29) Reign In Blood, 1986 (Slayer)
For their third full-length Slayer teamed up with producer Rick Rubin, who sharpened the guitars until they slashed and hacked like rusted razors, convinced Tom Araya to (mostly) ditch the castrato screams and instructed Dave Lombardo to beat his drums like Godzilla stomping out Tokyo. The result? An instant classic, bookended by two of metal’s most terrifying tunes: “Angel of Death,” the song responsible for Slayer’s being hit with Nazi sympathizer accusations for the past two decades, and “Raining Blood,” to this day still the band’s main set closer
because, honestly, what the hell are you gonna follow it with?
WHAT THEY SAID Kerry King: “When we started, nobody was doing what we did. Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth were all playing fast, but Reign in Blood was a new frontier.”
28) OK Computer, 1997 (Radiohead)
The fire and skill of Radiohead’s three-guitar frontline first drew major attention on 1995’s The Bends. Two years later, these Brits upped the ante with OK Computer, creating a captivating brand of space rock. While singer Thom Yorke handled the rhythm guitar parts, guitarist Jonny Greenwood took on the more “traditional” lead work (those freakazoid solos on the epic “Paranoid Android” are his doing) and Ed O’Brien specialized in wacky noises (that’s him pushing an AMS digital delay to its breaking point at the end of “Karma Police”). Lauded by critics, musicians and fans alike, OK Computer is arguably the most influential rock guitar album of the past decade.
WHAT THEY SAID Jonny Greenwood: “Our ears get bored very quickly. Sometimes a guitar plugged into an amplifier isn’t really enough. So you hear sounds in your head, or on a record, and you say, ‘I want it to sound like this.’ And sometimes it won’t—I can’t play the trumpet, so it’s not going to sound like Miles Davis. But we aim for these things and end up with our own garbled version.”
27) Moving Pictures, 1981 (Rush)
A keyboard-heavy, new wave/hard rock amalgam, Moving Pictures contains no proggy sci-fi tunes about rebellious trees or Syrinx-dwelling priests. Instead, we get one song named after a Mark Twain character and another based on a short story about a freakin’ car. The thing is, both songs— “Tom Sawyer” and “Red Barchetta,”
respectively—totally rule, as does the crunchy, crystalline “Limelight,” which features a stellar wang barabusing solo by Alex Lifeson. Add the Morse code cribbing instrumental “YYZ,” and you have that rare beast that classic rock radio used to refer to as the Perfect Album Side.
WHAT THEY SAID Alex Lifeson: “If we’ve influenced a generation of bands or musicians, it’s because they look at Rush and think, Here’s a band that wasn’t popular in a mainstream way, yet they’ve been around for 30 years.”
26) Alive!, 1975 (Kiss)
Although renowned for their elaborate stage shows that filled arenas, Kiss’ albums were stiffing. Shrewdly, the band recorded Alive!, an album that packed all of the excitement of their live act into a two-record set. Listeners got the feeling that they were front-row center for white-hot takes on “Deuce,” “Strutter,” “Black Diamond” and “Cold Gin.” So vivid were the performances, one could almost smell the smoke emanating from Ace Frehley’s guitar. The live version of the previously released “Rock and Roll All Nite” became a radio staple, making Alive! a massive hit and perhaps the first album that inspired basement tailgate parties. Gene Simmons’ ego (and bank account) would never be the same.
WHAT THEY SAID Gene Simmons: “The record exploded and immediately the world changed for us. For the next three years straight, we were the number-one band in the Gallup Poll, above the Beatles and everyone else. It quickly became larger than life. And all you had to do was look out into the audience and see everyone with painted faces to understand it.”
25) Peace Sells... But Who's Buying?, 1986 (Megadeth)
Recorded with the assistance of massive amounts of drugs and booze, Megadeth’s sophomore album and commercial breakthrough cemented Dave Mustaine’s status as both thrash metal’s blackest sheep and baddest dude. Tracks like “Wake Up Dead,” “Devil’s Island” and the MTV fave “Peace Sells” are fueled by his sneering vocals, piss-and-vinegar lyrics and rapid-fire riffs, and fortified with technically dizzying performances by fusion guitar whiz Chris Poland and jazzbo drummer Gar Samuelson. The cover of Willie Dixon’s “I Ain’t Superstitious” may be a tad blasphemous, but no more so than the band’s subsequent slaughtering of “Anarchy in the U.K.”
WHAT THEY SAID Dave Mustaine: “I don’t care what anybody says; they can talk shit about me all they want. I’ve accomplished more in my career than most people can do in two or three lifetimes.”
24) Rising Force, 1984 (Yngwie J. Malmsteen)
In the Eighties, very few guitarists could make Edward Van Halen quiver in his Converse, but of all the great players that emerged from that decade, Swedish-born Yngwie J. Malmsteen came the closest. Like Van Halen, Yngwie rewrote the book on rock soloing. By combining a distinctly Bach-influenced compositional style with the raw psychedelic fury of Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore, he created a new language that has been adopted by at least three decades of metal guitar virtuosos.
Malmsteen’s razzle-dazzle technique is evident on all of his albums, but Rising Force, his first release with his own band, is considered his best and most
revolutionary. Never before had a rock guitarist played with such breathtaking speed and precision. Yngwie’s gonzo command of exotic scales, sweep-arpeggios and chromatic runs was every bit as innovative as Van Halen’s use of tapping and false harmonics. And even though Yngwie’s larger-than-life personality and huge ego is the stuff of legends, this recording proves he’s always had the goods to back up his biggest brag.
WHAT THEY SAID Yngwie Malmsteen: “ ‘Black Star’ and ‘Far Beyond the Sun’ from that album sort of sum up my style. There are fast runs, slow harmonies and some really nice arpeggios in them. I’ll probably play those songs until the day I die.”
23) Who's Next, 1971 (The Who)
In the early Seventies, still buzzing from the success of Tommy, Pete Townshend labored long and hard on an elaborate concept piece called Lifehouse. Embracing everything from Sufi mysticism to avant-garde electronic composition, it proved unrealizable, even for a supergroup of the Who’s stature. So the band took nine of the best songs from the project, went into the studio with producer Glynn Johns and emerged with one of the greatest rock and roll albums of all time. From the skittering synth telepathy that kicks off “Baba O’Riley” to the final crashing power chords of “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” this is rock on an epic scale, and an album that captures Townshend, singer Roger Daltrey, bassist John Entwistle and drummer Keith Moon at the height of their formidable powers.
WHAT THEY SAID Pete Townshend: “I’d been fucking damaged by the Lifehouse project. In the end I had an actual nervous breakdown. So by the time we were in the studio making Who’s Next, we had great music and we were playing great because we’d already recorded the album something, like, 15 fucking times!”
22) Wish You Were Here, 1975 (Pink Floyd)
A lot was resting on Pink Floyd’s collective shoulders as they entered EMI’s Abbey Road Studios in 1975 to make Wish You Were Here. Their previous album, Dark Side of the Moon, had been a massive success, and the pressure was on them to come up with something just as remarkable, both artistically and commercially. Bassist Roger Waters and drummer Nick Mason were working through
marital strained relations, which would end in divorce for both couples. Within Abbey Road, Waters and guitarist David Gilmour were quarreling over musical direction—the early stages of a friction that flared into an all-out conflagration by the time the group made The Wall some four years later.
In these volatile relationships, Waters found his grand theme for Wish You Were Here: the music business itself, and its tendency to crush the dreams of those who pursue fame, fortune and a chance at creative self-expression. As in the past, Waters made the central figure of the piece Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd’s original leader, who had had cracked under the pressure of stardom and become too mentally unstable to continue with the group. It is Barrett who served as the inspiration for Waters’ “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” a messianic martyr to the soulless mechanisms of the music biz. The ominous “Welcome to the Machine” and the unctuously disquieting “Have a Cigar” rank among Waters’ darkest compositions. But David Gilmour’s yearning lead guitar lines shoot rays of light and glimpses of hope throughout the album. His playing on the epic “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” which both opens and closes the album, ranks among his greatest guitar work. As is often the case in Pink Floyd’s oeuvre, Waters and Gilmour manage to counterbalance one another with yin/yang poise.
In “Wish You Were Here,” Waters calls out to the absent Barrett, evoking him as a comrade and counterpart. (After Barrett’s departure, the job of leading Pink Floyd fell to Waters.) And while Waters’ concepts and lyrics would see the band through numerous artistic triumphs, here he seems keenly aware of the dangers of falling over the edge.
WHAT THEY SAID David Gilmour: “Wish You Were Here is about the feeling we were left with at the end of Dark Side, that feeling of ‘What do you do when you’ve done everything?’ But I think we got over that. And for me, Wish You Were Here is the most satisfying album. I really love it. I mean, I’d rather listen to that than Dark Side of the Moon, because I think we achieved a better balance of music and lyrics on Wish You Were Here.”
21) Rage Against the Machine, 1992 (Rage Against the Machine)
They came out of L.A. at the dawn of the Nineties. The aptly named Rage Against the Machine combined the ghetto anger of hip-hop and the testosterone fury of metal with a keenly felt political mandate to champion the oppressed and fight the abuses of privilege and power. It was a new and exciting concept back then, and what really drove the point home was the fiercely disruptive guitar work of a Harvard educated young Marxist named Tom Morello. The napalm cry of exploding bombs, the jagged rhythm of strafing machine guns—Morello wrought seemingly impossible sounds with his ax and became an innovative and radical force in metal, as Hendrix and Van Halen had before him.
WHAT THEY SAID Tom Morello: “Rather than being influenced by other guitarists, my playing in Rage was more influenced by hip-hop and techno DJs. The rhythmic freedom they have to drop sounds into a track. That’s what I aspired to.”
20) Surfing with the Alien, 1987 (Joe Satriani)
Peaking at No. 29, Surfing with the Alien was the first instrumental rock guitar record to crack the Billboard album charts since the Ventures’ Sixties heyday, but, as its title suggests, this was surf music from another galaxy altogether. From the new millennium blues of “Satch Boogie” to the cosmic lyricism of “Always with Me, Always with You,” Satriani dared to boldly go where no Shrapnel label artist had gone before by injecting harmony, humor and humanity into his outrageous displays of technique. Unlike Jeff Beck on his jazz-inspired Wired and Blow by Blow albums, Satch aimed below the belt instead of at the brain, rocking out with balls-to-the-wall abandon.
WHAT THEY SAID Joe Satriani: “ ‘Satch Boogie’ was intended as an instrumental guitar “barn burner’ in the great tradition of tunes like ‘Jeff’s Boogie’ by Jeff Beck or ‘Steppin’ Out’ by Eric Clapton.”
19) Exile on Main St., 1972 (The Rolling Stones)
The Stones were on a roll in the early Seventies, riding out a long creative streak. It all peaked at Keith Richards’ rented villa in the south of France amid scenes of rock-star decadence and epic consumption of intoxicants and drugs, including heroin. Exile on Main St. is a sprawling double-disc set that distills the Stones’ itchy blend of raw blues voodoo, shit-kickin’ country honk, world-weary balladry and dirty old rock and roll. Richards was wasted on smack but in top musical form, nonetheless, and coguitarist Mick Taylor was fitting like a glove. Exile was a perfect moment in the summertime of rock that would never again be equaled by the Stones—or anyone else.
WHAT THEY SAID Keith Richards: “Mick Taylor’s a really shy guy. I wouldn’t say that you ever get to know him. I don’t think anybody does. But probably the closest I ever got to Mick was playing guitar on Exile on Main St.”
18) Blood Sugar Sex Magik, 1991 (The Red Hot Chili Peppers)
It came out of a haunted mansion in the Hollywood Hills—the album that established the Red Hot Chili Peppers as major-league contenders in the game of rock. By this point, the Peppers had survived the Eighties L.A. punk scene, a head-spinning succession of personnel changes and the death of founding guitarist Hillel Slovak. But now they had John Frusciante in the fold, not to mention producer Rick Rubin, who worked with the band for the first time on Blood Sugar Sex Magik. There would be no Rage Against the Machine, nor any rap metal, without Blood Sugar’s amalgam of funk, metal and hip-hop vocalizing.
WHAT THEY SAID Flea: “That was the beginning of a new era for us. Breaking into the mainstream was a real change in our lives. Also it was a time when John brought a whole new concept into the band as a guitar player and songwriter. It suddenly gave us so much more to draw from—a bigger launch pad for us all to get launched into outer space from.”
Frusciante: “Following the great creative peak of recording Blood Sugar, the positive feelings I had had began to dissipate.”
17) The Number of the Beast, 1982 (Iron Maiden)
“You know when astrologers talk about a planetary lineup?” Iron Maiden’s foghorn-in-chief Bruce Dickinson once mused. “Like, ‘this conjunction only happens once in a blue moon’ sort of thing? What you have with Number of the Beast is the musical equivalent.” The metaphor, while extravagant, was and is absolutely right. Released in 1982, Maiden’s third album marked the moment when all the pieces fell into place for the British band.
Prior to its recording, Iron Maiden were a band in transition. Paul Di’anno, the group’s volatile frontman, walked out after the world tour for Maiden’s second album, Killers. While his departure lessened the group’s internal friction, it also left a sizable void. Di’anno wasn’t the ideal metal singer— his stage presence owed more to the snarl and spittle of punk—but he was a vital ingredient in the band’s growing success. Now, the remaining members—bassist Steve Harris, guitarists Dave Murray and Adrian Smith, and drummer Clive Burr—faced the challenge of building upon their accomplishments with an unproven frontman.
What happened next is the stuff of modern mythology. Dickinson, then the singer in Samson, had been watching Maiden from the pit on their tours—and thinking that he could do a rather better job of fronting them. Word of his talent and aspirations reached Maiden’s manager, who tracked him down at the Reading Festival and subsequently signed him to the band’s lead singer slot.
The Beast lineup was in place, consolidated by the return of Martin Birch, the production legend who had given Killers its muscle and whose past clients included Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. With little more than a desire to make a record that would maintain their career trajectory, Maiden headed into the Battery Studios to start work. When they lef, they were armed with what many consider the most important metal album of the decade.
The Number of the Beast was anything but a lobotomized metal juggernaut. Thanks in part to Dickinson—who, alongside his abilities as a vocalist, was obsessed with military history, fencing and literature—the new album combined its aggression with imagination and an awareness of culture. The title track, for instance, was based on Tam O’ Shanter, a Robert Burns poem that Harris had read at school. “The Prisoner” was inspired by the cult Sixties TV program of the same name (and required the band’s manager Rod Smallwood to seek permission from Patrick McGoohan to sample the dialog). Meanwhile, the reflective “Children of
the Damned” combined lyrics inspired by the classic horror film with Harris’ love of prog-rock time signatures. Inevitably, Maiden’s detractors ignored Beast’s kaleidoscope of subjects in their rush to condemn it as a youth-corrupting work of Satanism. Some burned the record in mass bonfires; others battered it into shards with hammers. As the band toured the U.S. in support of the album, protesters showed up at gigs, dragging crosses and handing out leaflets. “Americans do tend to be over the top about things like that,” says Harris.
Fortunately, the hand wringing of the minority could not change the fact that Maiden had found their audience. Even with no airplay and little marketing, The Number of the Beast reached 33 on the Billboard Pop charts, earning a Gold disc the following year and going Platinum a few years later, setting up the band for the hallowed position they occupy to this day.
16) The Essential Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, 2002 (Stevie Ray Vaughan)
Stevie Ray Vaughan had a tremendous impact in his too-brief career, which featured just four studio albums and one live recording. From the moment his debut, Texas Flood, hit the streets in 1983, Vaughan made the world safe again for old-school blues-based rock and simultaneously took the music he loved into the future. His impassioned, yet highly technical, style altered the perceived parameters of virtuoso guitar playing. This two-CD collection features 33 of his best tracks, each beautifully remastered, and makes an excellent starting point for anyone who wants to dig into this modern master.
WHAT THEY SAID Stevie Ray Vaughan: “If people tell me they don’t want to hear a blues band because it brings them down, they’re not paying attention at all. I like a lot of different kinds of music, but if it doesn’t have any soul I can’t relate to it.”
15) Ten, 1991 (Pearl Jam)
Although Pearl Jam rose from the ashes of Mother Love Bone (whose singer, Andrew Wood, overdosed on heroin), Ten didn’t explode out of the box. That would be the case with Nirvana’s major-label debut, Nevermind. Slowly, however, radio programmers in search of acceptable “grunge” to play alongside Led Zeppelin, U2 and Guns N’ Roses started spinning tracks like “Alive” and “Even Flow.” What they discovered were songs that sounded great anytime, anywhere. Between the urgent, highly distinctive timbre of Eddie Vedder’s voice and the emotionally charged guitar playing of Mike McCready and Stone Gossard, commitment poured from Pearl Jam. Music fans who viewed other grunge acts as too aloof (or just too damned weird) suddenly had new heroes.
WHAT THEY SAID Mike McCready: “Eddie’s lyrics are extremely honest. People can tap into that. They know something real is coming from that. He’s a man full of conviction. That comes in his singing and writing, and hopefully our music backs that up.”
14) Aenima, 1996 (Tool)
Their 1993 debut, Undertow, was harsh and compelling, but Tool paved their more experimental future with Aenima, their sophomore outing. The band’s first major foray into epic structures and unconventional arrangements, Aenima showed that prog-metal needn’t sound like Dream Theater or Porcupine Tree. While the songs are technical and challenging, they’re also suffused with enough mystery and emotion that they don’t resemble music lessons. Guitarist Adam
Jones plays an equal balance of crushing chords, jagged riffage and ominous noodling, and the unusual time signatures and sprawling passages keep the tension in the songs building until the fierce, climactic release.
WHAT THEY SAID Maynard James Keenan: “The record is written so that there are layers to get into. It’s about unity—realizing that everything is connected. It’s about breaking down the process of pointing the finger.”
13) Blizzard of Ozz, 1980 (Ozzy Osbourne)
The album that introduced Randy Rhoads to the world (the previous two albums he made with Quiet Riot came out only in Japan), Blizzard of Ozz set the template for the shreddin’ Eighties with its combination of NWOBHM aggression and Hollywood flash. Rhoads burst onto the scene as the most unique and influential rock guitar hero since Eddie Van Halen, distilling inspiration from Ritchie Blackmore, Van Halen and classical maestro Andres Segovia while placing his tasteful personal stamp on “I Don’t Know,” “Crazy Train” and the acoustic solo centerpiece “Dee.” Osbourne may have rescued Rhoads from obscurity, but Randy made Ozzy a star.
WHAT THEY SAID Randy Rhoads: “We were just thrown together on that album. It wasn’t planned out; whatever came out was purely inspiration.”
12) ...And Justice For All, 1988 (Metallica)
When Metallica entered Los Angeles’ One On One studios with producer Flemming Rasmussen in early 1988, they were, musically speaking, at the height of their powers, having achieved critical and mass acceptance with Master of Puppets. Emotionally, it was a whole different story. James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett and Lars Ulrich were shattered from the death of bassist Cliff Burton two years earlier and still had not (did they ever?) completely gelled with his replacement, Jason Newsted. The new music they brought to the recording sessions—crude and jittery, incredibly aggressive and complex, and occasionally lacking direction—reflected the band members’ bruised psyches. Justice’s nine marathon-length songs (which at the time had to be issued on two separate slabs of vinyl) are full of unexpected compositional quirks, among them jarring tempo shifts and musical transitions, multiple key changes, odd-metered time signatures, awkwardly grouped note patterns and long, labyrinthine instrumental sections. Hetfield’s lyrics, meanwhile, are among his most nihilistic, from the apocalyptic “Blackened” (“Evolution’s end/never will it mend”) to the blistering “Dyer’s Eve,” a pointed depiction of a damaged upbringing (his own?) at the hands of callous parents.
And then there’s the album’s overall sound: Rasmussen’s wonky production almost entirely squeezes out the bass guitar, leaving only Hetfield’s vocals, the heavily scooped six-strings and Ulrich’s clicky drums to carry the load. Many reasons for the absence of low end have been offered over the years: Newsted merely doubled all of Hetfield’s riffs, rendering his bass indistinguishable from the guitars; it ws
intentional "hazing" directed at the new kid by his bandmaates; and so
on. Whatever the reason, the production on Justice-harsh, unsettling and bone dry-accentuates the music's raw-nerve intensity.
For all of its idiosyncrasies, Justice quickly eclipsed the success of Master of Puppets upon its release. This was in large part due to the overwhelming popularity of the power ballad “One.” With lyrics based on the gruesome antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun and accompanied by a disturbing video (the band's first) that featured clips from the 1971 film adaptation of the book, the song made Metallica unlikely MTV darlings. Nominated for a Grammy in the category of "Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal," Metallica infamously lost out to aging British rockers Jethro Tull. Talk about disturbing.
But …And Justice for All is not significant for these moments of mainstream triumph. Rather, it is a remarkably raw and uncompromising document of a band exorcising their demons, as well as the sound of thrash metal pioneers taking the music they helped to create as far as possible before washing their hands clean of the whole damn thing for good.
WHAT THEY SAID James Hetfield: “The idea for the opening on ‘One’ came from a Venom song called ‘Buried Alive.’ The kick drum machine-gun part at the end wasn’t written with the war lyrics in mind, it just came out that way.”
Kirk Hammett: “I had only eight days to record all my leads for the album because we were heading out on the Monsters of Rock tour. With ‘One,’ the first solo went fine, but I had trouble with the second lead. I did the third one in a couple of hours. I worked out the tapping thing at the beginning, and from there it flowed very well, I think because I was so pissed off about the second solo.”
11) Cowboys From Hell, 1990 (Pantera)
The first Pantera record to be heard by anyone outside of the Lone Star State, Cowboys from Hell was also the first to fully capture the hard-swinging, head-pummeling interplay of guitarist Diamond Darrell (soon to be renamed Dimebag) and his older brother, drummer Vinnie Paul. Songs like “Primal Concrete Sledge,” “Cemetery Gates” and “Cowboys from Hell” kicked shit and kicked ass in equal measures, while Dime’s soulful shredding and Texas-sized riffs served notice that here indeed was a young gunslinger to be reckoned with. This was extreme metal before the term existed.
WHAT THEY SAID Terry Date, Cowboys producer: “I think we won’t see another guitar player with Dime’s kind of creativity and passion for his instrument for a long, long time, if ever.”
10) Revolver, 1966 (The Beatles)
The Beatles had already altered the course of music forever by the time they set out to record Revolver. What they had yet to do was create an album that reflected their growth and maturity as composers and recording artists. Revolver filled that void, and did so in remarkable fashion, reflecting both the band members’ emerging consciousness, via LSD, and the changing cultural landscape. Pop art, drugs, free love, Dylan, politics, the I Ching, the sounds of the Far East and the West Coast—Revolver refracted these influences, and more, with such stunning alacrity that it was hard to tell which was moving faster, society or the Beatles. The studio innovations used to create Revolver loom large in Beatles lore. What lasts, however, are the songs: “Taxman,” “Here, There and Everywhere,” and the endlessly fascinating “Tomorrow Never Knows” are standouts in rock’s first bona fide work of art.
WHAT THEY SAID John Lennon: “We’d had acid on Revolver.
Everybody is under this illusion—even George Martin was saying, ‘Pepper was their first acid album.’ But we’d had acid, including Paul, by the time Revolver was finished.”
