THE BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 1990-1999
You guys know the rules by now. Full lengths only (which sucks because Suffocation actually landed with TWO EPs in the top 50 when I first did this list and Blind Guardian released the best live metal album of all time during this era, but it's an arbitrary distinction I always give myself so you'll have to deal with it), and metal only, because nobody reading this cares about how much I also love dumbass Fat Wreck skate punk from this era. Anyways enough metashit, let's get on with it!
I know that their 96 debut, Serenadium, is generally considered these brutal Danes' zenith, but there's some intangible quality about Five Across the Eyes that I don't think I'll ever fall out of love with. Part of this is purely nostalgia, because this was one of the first ultra-dry tech death albums that I ever really heard and I was instantly hooked all those years ago. Those of you who are the perfect age to remember those early flash videos of the early 2000s might remember one that made the rounds on Ebaumsworld and such under the name of "Death Metal Karaoke", where it was just some goofy joke where gibberish lyrics flew past the bottom of the screen while death metal played. Well the track used for that was "The Bullet's Breath" from Iniquity's third album, Grime. I wasn't really into extreme metal at the time apart from a few scattered bands, but something about it hooked me, so I fired up the old p2p networks and grabbed a bunch of random tracks from the band. The ones from Five Across the Eyes are the ones that really stuck with me, and to this day I can't help but feel a rush of nostalgia from one of the first death metal bands I ever loved. Apart from the nostalgia and the extremely dry production actually adding to the mechanical mania of the technical wizardry that this album revels in, one of the big things that helps this stand out to me is simply the fact that this features Mads Haarlov on vocals, who I have been saying for years is one of the absolute best death metal vocalists on the planet. This guy is insanely underrated, carrying one of the most inhuman and beastly roars the genre has ever seen. Most other great death metal vocalists at the very least sound like a human being, but Haarlov really doesn't. There's something completely feral and bestial about how his incendiary voice punches through the music. It all just adds to how little human element is present in this album, and that's something that would usually be a negative, but these guys make it work, and I'll always love it for that. Also, side note: "Inhale the Ghost" is one of the raddest fucking song titles ever written.
It's easy to forget just how wildly ahead of their time Nocturnus was. Death metal barely knew what it was in 1990. Morbid Angel had only just codified how to truly divorce death metal from thrash the year before, most classic bands in the genre had either just barely gotten their debut out, and even if they did there's a solid chance there's still a lot of Slayer influence left over since the transition was still being hashed out at the time, but somehow in the midst of simply figuring out what the genre even stood for and sounded like, Nocturnus was busy upending all of the conventions and buttfucking all of the rules before anybody even knew what they were. The Key still stands out today for sounding like almost nothing else. It was already unheard of within the genre for the drummer to also be the vocalist, not to mention taking a style meant to be as brutal and primal as possible and adding in a full time keyboardist. But not only did they do it, they did it better than anybody who has tried doing it in the years since. On the surface these things can be kinda gimmicky, since Mike Browning doesn't sound all that different from most DM vocalists at the time and the keys don't really ever take the lead with their own melodies and instead just play swelling chords in the background for atmosphere, but that atmosphere added so much to the unending brutality of the riffs themselves. These blasts were almost Sandoval-esque in a time when he was one of the only guys who could truly call himself the best in the genre, and the forward-thinking rule-fucking helped pave the way for tons of bands in both the prog death and tech death scenes in the future. Context certainly matters when judging this album, sure, but even with the context of the time stripped away, this is just incredibly written and perfectly performed death metal that became a cult classic for a damn good reason.
Skyclad are rightly known as the forefathers and flat out inventors of folk metal, and for my money, their undisputed peak of their career happened in 1994 with Prince of the Poverty Line. They were extremely prolific during this decade and have tons of great albums, but all of them are flawed in some way, usually the simple fact that they have great beginnings and ends but mediocre middles, and honestly Prince of the Poverty Line is no exception. Simply put, this one has the strongest strong songs and the least boring weak songs out of their entire career. I'm not kidding when I say that this could easily land a whopping thirty points higher if every song was as good as "Civil War Dance" or "Cardboard City". The former is quite easily my favorite song of their entire career, featuring one of the best build-and-release moments in the entire scope of heavy metal in general in the intro, some of their downright meanest riffs in the chorus, and some of the most venomous and evocative lyrics Martin Walkyier would ever pen. I've heard Skyclad described as "the most aggressively British band ever" and this album is a great example as to why. There's so much downtrodden, filth-caked urban misery just oozing out of every second, with a stiff, biting sarcasm permeating the record. At this point in history, Walkyier hadn't adopted the more melodic voice he'd champion around Irrational Anthems, here still carrying the biting snarl and bitter snark he had in Sabbat, and it works so well with the "brown" feeling this album couples with pure righteous anger. The fiddle finally became an inescapable aspect of their sound on the previous album, but here the interplay with the nasty, dirty riffage is simply the best it would ever be. This is that perfect nexus in time when they were both folking and rocking instead of just folking. They weren't going to tackle a song as heavy and menacing as "Gammadion Seed" ever again in the future, and if you want to know what truly pure folk metal sounds like, this is 100% the album I'm going to point you towards, every single time. "Take your partners for our civil war dance / Open season on the underworked and overpaid".
One thing that should surprise nobody is that Motorhead is going to make more than one appearance, and I'm not even worried about spoiling that the other entry is going to be Bastards. Everybody should be able to see that coming. My internetical pseudonym for the past 14 years is "BastardHead" and what the fuck do you think that's a reference to? Lemmy and crew were definitely on fire in the 90s, with no less than four albums that easily deserve a place and their classic canon alongside their 70s and 80s material, and Overnight Sensation is easily one of the best of the post-classic lineup era. This one stands out for several reasons, one of which being that this is the album that finally ended the decade long experiment of the band having two guitarists, finally bringing them back to the power trio format that made them famous in the first place and solidifying the lineup of Lemmy, Phil Campbell, and "The Greatest Drummer in the World" Mikkey Dee that would persist until Lemmy's death nearly twenty years later. The other being that this is probably the purest and best blend of the band's sleazy Little Richard influenced rock n' roll and their pure molten heavy fucking metal. Lemmy has always been of the mind that Motorhead is a rock n' roll band first and foremost and all of the punk and metal influences are secondary, and honestly most of the time he's not wrong. But for a brief period in the 90s, there was absolutely no denying their titanic heaviness. Listen to the high speed assault of "Civil War", the monumental "Shake the World", or the actual-goddamn-Motorhead-trying-thrash of "Them Not Me" and tell me that they hadn't fully embraced their place in the metal pantheon by this point. There's plenty of old time rock sleaze here still as well, with the title track, "Murder Show", and "Crazy Like a Fox" being the standouts in that regard, and "Eat the Gun" mixing the two styles in such a way that it sounds like Chuck Berry joining a metal band. Basically every song is a standout and a perfect example of why Motorhead was so fucking good at what they did. People complain that they just wrote the same song over and over again, and anybody reading this should know better than that by now, but there's no denying that they had a signature sound regardless, and Overnight Sensation is just another in a long line of examples as to why they never really needed to stray too far from the path they had beaten.
Demo Hammer is simply one of the most brutal thrash metal bands to ever exist. It's barely even a contest. I'd say with little hesitation that Epidemic of Violence is the closest that thrash can get to becoming death metal without actually stepping over the line. Seriously, the first minute of "Skull Fracturing Nightmare" alone is likely to snap your goddamn neck based on soundwaves alone. Almost nobody else can throw such a veritable whirlwind of riffs at you for as long and as incessantly as these guys can without blurring into a white noise of brutality. The amount of hooks that this beats into you with a steel hammer is fucking unreal, there are so many memorable riffs and songs that it's almost unfair. Honestly I could probably describe this album best by just listing song titles and letting you fill in the blanks. "Skull Fracturing Nightmare", "Orgy of Destruction", "Pyroclastic Annihilation", "Omnivore", they all just feed into the fact that this album is a purely destructive force of nature with no real motive other than the wanton destruction of anything that finds itself in its path. Pure chaotic neutral metal. It's here to destroy and that's all it needs to do, for better or worse. Probably the best part of this is that it fixes the muddy production that holds their debut, Tortured Existence, back from being almost exactly as good. This'll probably be the shortest entry in the whole series because I really don't know how else to describe this beyond "it's complete destruction in musical form".
This is honestly a really, really hard album to listen to and talk about. It's so bizarre to think that Peter Steele has been dead for almost a decade now, and how he seemed to be doing better than ever before at the time when his past drug abuse finally caught up to him and killed him, because World Coming Down absolutely sounds like the last gasps of a dying man who gave up on living long, long ago. The band famously refused to play anything from this album live because it reminded Pete of the worst time in his life, and listening to it really hammers that home, because World Coming Down is just pure fucking despondent hopelessness at every turn. Type O was also famous for their sardonic wit and black humor they'd inject into every album, but this was the one time where they seemingly went fully mask off and just gave the fuck up. Any humor present here is presented similarly to how a suicidal man on the edge of a bridge would dryly chuckle when a well meaning onlooker would tell him that life is worth living. Of their entire oeuvre, nothing is more hopeless than World Coming Down. This is just dirge after dirge after dirge of ugly, meaningless, destitute misery, broken up only by short interludes meant to mimic the last minute of somebody fucking dying. I can't source it right now but I feel like I've read somewhere that Pete had to leave the room after hearing the finished version of "Lung" for the first time because it was such a horrifyingly realistic portrayal of a man's last desperate breaths while surrounded by his wailing family. I believe it. If you've ever suffered through depression, a lot of this album sounds familiar, even if you've never heard it before. It's ugly and empty, just long stretches of downtrodden nothingness with extremely brief flashes of beauty that are almost impossible to appreciate when mired in the bog of self loathing. It's like laying half-submerged in a landfill, lungs on fire, consciousness fading, and then looking up and seeing the northern lights. I know I'm going to make this really long, but there's a section of Noktorn's review for this album that just perfectly encapsulates what makes it so great much better than I ever could, so bear with me here. "...depression is much more an abstract, featureless misery than it is
something beautiful. The riffs flawlessly express this: amorphous,
languishing collections of lethargic, dissonant notes, with just a
fragment of minor key melody to give a trace of emotion to it And
that's all there really should be, as that's all there is during periods
of depression: a trace of emotion, more a memory of what it's like to
feel than any feeling itself. But the more incredible thing they're
able to do is in the openly melodic segments, with their bittersweet
beauty that fits the New York goth style and allows us all to look into
it. This beauty isn't a celebration of a depression, but a celebration
of beauty in ugly places. It's the beauty in natural disasters, in
inevitability, and most importantly, in the fact that you, yes, you,
will not be remembered after you're gone. Type O Negative celebrates
our insignificance, how non-existent the footprint each one of us leaves
on our world will be. This is the musical equivalent of standing on
the edge of the river at night and looking longingly at the city before
you, surrounded by people, and yet the loneliest person in the world.
That is beauty."
God damn do I need some levity after that. And luck would have it, one of my all time favorite bands makes their first appearance at this point. This is another one that's completely unsurprising if you're familiar with my writing, but yeah Running Wild is definitely going to show up more than once as well. I've long said that Pile of Skulls is actually one of their weaker albums from their classic period, but they were so fucking good from 84-95 that even one of their weaker efforts from the time is good enough to find itself ranked as one of the best albums of the decade. I call this one of the weaker ones purely because the token "just okay" tracks this time around are probably the least interesting of their career. The title track could've been a total stunner but it feels like the chorus is just empty, like it needed more backing vocals or bigger chords in the back or something, because as it stands the simple palm mutes hold it back. And don't even get me started on "Roaring Thunder", which is easily the lamest butt rock track they ever crammed into a raucous speed metal album. I always thought "Uaschitschun" was a big misstep on Port Royal and I like a third rate copy of it even less. So if I've got bad shit to say about the album, why is it even on this list? Well the answer to that is simple: the good songs are among the best they'd ever write. The combo of "Chamber of Lies" into "Whirlwind" is one of the best album openers they'd ever pen, "Fistful of Dynamite" is one of the best hard rock songs they'd write, "Lead or Gold" seemed to perfectly predict the Thilo Hermann era with it's wild gallops and triumphant lead lines, and "Jenning's Revenge" is one of their catchiest and most underappreciated tracks of the era. But really, you know the real reason this album is held in such high regard. It's not a surprise at all, but "Treasure Island" is arguably Rolf's absolute peak as a songwriter, with every single second of its 11 minute runtime being fucking iconic. Even the corny spoken word intro is inseparable from the main song, which itself features some of their best riffs, potentially the best chorus they ever wrote, and one of the most impressive extended soloing sections Rolf ever laid to tape. "Treasure Island" really is the quintessential Running Wild track. Every single thing that makes them one of my all time favorites is found here in spades, from the infectious hooks to the wailing solos to Rolf's hilariously thick German accent mangling every third word (turns out "toad" is pronounced "twahwd"). I can't recommend it enough. Just like Skyclad's entry up there, the good songs here are so fucking good that if everything was as good as them, this would rank like thirty spots higher.
And now we're back on the brutality, because fuckin' hell is Harmony Corruption a menacing album. This is another one that I tend to forget came out as early as it did, because it sounds like it came fresh from the heyday of death metal instead of the first year that anybody other than Death and Morbid Angel knew what the fuck they were doing. The fact that Napalm Death found their way to death metal via grindcore instead of thrash gave them a very distinct character that most of their contemporaries lacked. They already employed blast beats as a standard part of their repertoire, they were already used to the wildly chaotic pace and structure of these songs, they already tackled pure extremity from a slightly different angle. They didn't get here by playing Slayer or Kreator faster and faster until they finally crossed the threshold, they got here by taking one of the angriest and most filthy styles of music and simply made it heavier and more hellish. It helps that this helped usher in the stable lineup the band would more or less run with for the rest of their career barring this being the last album Mick Harris would drum on before being replaced with Danny Herrera (and also Jesse Pintado leaving fifteen years later but nobody replaced him and Mitch has been the sole guitarist ever since so it's barely a difference really). This newfound cohesion would really shine through in how tight these songs are despite their inherently chaotic nature. I think the real glue that helps this stand out as much as it does is the introduction of longtime vocalist Barney Greenway, whose incredibly deep and vicious growl was leagues away from Lee Dorrian's frantic shouting, pushing them even further into full on death metal and helping them become the enduring legends they became as opposed to the flash in the pan originators of a different style. The immediately recognizable touch of Morrisound Studios and Scott Burns also helps the push into clear death metal. I'm probably making this sound like this is good solely because they shifted from grindcore to death metal, but that's not what I'm getting at here. What I mean is that they entered death metal when it was a burgeoning scene and immediately stood out for having a sort of dutch-angled left-of-center madness that their contemporaries could only dream of. This is a very hurried, frantic, and chaotic whirlwind of riffs and aggression that has easily stood the test of time as possibly their best album in a career loaded with great albums.
I know the conventional wisdom is that Sodom's peak in the 90s was the unfairly brutal Tapping the Vein or their initial comeback of Code Red, but for my money, their peak was actually Better Off Dead, the one that's more or less unfairly forgotten thanks to being sandwiched in between two of their most popular albums (Agent Orange and the aforementioned Tapping the Vein). I always joke that the 80s ended in 1992, and this here is one of the reasons I say such a thing, because this is ironically one of the most unabashedly 80s albums Sodom ever wrote. When most thrash bands were either getting more technical or more groovy, Sodom bucked the trend by, oddly enough, just sorta regressing back to the early/mid 80s for inspiration. While Megadeth was busy shredding our faces off, Sodom instead reached back to more simplistic inspirations, namely Tank and Motorhead. There's a lot of punk and hard rock influence to be found here, most notably on their covers of "Turn Your Head Around" and "Cold Sweat", the enduring classic "The Saw is the Law", "Resurrection", and one of their most underappreciated classics, "Stalinorgel". That's not to say these lighter influences completely usurped their trademark manic thrash, not by any stretch. "An Eye for an Eye" stands right up there with "Nuclear Winter" or "Agent Orange" in terms of opening cookers, and I'd put "Shellfire Defense" and the entire b-side on equal footing with anything else they ever wrote. This is without a doubt their most underrated album, and I sometimes consider it to be their best album period. It's just the perfect amalgam of all of their influences. It's got the insane thrash they rose to prominence with, a heightened punk sensibility (which admittedly they've always worn proudly), plus heaps of Motorhead and early 80s NWOBHM. It's the musical manifestation of not giving a fuck. Angelripper clearly didn't give one single shit about keeping with the times and instead just indulged himself on his old favorites and did what he did best.
I've actually softened on the Scheepers era of Gamma Ray quite a bit in recent years, but there's still no denying that when Kai Hansen resumed his rightful place as the singer, they took off in a way that few power metal bands ever managed. Their streak from 1995-2005 is completely fucking unreal, with all five albums encompassing that span being stone cold classics, and their three albums that were released in the 90s stand out a little bit ahead of their 2000s counterparts simply because Kai's infuriating habit of stealing riffs and melodies left and right hadn't really started yet. I struggle to rank this trio of albums sometimes, because they're all fairly similar in their strengths and weaknesses. Power Plant, like the other two, runs a little bit too long and has a filler track or two that I could really do without (this time being the too-dorky-even-for-me "Heavy Metal Universe" and "Hand of Fate", which has a phenomenal chorus but the rest of the track is pretty meh (and also has one of the earliest examples of Kai ripping off his heroes with the first verse being a dead fucking ringer for "Dissident Aggressor")). But like always, their good songs are so fucking good that it just flat out doesn't matter in the end. The a-side is pretty much flawless, with "Anywhere in the Galaxy" being one of their most bombastic and intense openers, "Send Me a Sign" being one of the most achetypical power metal anthems, "Gardens of the Sinner" being one of the most epic openers to not actually open an album, "Razorblade Sigh" having one of their coolest soloing sections, "Short as Hell" being an awesome groovy experiment that works perfectly, et cetera forever. Special shoutout has to go to "Armageddon", the closing epic that was actually the first power metal song I ever heard, if you can believe it. That fucking chorus is on a whole other level, and the fact that they were able to keep up the pace for nearly nine solid minutes and never once get boring is a feat unto itself. Without a doubt one of the best power/speed metal albums Germany would ever crank out, and that's with the knowledge that the scene is going to be represented a few more times as this list goes on. It was a really fertile time for that scene, without a doubt.
And that's all for part one! I'll be doing this the same as I did the 00s feature a few years ago, so check back in two days from now for the next installment!
I read with pleasure everything you write. Keep up the good work.
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