GMD Votes: Top 20 Traditional/Doom Albums

[no country for old wainds]

none of their albums are completely consistent, i'm not fond of when they take too much influence from the more stoned end of sabbath's catalogue and they do have a tendency to meander at times. at their best they're pretty much the most emotionally charged doom band of them all though, simultaneously intimate and biblical in scale, so naked and vulnerable yet skysplittingly powerful and authoritative. wagner's vocals are among the most passionate and inimitable i've ever heard, too.

i'd offer up 'the wish' (from THE SKULL) as an alternative best trouble song. if you don't like this or the one rms posted then yeah i'd say probably don't bother:

 

[rms]

I'd say Psalm 9 is solid throughout, but I definitely agree about the rest of their 80s stuff.

 

[J.]

to me, pentagram is the best of the early american doom trio.

 

[Nephilim96]

to me, pentagram is the best of the early american doom trio.

Pentagram, Saint Vitus, and who? Trouble?

 

[J.]

yes

 

[Nephilim96]

Something seems weird about grouping Trouble with those two. I don't know what, but it doesn't feel right. Whatever.

 

[no country for old wainds]

unfortunately pentagram's best work isn't eligible for this list, otherwise i'm sure it'd be in the top 20.

 

[J.]

first daze here, definitely

 

[no country for old wainds]

i considered sneakily putting it anyway but i figured comps weren't allowed.

 

[Burkhard]

wtf is up with all the hate for Angel Witch? It's a cemented NWOBHM classic, one of the best. Far better than most of the shit on this list.

One man's meat is another man's poison. BTW, I wouldn't use the word "hate" in this context. The music simply doesn't do anything for me. (The same goes for several other albums in this list.) As already stated in the first round, I've never been a huge fan of "traditional metal". Even though my first metal album (way back in 1984) was one which might qualify as tradtional metal, namely Lita Ford's "Dancin' on the Edge" (which I did enjoy quite a lot at that time), the "musical revelation", as far as metal is concerned, came for me when I first listened to Metallica's "Fight Fire With Fire" a few months later, so maybe this might explain some things (or not). Sorry if I put the albums in an order which you don't approve of.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

What are the Sabbath rip-off moments on Psalm 9? To me, Trouble is by far one of the most distinctive and individual of all the early trad doom bands. I mean, if we're going to discuss rip-offs, Candlemass nicked a bunch of Trouble riffs/ideas early on. Psalm 9 got rid of all the relaxed/"stoner" vibe of Black Sabbath (and Pentagram) and replaced it with tight and aggressive thrashy riffage. The musicianship was also way ahead of most of their contemporaries; listening to the instrumental Endtime you don't even need Watchtower to hear where Confessor got their inspiration.

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

One man's meat is another man's poison. BTW, I wouldn't use the word "hate" in this context. The music simply doesn't do anything for me. (The same goes for several other albums in this list.) As already stated in the first round, I've never been a huge fan of "traditional metal". Even though my first metal album (way back in 1984) was one which might qualify as tradtional metal, namely Lita Ford's "Dancin' on the Edge" (which I did enjoy quite a lot at that time), the "musical revelation", as far as metal is concerned, came for me when I first listened to Metallica's "Fight Fire With Fire" a few months later, so maybe this might explain some things (or not). Sorry if I put the albums in an order which you don't approve of.

lol, i accept your apology . Jokes aside though, you're right, hate was probably the wrong word for me to use. I just think it's better than half the albums on this list and is widely considered a classic trad metal album. So it's kind of weird for me to see see people saying that it shouldn't have made a top trad metal list.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Only album here way out of place is Warning's imo.

 

[Master_Yoda77]

 

[Krow]

Eh. I like that Warning album but hes right, no comparison to the rest of the albums. I actually can hardly believe you guys want to put such a whiny album on the list at all. Solitude Aeturnus, Reverend Bizarre, or Revelation would have been better non 80s doom rep imo.

Edit: blah blah SA and Revelation were around but didnt have full lengths until the 90s

 

[Mort Divine]

the non-lazy thing to do would have been to outright just not merge trad. metal and doom and then better representation could have been had

but hey ozz hates doom, so who'd expect that to happen

 

[divine_torture]

I misinterpreted the post. Sorry.

I explained in another one of these posts/threads why it's important to listen to all the albums. There were some people who explicitly indicated that, out of 20 albums, they had only listened to 10 of them and proceeded to rank all 20 albums. THAT skews results. That's what I thought was happening and I was wrong. I apologize again.

I can't even vote right now because I've only listened to maybe a third to half the albums on the list and haven't even had the motivation to listen to the rest.

There's 6 I have to hear yet

 

[The Ozzman]

the non-lazy thing to do would have been to outright just not merge trad. metal and doom and then better representation could have been had

but hey ozz hates doom, so who'd expect that to happen

I never explicitly said I hate doom. I just find it the least interesting of all metal genres.

With that in mind, I wouldn't have been interested enough to do a doom thread by itself but I knew there was enough interest with others and thought this was a way to meet in the middle.

 

[no country for old wainds]

WATCHING FROM A DISTANCE has many prominent supporters among legends of the trad doom scene so we're in good company methinks - it will endure in the canon no matter how many people pass it off as emo bullshit. personally i'm delighted such a polarising record made the list.

 

[Funerary_Doom]

I misinterpreted the post. Sorry.

I explained in another one of these posts/threads why it's important to listen to all the albums. There were some people who explicitly indicated that, out of 20 albums, they had only listened to 10 of them and proceeded to rank all 20 albums. THAT skews results. That's what I thought was happening and I was wrong. I apologize again.

I can't even vote right now because I've only listened to maybe a third to half the albums on the list and haven't even had the motivation to listen to the rest.

Ohhhh. Gotcha. It's no problem. I actually got a little carried away with that second post. My bad. Cheers