Some black and power recommendation

polarity3 said:
essentials; these are the recordings widely agreed upon as classics, though will a little of my personal taste interjected. familiarity with these will allow you to more easily determine what else is worth listening to and what's derivative crap;

immortal - pure holocaust
burzum - burzum/aske, det som engang var, hvis lyset tar oss, filosofem
darkthrone - transilvanian hunger, panzerfaust, under a funeral moon (how was i the first person to mention them?!)
bathory - under the sign of the black mark, blood fire death
enslaved - vikinglgr veldi
mayhem - live in leipzig, de mysteriis dom sathanas
emperor - in the nightside eclipse
gorgoroth - antichrist
ulver - bergtatt (controversial one here...)
graveland - thousand swords (personally can't understand what people see in this one, but it's accalimed enough that you should at least check it out)
summoning - dol guldur
beherit - drawing down the moon
necromantia - scarlet evil witching black
varathron - his majesty at the swamp

some more recent/less classic stuff

nokturnal mortum - goat horns, lunar poetry (all their albums are pretty good as far as i know)
deathspell omega - si monumentum requires circumspice
drudkh - autumn aurora, forgotten legends, the swan road
mutiilation - remains of a dead ruined cursed soul, vampires of black imperial blood
vlad tepes/belketre - march to the black holocaust (split)
alcest - le secret
nocternity - onyx
krieg - the black house, patrick bateman
antaeus - cut your flesh and worship satan
moonblood - blut and krieg
blut aus nord - the work which transform god (it's now become trendy to hate this album, but oh well. their earlier stuff is apparently good too)
velvet cacoon - genevieve
graveland - memory and destiny, the fire of awakening, dawn of iron blades (this era of stuff is far superior to his supposed "classic" material, imo)
demoncy - joined in darkness (some people absolutely love this, personally i think it's pretty good but am yet to hear in it what they hear....still trying, though)
gontyna kry - welowie

there's more, but i'm not going to make a huge list of bands. i don't think i've omitted anything of undeniably high quality.

edit: i definitely advise downloading before buying with black metal

This is pretty much the definitive black metal list.
 
how come noone ever mentions dimmu borgir when talkin bout black metal?
they may be sell outs but they still are black metal
in power metal i kind of like blind guardian
and dont forget satyricon and gorgoroth in BM