Stop! In the Name of Satan

In honor of Halloween, or Hallowe'en if you're feeling extra evil, Mothra and I will be playing 2 hours of metal this Sunday night. I know, I know - Halloween will have come and gone by Sunday night but the stench of corpses and pumpkin innards will still fill the air so we will obey our demonic masters and make your eardrums bleed. Neither of us owns a lot of metal so we have to scour the internet for hitz. I came across an amazing resource the other day and have been working my way through it ever since. It's a blog simply titled best metal songs and it's a continuing series of write ups and videos of heavy metal classics and obscurities plus some head scratching randomness.

I immediately took to it since the number one pick is Iron Maiden's "The Trooper" which is a refreshing change from the typical Black Sabbath/Led Zeppelin/Metallica list toppers. The blog also features a heavy dose of international meal bands including the more obvious choices like Brazilian thrash metal purveyors Sepultura and Swedish black metal vikings Bathory but also less well known bands like the wonderfully named German group Crematory and Austria's own Pungent Stench who mostly sing about cannibalism.

But then I realised that the number system may not be based on merit, although there are few metal songs more awesome than "The Trooper," but simply the order in which the author of the blog wrote about each song. Obviously his early choices were going to be some of the classics but I don't think he's really trying to make a list in order from best to worst, especially since he's just entered song #850 and nobody is that obsessive about making sure their list is in the proper best to worst order, not even Listmaker. Plus, he's not even solely writing about the best metal songs ever written since he's included some very odd choices like David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" (#833) and Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness" (#393). The blog apparently started with a metal mission which has since become simply a list of great songs, which isn't a problem but he may want to rethink renaming the thing because I can't imagine any of The Supremes biting off the head of a bat while singing "Baby Love," (#330) not even Diana Ross.

Iron Maiden - "The Trooper"