Ernesto Catalan

Hardcore the way it’s meant to be played: very loud and very fast!

Peter Frampton hates this one because it’s probably his finest set of tunes and wasn’t successful with them. Simple as that. It is his hardest rocking album since his Humble Pie days.

Thin Lizzy’s last studio album was also the band’s hardest, heaviest album ever while retaining the melodies and dueling solos of Scott Gorham and the late great John Sykes who brought a healthy kick in the butt to the band with his guitar hero pyrotechnics. Not a single dull moment in this heavy metal masterpiece. Surely much heavier than their earlier stuff but still sounding like Thin Lizzy, “Thunder And Lightning” is a certified classic you simply can’t miss if you call yourselves “headbangers”!

Along with “The Number Of The Beast”, “Killers” is Iron Maiden at its fastest most brutal era. People tend to forget just how heavy Maiden used to sound. “Killers” is Paul Di ‘Anno’s second and last Maiden album, but he went out with a bang! With scorching tracks like “Murders In The Rue Morgue”, “Wrathchild”, “Purgatory”, “Drifter”, “Another Life” and the title track, the band cemented themselves as one of the NWOBHM heaviest and most technically proficient bands. This is the the quintessential Maiden album, consolidating the sound that would inspire hundreds of bands worldwide.

Oppressively and humongously heavy, making Black Sabbath sound like a Saturday morning cartoon tune. This is the true sound of “grunge”!

I have yet to hear this tune. Big time Nirvana fan, but that doesn’t mean I like every single of their songs. They were game changers, even though many groups predated their style (later know as “grunge”). Bands like Meat Puppets, Lemonheads, Dinosour Jr., Descendents, Soul Asylum and most importantly, Hüsker Dü, played very much like Nirvana but YEARS before them. And however Nirvana stated how much they love Pixies and Sonic Youth, they sound very distant from them, only taking little things and there: the noise (Sonic Youth) and the dynamics of soft/loud, hard/fast style of Pixies.

A slower (and better played) version of venom. Warfare lie in a musical limbo: too slow for being a thrash band, too raw to be a NWOBHM member. Be mindful that my comments are for this album in particular. It also sounds like a slower but metallized version of GBH, and there’a the obvious Motörhead influence lingering throughout the album, specially on the faster tracks like “Let the Show go on”. This is Warfare’s debut so things get a bit better and tighter on the following albums.

The greatest bosanova album ever made. Period!