Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History
I’ve finally decided to put together an album by album history of hard rock and heavy metal. I’ve decided to do this on a year by year basis, with what I feel were the ten best and most essential albums for each year. The journal will be written with fairly in-depth album reviews, insights and the type of impact that these albums had if any at the time and in the future. I decided that I would do this from 1970 to present day (so a hell of a lot of albums here) but I quickly realised that the real birth of this music, probably started a year earlier in 1969 which was such a pivotal year, so for that reason my reviews will start there, despite sounding an odd place to start number wise.
The motivation for the journal actually comes from various friends of mine, who often ask me how should they get into metal and heavy music, and where should they start. As always I often say at the beginning, where it was more melodic and less heavy by today’s standards, as a I know chucking them a Sepultura or Slayer cd will have them running for the nearest exit and swearing never to listen to anything heavy ever again! So this journal will hopefully be educational and interesting to any reading and possibly even nostalgic. For me it actually allows me to put all the stuff that I’ve listened to, finally down in a cohesive list once and for all, I also hope to sneak in some albums that I may have forgotten or overlooked as well. Also for some of the years for me, it will be almost impossible to choose just ten albums, but I’ll worry about that when the time comes. The format may well change slightly as I go along but that depends on how the journal goes. So I’ll kick of position 10 for 1969 on my next entry, after inserting a 'pre-listening list'.