For the 250th anniversary of America, Last Rites is featuring 250 of the greatest American metal albums ever made, and here we are at Part Four, already. Please note that these albums are not ranked or ordered in any way — just prime examples of kick-ass heavy metal made by American bands. Got any ideas what entries are still to come? Got any favorites that you’re sure we missed? (You’ll know by Friday, if we did.) Let us know in the comments!
Catch up on Parts 1, 2, & 3 here, here & here.
Tool – Ænima
Omen – Battle Cry
Asunder – A Clarion Call
Helcaraxë – Red Dragon
Helcaraxë’s Red Dragon is almost certainly the greatest Sweden-loving melodic death metal concept album about Tolkien’s The Hobbit ever to emerge from the verdant hills of New Jersey. That’s a little pithy, I guess, but Red Dragon truly shines because of its triple commitment to heaviness, melody, and catchiness. It has the bulldozing drive of Crusher/Avenger-era Amon Amarth, the fuck-heavy heft of Amorphis circa Karelian Isthmus, and the fleet melodicism of early In Flames. And, unlike the unforgivable bloat of Peter Jackson’s nearly 9-hour film adaptation, Helcaraxë honors Bilbo’s origin story in a destructively tidy 44 minutes. Plus, a promise from me to you: Once you’ve heard “Skin Changer,” you’ll forever find yourself crooning under your breath – “BEEEEORRRRRRN / TRAAANSFOOOOOORM.” If you like death metal of any sort, it’s hard to imagine being sore any time you jam Red Dragon. [DAN OBSTKRIEG]
Impaled – Mondo Medicale
Lurker Of Chalice – Lurker Of Chalice
Faith No More – Angel Dust
Agalloch – The Mantle
I am not sure these kinds of bands exist anymore, but at one point there were a few bands that felt like, and represented, a sort of seismic shift of the metal equilibrium. Agalloch was one of those bands. And The Mantle was arguably Agalloch in its most earth-shaking form.
What struck me first — and anyone, really, who grew up in Portland — was the picture of the Thompson Elk sculpture on the cover. I had never really given it much thought, passing by it often enough on my way to school. Framed in that way, though, that familiar elk seemed oddly mysterious. Ominous, even. I think, over the years, that picture has stuck. The Mantle is the elk album.
Of course, The Mantle is also more than the “elk album.” It is Agalloch’s magnum opus. “A Celebration for the Death of Man,” if you will. It is morbid. Pensive. Reflective. And it’s genuinely beautiful. One of my all-time favorites. [CHRIS C]
Trouble – Psalm 9
Warrior – Fighting For The Earth
Truth And Janey – No Rest For The Wicked
Morbid Saint – Spectrum Of Death
Dream Death – Journey Into Mystery
Dream Death’s Journey into Mystery doesn’t fit squarely into any particular genre box, but that’s probably because many of the boxes hadn’t been made yet when this album was released in 1987. Certainly, Journey into Mystery owes a lot to early Celtic Frost; it sits similarly at the convergence of several genres. Elements of thrash, death, and doom combined with horror themes create an album that is brooding, atmospheric and barbarically punishing. Did Dream Death create doom/death? Not exactly, but they undoubtedly sowed fertile seeds for the genre’s germination. [JEREMY MORSE]
Municipal Waste – Hazardous Mutation
Overkill – Feel The Fire
Queensrÿche – Operation: Mindcrime
Rune – The End Of Nothing
Origin: Dayton, Ohio
Why it belongs: While not a roaring commercial success even by the meager standards of underground death metal, The End of Nothing played a crucial role in solidifying Harmony, Pennsylvania’s Willowtip Records as a leading exporter of “forward thinking metal.” The impulse toward technical innovation has driven death metal forward at every stage of its evolution, but what Rune provides here instead is a probing of new emotional expanses. Yes, you hear the rage of Ripping Corpse in some of the riffs, but what sticks with you is the sadness.
What’s the most American thing about Rune: As was often the case with American bands challenging metal’s orthodoxies in the early 2000s, Rune look and sound like a group of fellers from a dying town bound only by the fact that they’re the only people in a 20-mile radius who’ve even heard a metal album. Rune has always sounded like the musical equivalent of a dandelion growing up between the cracks in the pavement of a Wal-Mart Supercenter parking lot, only to be run over by a Ford F-350 with truck nuts. Ain’t that America. [DAVID FONSECA]
Morbid Angel – Altars Of Madness
Angelcorpse – The Inexorable
Pig Destroyer – Prowler In The Yard
Caladan Brood – Echoes Of Battle
Meliah Rage – Kill To Survive
Hindsight seems to give the impression that the US had just about completely shifted from traditionally-styled metal to thrash by 1988, but there was actually a lot of great trad metal still happening, even if much of it had the sharper edge of thrash. But even among those in the know at the time, Meliah Rage’s debut album Kill To Survive dropped like a T-800 with new shades. The formula was tried and true: kickass riffs, bass lines, drumming, and singing, right? But Meliah Rage somehow captured a uniquely ferocious sound, sharp and jagged and electric and absolutely feral, that lit up the formula like no one before and made it fun as hell. Vocalist Mike Munro was a huge part of that, coming off like James Hetfield’s evil doppelganger conjured by King Diamond. Kill To Survive is a perfect example of just how deep the well was of excellent heavy metal in the late 80s. An all-timer of a heavy metal album, generally, and an exemplar of the late transition from traditional metal to thrash. [LONE WATIE]
Judas Iscariot – To Embrace The Corpses Bleeding
Yob – The Great Cessation
Flotsam And Jetsam – Doomsday For The Deceiver
Blue Öyster Cult – Secret Treaties
Confessor – Condemned
Thanks to the wonders of recently legalized recreational substances, when listening back to Condemned to collect my thoughts for this blurb, I bombarded my compatriot with a string of unsolicited and obviously brilliant statements, so let’s just let Stoned Me do the heavy lifting here. [ANDREW EDMUNDS]
High Spirits – Another Night
The Dillinger Escape Plan – Calculating Infinity
Death – Human
Agoraphobic Nosebleed – Altered States Of America
Part of the goal of MURICA as a thing is to simply be the MOST. In whatever way you want to think about that and in every facet of life, this country focuses on taking it to the max. We need to be the richest, have the largest portions of food (as our European World Cup guests are currently discovering), drive the most absurdly large trucks, and so on and so forth.
Not only is Altered States Of America the most Agoraphobic Nosebleed album to ever Agoraphobic Nosebleed, but it also happens to be grindcore taken to its most absurd limit. It’s 100 tracks in barely over 20 minutes, where every “song” could be missed because you sneezed and your ears were busy. The programmed drums are intentionally pushed beyond anything close to resembling human, the lyrics are unhinged, the samples are bizarre as hell, and everything is so noisy as to be punishing; but that’s the point. Altered States Of America is so perfectly unpleasant as to be the best representation of one of the most sonically challenging subgenres. [SPENCER HOTZ]
The Gault – Even As All Before Us
Lethal – Programmed
Fifth Angel – Fifth Angel
Panopticon – Kentucky
Panopticon mastermind Austin Lunn crafted a blend of bluegrass and black metal on the project’s best record, Kentucky. Aside from the hard-hitting themes of corporate greed and environmental harm at the hands of mankind, Lunn’s art speaks to the trials and tribulations of blue collar Americans.
But what stands out like a field of flowing Kentucky bluegrass is how sincere it all sounds. The bluegrass-black-metal-folk mix isn’t a gimmick, rather a man conjuring the roots of home and yesteryear. It would be a shame not to include this one on our list of the top 250 US metal albums for the sense of Americana alone, but also because it’s as emotional as metal can be. The banjos, tremolo riffs, and blast beats do indeed make for quite the mashup, but the soulfulness doesn’t really allow you to pay much attention to how jarring that might sound.
Being so close to Kentucky probably impacts my bias here, and I’ll admit that. But if you’re a fan of heavy music and the art of it all, it’s hard not to at least appreciate this one. Maybe the sound isn’t for you, and that’s OK. But again, there’s a reason to respect what Lunn captured here. Sorrow, heart, and hope [BLIZZARD OF JOZZSH]
Internal Void – Standing On The Sun
Riot – Fire Down Under
Chastain – Ruler Of The Wasteland
Hate Eternal – King Of All Kings
Erik Rutan took everything he’d learned in Ripping Corpse and Morbid Angel to build his signature style of death metal with Hate Eternal. Sophomore effort King of All Kings might be their most brutal and unrelenting album, combining extreme speed and possessed vocals with riffs that are simultaneously thick and muscular (you’ll swear the guitar itself is flexing) and yet slippery, almost lithe. It absolutely wants to hurt you, but there are also surprising flashes of melody that give it the occasional “epic” vibe, helping to elevate this above so many of the band’s peers. In the era when “blasting death metal” was actually used as a genre descriptor, Hate Eternal reigned supreme. [ZACH DUVALL]
Cynic – Focus
Absu – Tara
Michael Romeo – War Of The Worlds // Pt. 1
Terrorizer – World Downfall
If you had your thumb on the pulse of EXTREME MUSIC FOR EXTREME PEOPLE 30+ years ago and had your brains absolutely dusted by Altars of Madness in the spring of ’89, you pounced on World Downfall six months later like a golden retriever on a fallen McNugget. David Vincent on bass / backing vocals and thee Commando on drums? Take all of our money, immediately! What made the Terrorizer debut even more exceptional, however, is the fact that, amidst a stretch where it seemed as if England could do no wrong in terms of cranking out a bagillion good-to-great grindcore acts, World Downfall dropped a pin in the U.S. like a gat-danged meteor strike. Is this the scootin’est death/grind beast ever to grace our Planet Earth? Why yes, Sir David Frederick Attenborough, it absolutely fucking is! [CAPTAIN]
Converge – Jane Doe
Sadus – Chemical Exposure / Illusions
Acid King – Busse Woods
Down – NOLA
The running theme in my blurbs is that, unlike other participants, I did not pick my albums. So, freed from the crushing weight of making a case for favorites like a battle-vest-bedecked Albert Brooks in Defending Your Life, I can fire from the hip and say you should just skip to “Bury Me in Smoke” and imagine the 12 other songs on Down’s NOLA are that good. In the interest of fair and balanced reporting, “Lifer” and “Stone the Crow” are the other songs southern stoner metal marks dig from this legit supergroup uniting the boundless talents of Jimmy Bower (but… on drums), Pepper Keenan, and Kirk Windstein. Alas, Phil Anselmo is also there, whose very presence is increasingly like paging through a yearbook and wondering what you were thinking with that haircut — truly the musical embodiment of “it was just a phase.” But, man, “Bury Me in Smoke,” am I right? And then your post-coital cigarette drag is the realization you could be listening to Crowbar or Eyehategod. [SETH BUTTNAM]
Corrosion Of Conformity – Animosity
Lamb Of God – Ashes Of The Wake
Griffin – Flight Of The Griffin
THE FOURTH 50
Tool – Ænima
Omen – Battle Cry
Asunder – A Clarion Call
Helcaraxë – Red Dragon
Impaled – Mondo Medicale
Lurker Of Chalice – Lurker Of Chalice
Faith No More – Angel Dust
Agalloch – The Mantle
Trouble – Psalm 9
Warrior – Fighting For The Earth
Truth And Janey – No Rest For The Wicked
Morbid Saint – Spectrum Of Death
Dream Death – Journey Into Mystery
Municipal Waste – Hazardous Mutation
Overkill – Feel The Fire
Queensrÿche – Operation: Mindcrime
Rune – The End Of Nothing
Morbid Angel – Altars Of Madness
Angelcorpse – The Inexorable
Pig Destroyer – Prowler In The Yard
Caladan Brood – Echoes Of Battle
Meliah Rage – Kill To Survive
Judas Iscariot – To Embrace The Corpses Bleeding
Yob – The Great Cessation
Flotsam And Jetsam – Doomsday For The Deceiver
Blue Öyster Cult – Secret Treaties
Confessor – Condemned
High Spirits – Another Night
The Dillinger Escape Plan – Calculating Infinity
Death – Human
Agoraphobic Nosebleed – Altered States Of America
The Gault – Even As All Before Us
Lethal – Programmed
Fifth Angel – Fifth Angel
Panopticon – Kentucky
Internal Void – Standing On The Sun
Riot – Fire Down Under
Chastain – Ruler Of The Wasteland
Hate Eternal – King Of All Kings
Cynic – Focus
Absu – Tara
Michael Romeo – War Of The Worlds // Pt. 1
Terrorizer – World Downfall
Converge – Jane Doe
Sadus – Chemical Exposure / Illusions
Acid King – Busse Woods
Down – NOLA
Corrosion Of Conformity – Animosity
Lamb Of God – Ashes Of The Wake
Griffin – Flight Of The Griffin
