Author: Martin Popoff
Published by: ECW Press 2004

The Top 500 Heavy Metal albums of All Time is a book that serves a particular purpose. This purpose is to inform and educate the reader about these albums, while bringing forth interesting facts and brief interviews with the artists themselves. What we have here is a vast collection Heavy Metal nostalgia, that does not seem to be biased on any level, and that is definitely something that is rare coming from the journalism world.

For those that read Popoff's last platter, The Top 500 Heavy Metal Songs of All Time and were disappointed (such as myself), then I think you will feel one of two ways about this book. The first way is that you are equally as disappointed, and the second is that (like me) you find this book to have much more meat in it, and by meat I mean better interview pieces from the artists and more interesting tidbits to keep the attention span running. It also seems to have more of a focus on real Metal, and less of the rest (even though Nirvana is still in here).

There are several ways to approach the book as a reader. For one, you could start in the beginning at the number one album (which happens to be Metallica's Master of Puppets surprise surprise). Or you could do what I did, and utilize the several amazingly extensive appendixes that Popoff provides in the back of the book to find what albums you are actually interested in reading about and then skim through the rest. Of course you could also start in the back at number 500 and work your way towards the front, which actually makes more sense to me since I think the actual book should start in the beginning that way.

Despite that one minor complaint, the way the book is structured is still very enjoyable, in that with each entry there is often a picture of the album cover artwork, and then always a comment from Popoff (an extensive and informative paragraph) followed by an answered question by someone in the respective band (without the question). For example on Iron Maiden's Live After Death, Popoff says "The beauty of this album is hearing Nicko, at the height of his powers, swashbuckler and slice through the early Burr material. Hallowed Be Thy Name being of particular percussive joy."

Following this, Bruce Dickenson (the singer of Iron Maiden) says "Live After Death was not just one concert. It was assembled out of different songs from different nights. We recorded at least three nights, and then we assembled the best out of those three nights."

This pattern goes on and on throughout the entire book, which I think really helps Popoff convey the importance of each album without dragging it on for too long, and at the same time getting right to the point and creating an understanding of what that album is about for the reader. Buy this if you are a collector or even just an enthusiast of the genre.


Rating: 7.5/10

Written by Jonah
Thursday, December 23, 2004