Hall of Fame

It’s strange that the one of the cornerstones of doom is actually one of the most lyrically positive albums in the entire secular metal canon.

In early 1982, Accept were in dire need of an identity, onstage and especially on record.

Focus almost never happened. Hurricane Andrew (a Category 5 storm that devastated South Florida in 1992), bassists frequently exiting and three separate visits to Morrisound Studios could’ve cost the world Cynic.

It’s hard to say who was more shocked—punks or metalheads—by hardcore band D.R.I. signing with Metal Blade Records via the label’s new Death Records imprint in 1985.

Upon finding out the next album our vaunted Hall of Fame was going to open its pearly gates to was slated to be Judge’s Bringin’ It Down, an anticipatory buzz broke out amongst the extreme music luminaries hanging around the Decibel table at the most recent Maryland Deathfest.

In 1985, the hardcore punk and metal scenes were like the pre-Civil Rights deep South: segregated. The two just didn’t mix.

Nile didn’t play cribbage with the Lord of all Fevers and Plagues. Entrails were never ripped from an unfortunate virgin’s cunt as far as we know.

When five unassuming, working-class dudes from Nassau County (Long Island, NY) released their debut full-length in 1991, it initially didn’t seem destined to have the atomic bomb of impact that it would eventually ascertain with the passage of time.

There is influence and under the influence. California’s Autopsy were both.

Dateline: Summer 2000. My former band has just finished our 30-minute spot on the rickety stage at New York City’s CBGB as one of eight opening acts for what is supposed to be grindcore experimentalists Discordance Axis’ last show.

By 1989, John McEntee was growing increasingly disenchanted with his membership in technical thrash band Revenant. With the aid of Revenant drummer Paul Ledney, McEntee set out to pursue his own brand of blackened death metal, christening it Incantation.

From a brief moment in 1986, bassist, songwriter and lyricist Leif Edling, almost by sheer willpower alone, managed to raise the leaden monolith of Candlemass from their murky depths and into an upright position.

Many will cry sacrilege, but we’re gonna say it anyway: …And Justice for All is Metallica’s finest hour.

Rolling from Los Angeles into the parched sandbox of the Mojave, anyone familiar with Welcome to Sky Valley will see almost all the relevant landmarks along the 10 East freeway.

News flash: Thrash metal didn’t begin or end with the release of Testament’s The Legacy, but just because the band’s 1987 debut didn’t defiantly construct genre bookends, it is still very much worthy of entry into Decibel’s hallowed hall.

As far as Hall of Fame inductees go, the making of Black Sabbath’s ninth album, their first with former Rainbow vocalist Ronnie James Dio, easily ranks as one of the most drama-filled.

It’s both Repulsion’s genre-sparking album and the way enlightened metal fans will look at you should you admit ignorance of the fact—which is very well possible, seeing as Repulsion has always been a band that your favorite bands worshipped, but were somehow otherwise criminally unheard of.

If there’s just one person in the world who’ll never forget the exact date NOLA came out, it’s Eyehategod guitarist/Down drummer Jimmy Bower.

“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women,” so said Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan in 1982’s Conan the Barbarian when asked, “What is best in life?”

Without Napalm Death’s Scum, you probably wouldn’t be holding this magazine. This album—essentially a split LP between two almost completely different lineups—defined grindcore with its growled vocals, whirring, hardcore-influenced riffs and faster-than-a-locomotive blast beats.

While it’ll never be regarded as the kind of breakthrough record Leviathan became, thanks to universal acclaim (indie rock critics and all) and its inclusion on not one but three video game soundtracks (Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Project Gotham Racing 3, Saints Row), Mastodon’s Remission LP is much more important in the scheme of the band’s history and modern metal itself.

Of all of their bizarrely captivating feats, the fact that Coalesce managed to create arguably their most important album after they had ceased to be a band has to rank near the top of the list.

Opeth’s Orchid existed among tape traders for almost a full year, either as a partial or full album with the songs cut in random places, before Candlelight unfurled it upon an unsuspecting public in May 1995.

Call it the face that launched a thousand metalcore graphic designers (into a rat-race of feverish mimicry).

It’s a stretch to call Diamond Head’s 1980 debut, Lightning to the Nations, “extreme” metal. In their era, the über-influential New Wave of British Heavy Metal, Diamond Head—four teenage mates from Stourbridge, England—were well-respected practitioners of a burgeoning new form of metal that was brash, raw and relatively fast.

Katatonia’s initial incarnation as a black doom outfit—replete with corpsepaint, weapons, stage names like Lord Seth and Blackheim, and song titles “Without God” and “Palace of Frost”—probably caught as many Darkthrone acolytes off guard as it did followers of England’s doom metal “big three.”

In 1995, Norwegian corpsepaint legends Immortal were on top of the world: With Mayhem’s Hellhammer sitting in on drums, vocalist/bassist Abbath and guitarist/lyricist Demonaz were high on the icy grimness of their own Battles in the North and opening for Morbid Angel on the European leg of the Domination tour.

With a few coughs at the beginning of “Sweet Leaf,” Tony Iommi officially hailed cannabis as the drug of choice for the kind of people who dug Black Sabbath.

While a pretty good case could be made for inducting either Rock for Light or I Against I into our esteemed Hall, the debut full-length by DC-cum-New York’s Bad Brains deserves the coveted nod; not just for its blazing punk/hardcore, but the circumstances surrounding its creation.

Cave In have had many musical identities since their inception in Methuen, MA, in 1995, but the one that first established them as underground heroes was the dizzying, face-ripping metal blowout now known the world over as Until Your Heart Stops.