#24 - Martyr

We're getting into the crème de la crème now, and at number 24 sits my favorite pure death metal band on this list.  We'll be coming to a few other bands in the coming posts who I've seen described as death metal, and who certainly exhibit some of the characteristics of the genre, but I can't think of anybody who would disagree with the assertion that Québec's brilliant technical death metal band Martyr fits firmly within its bounds (if any musical style truly has such things).  The extreme metal movement in that part of Canada is legendary, having produced, in addition to these guys, amazing technical death metal bands Cryptopsy and Gorguts (who would probably be on this list now if I had it to do over again) as well as legendary progressive thrashers Voivod.  Oddly enough, Martyr's mastermind and virtuoso guitarist Dan Mongrain has played in all three of those other bands.

I remember first hearing Martyr sometime around 2000, thanks (I think) to mp3.com, which was a gem back then for seekers of new music and bands eager to get their work heard.  Their album Warp Zone had just been released, and one or two of the tracks were available for download.  I can't remember what lead to me to giving them in particular a listen - probably that great online compendium, The BNR Metal Pages - but I know that I was blown away by what I heard.  The band's melodic approach is really unusual, especially for that time: angular and atonal, with frequent wide melodic intervals.  Rhythmically, like a lot of the genre, they're frenetic, complex and relentlessly aggressive.  Every one of the players is a master of his craft, especially Dan, who, when you hear him, makes perfectly obvious why he's been so in-demand as a guitarist.  As has become the custom, I'm including two clips here: a studio recording of the opener from their last (and best) album, 2006's Feeding the Abscess, and a live video from 2008 of a song from the same album called "Nameless, Faceless, Neverborn".  Both take some wildly unexpected turns; I hope you enjoy them.

#25 - Alice Cooper

One of the enduring enigmas of heavy rock: Is Alice Cooper a band or is Alice Cooper a person.  The answer, for any readers who aren't that well-versed in lore or music, is both.  But that never really seems quite right, because Alice (the man once known as Vincent Furnier) is such a large personality that he makes it hard to acknowledge anyone else sharing the stage with him, because Alice Cooper, the solo artist, released his first album only a year or so after the breakup of Alice Cooper, the band, and because the theatrical stage show and creepy storytelling are at least as defining as either of them.

Alice Cooper started as a group of high schoolers who could barely play their instruments in Phoenix, Arizona in the mid-60's, and managed to get signed by Frank Zappa to his indie label in 1968.  Their first two albums on his label, 1969's Pretties for You and 1970's Easy Action are loose and unpolished, but the somewhat avant-garde compositions and quirky arrangements give a hint about the creativity that would become clearer later when they developed the chops, funding and focus to more clearly showcase it.

1971's Love It to Death is a landmark album, Alice Cooper's last with Zappa's "Straight" label, and first with producer Bob Ezrin (who I consider to be an integral part of the band).  It was the band's first commercial success, and demonstrates enormous musical progress, particularly as instrumentalists.  The band went on to release four more albums in less than three years, a break-neck writing, recording and touring pace that, remarkably, resulted in a large catalog of consistently terrific music.  All of Killer, School's Out, Billion Dollar Babies and Muscle of Love are highly recommended.  Alice even managed one excellent album without his bandmates in 1975's Welcome to My Nightmare (still produced by Ezrin) before the quality of the output started to fade.

In the early 70's, Alice Cooper was an integral part of heavy metal's and glam rock's roots, but, perhaps even more importantly, they founded modern shock rock, and their influence can be seen decades later in the likes of Mercyful Fate, Gwar, White Zombie, Marilyn Manson, Slipknot and Ghost B.C., to name a few.  Despite their status as innovators, the music itself still holds up over 40 years later as progressive and powerful.  Here are a pair of clips, both from the Love It to Death album: the studio version of my favorite, "Black Juju" and a live for television performance of the eerie "Ballad of Dwight Fry".

#26 - Blotted Science

Kinda cheating, since you've already heard twice from mad metal scientist Ron Jarzombek with 80's tech-thrash pioneers WatchTower and his own project Spastic Ink, but I'm afraid I can't help but share this latest impressive band of his.  Like Ron's previous projects, they're progressive, and display breathtaking technical proficiency, but this instrumental offering is steeped in death metal, where his earlier forays were much thrashier.  Blotted Science also features bassist Alex Webster (of Cannibal Corpse and recently Conquering Dystopia) and have gone through a number of drummers, with Charlie Zeleny and Hannes Grossmann (of Obscura) appearing on their two recordings respectively.

Aside the obvious chops, Blotted Science also shows off an advanced understanding of music composition.  I'm going to show you both in the videos I was lucky enough to find at YouTube below, all from their most recent release, 2011's EP, The Animation of Entomology.  The first is an explanation and demonstration of the 12-tone row and its treatments in the song "Cretaceous Chasm".

If you enjoyed that music theory lesson, there's a similar one of one of the shorter songs from their first release, The Machinations of Dementia, entitled "Oscillation Cycles".  Next up is a mind-blowing video of drummer Hannes Grossmann recording his part for "Ingesting Blatteria" for the EP.

Finally, all of these songs (and indeed all 7 on the EP) are actually musical renditions of insect horror scenes from film - mostly B movies, which track exactly with the films, a la Pink Floyd's famous Dark Side of the Rainbow, but more complete and obviously intentional.  Here's the track "Vermicular Asphyxiation" synched up with some particularly grotesque video from B-movie homage, horror-comedy film Slither.  If you can stomach it, it's pretty impressive.

#27 - Megadeth

My favorite thrash metal band comes in at #27 overall.  Megadeth got started in Los Angeles in 1983, mere months after leader Dave Mustaine was unceremoniously dismissed from Metallica shortly before the recording of their first album.  I've read Dave's memoir, and it's clear that his entire life since has been colored by that firing, and he's been haunted by fears of inferiority, regret and envy ever since.  It's ironic to me, since I feel like he's done so much more as a leader than he ever could have done as the gunslinger of Metallica.  True, Megadeth has never had the commercial success that his former band had, but musically, I think they surpassed their rivals in inventiveness and virtuosity, if not sooner, then in 1990 with the recruiting of the longest lived Megadeth lineup and the release of their best work, Rust in Peace.

Dave, in the mid-80's, was a really good guitar player, playing faster and more aggressively than most of his contemporaries.  But the really smart thing he did with Megadeth was to swallow his (considerable) ego, and hire co-lead guitarists who were musically superior to him, particularly early on.  The guitar and drum positions in the band have mostly been revolving doors since the band's formation (probably chiefly due to Dave's abrasive personality), and have included such stellar musicians as fusion drummers Gar Samuelson and Vinnie Colaiuta, son of jazz musician Don Menza and drummer, Nick Menza, staple heavy rock drummer Jimmy DeGrasso, thrash metal pioneer Kerry King, fusion guitarists Chris Poland and Jeff Young, and shredders extraordinaire Marty Friedman and Al Pitrelli.  Like fellow thrashers Metallica, Megadeth always had a rhythmically progressive edge, playing in multiple and odd meters on occasion.  They just did it faster, tighter, and often better.  Here's my favorite selection from my favorite album of Megadeth's, "Holy Wars... the Punishment Due" from Rust in Peace.  Dave's solo near the end (beginning around 4:55) is one of my favorite guitar solos of all time.  I highly recommend the album as a whole.  It was rightly recognized with a Grammy nomination, as was its second track "Hangar 18", which features some fantastic soloing by guitarist Marty Friedman.  I remember playing the album for a friend back in the early 90's who listened exclusively to jazz, and, blown away by the musicianship, he immediately picked up his own copy.  In fact, I'm just going to put the whole album here.  "Holy Wars..." is the first track, so you have my permission to stop after that if you don't have 42 minutes to spare.  And any watchers of MTV News from the mid-to-late 80's will recognize the main riff from classic "Peace Sells... But Who's Buying", also below.

#28 - Beyond Twilight

Denmark's Beyond Twilight debuted in 2001 with a terrific prog metal album called The Devil's Hall of Fame, and followed it up with 2005's Section X and 2006's For the Love of Art and the Making, each of the three featuring a different vocalist, although their styles are similar, and all three are strong singers, coming out of the late 70's / early 80's hard rock style pioneered by the Deep Purple family tree.  Musically, Beyond Twilight showcases keyboards heavily, as the principal composer and songwriter is keyboardist Finn Zierler.  It's heavily orchestrated, and leans toward a film soundtrack kind of sound, with a bit of an insane carnival kind of mood, but super heavy (in a traditional metal kind of way) with a rock solid groove.  The third album is interesting in that it is a single piece of music comprised of 43 short tracks that the listener is invited to listen to in any order.

The first album featured one of my favorite vocalists, Norwegian singer Jørn Lande, in one of his two best performances that I've heard to date, and was released only four months after the other one, Ark's brilliant Burn the Sun.  Here's the first track from The Devil's Hall of Fame, entitled "Hellfire".  It's got a cheesy sci-fi intro that could have been done worse, and I dig the little gasp at the end of it that leads into the song.  You'll get a taste of the cinematic compositional approach, Jørn's unbelievable vocal performance, plus a tasty solo at the six minute mark by guitarist Anders Ericson Kragh and some equally tasty rhythm section playing throughout.  It's a great track, but the rest of the album is just as good.  If you like this one, check out the rest.

#29 - Primus

I distinctly remember first hearing Primus in 1991.  That summer, I bought a cassette tape of the soundtrack from Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, partly because I liked the movie, but mostly because it had songs by Slaughter, Winger, Kiss, Richie Kotzen, Steve Vai, Faith No More, Megadeth and King's X, all acts I liked to varying degrees at the time.  It also had a couple of bands I hadn't heard before, among them a relatively unknown San Francisco trio who actually appeared in the film as one of the entries in the climactic Battle of the Bands.  The song, "Tommy the Cat", was buried somewhere in the middle of the album, and when I heard it, I was blown away.  I had never heard such virtuosic rock bass playing in my young life, and the band's unique, paradoxical sound of heavy and playful, tightly grooved and loosely sung, dry, humorous, soulful and of bizarre tonality.  It was easily the best song on the soundtrack, and I immediately picked up their album, Sailing the Seas of Cheese, from which "Tommy the Cat" was taken.  The album was great beginning to end, and I soon got its predecessor, Frizzle Fry and their debut, a live album called Suck on This.  I was completely hooked and throughout the 90s, I picked up each album as soon as it was released and witnessed them live twice, once in 1991 in Irvine as an opener for Public Enemy and Anthrax, and again in 1999 in Atlanta on the Ozzfest tour.  I can say from first-hand experience that bassist/vocalist Les Claypool is as mind-bogglingly proficient live as he is in the studio.

Primus got their start in the San Francisco bay area at a time when underground metal, particularly in that area, was starting to appear above the surface.  Metallica and Exodus were on the rise and with them, the young thrash metal movement.  In fact, believe it or not, both Claypool and guitarist Larry LaLonde flipflopped between the fledgling Primus and a local thrash band called Blind Illusion, and both appear on that band's 1988 album The Sane Asylum.  LaLonde was even a member of Possessed, often regarded as the first death metal band, and appears on their first three records between 1985 and 1987.  And Claypool auditioned to replace the late Cliff Burton in Metallica in 1986.  With all this foundation in extreme metal, you might expect a different sound than what you get in Primus.  Then again, no one sounds like Primus, and while they're difficult to label, I'd give them credit as an early influence in the experimental-, alternative- and funk-metal subgenres.

Since "Tommy the Cat" was my introduction to Primus, and because it had such an effect on me, I'm including that here for your listening pleasure.  Following that is a live recording from 2010 of my daughter Megan's favorite, "Harold of the Rocks", off of their studio debut of 20 years earlier.  It goes a bit "free form jazz odyssey" in the middle, but also gives you a chance to hear Ler LaLonde's unique melodic approach and the band's storytelling approach to songwriting, and anyway it's one of my favorites too (although I could probably say that about a good dozen or so).

#30 - Deep Purple

English legends, Deep Purple, formed in 1968 and quickly gained a following on the merits of their debut, Shades of Deep Purple, and its hit single, a cover of the Joe South song "Hush".  Back then, they were a psych-infused pop rock band in sound, but with a bold classical music references.  Their obvious chops and musical self-indulgence along with the psych and eventual hard rock leaning of their sound in that first incarnation are reminiscent of a band they toured with early on: Cream.  Purple really began to hit their stride when they recruited replacement bassist Roger Glover and vocalist Ian Gillan from the band Episode Six in 1969, and took a turn toward the heavy.  The "Mark II" lineup released four fantastic studio albums, one of the best live albums of all time, and the fascinating Concerto for Group and Orchestra over the four years that followed, cementing themselves as one of the greatest hard rock bands of their fertile time.  In the years after Gillan and Glover split again in 1973, Purple has produced some interesting music here and there, introducing vocalist David Coverdale to the world, reuniting the Mark II lineup in the mid 80's for a couple of decent prog/hard rock albums, and recruiting the amazing Steve Morse on lead guitar for the past 20 years, but their output during those four years in the early 70's was something special.

As I've been doing lately, I'm going to include two examples of their work below.  First is a live TV performance from 1970 of the progressive and heavy "Child in Time".  It illustrates the afore-mentioned self-indulgence, classical music influence, the cutting edge chops of keyboardist Jon Lord and guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and the inimitable vocal stylings of the great Ian Gillan.

And a classic from their biggest record: