An Ode to Hated Metal Records by Beloved Metal Bands

Metallica, after they started sucking

There are two important facets to heavy metal fandom. The first is knowing your shit and loving that shit. The second, and probably more vital facet, is hating the shit out of certain shit with the fury of a thousand shit-filled suns. If you have any semblance of taste or curiosity it’s pretty easy to find music to love. But knowing which records to piss on is an investment. Sometimes you had to be there. Here your shortcut to the most maligned missteps, experiments, and straight-up failures in heavy metal.

Metallica – Metallica

The world doesn’t hate

The Black Album

, but that fact makes legions of butt-hurt metalheads hate it even more. If you hear Metallica on the radio there’s a good chance the song came from this 30-million seller. And that’s part of the beef. When you heard the sprawling, depressive thrash of “One” on the radio it felt transgressive. When “Enter Sandman” comes on for the zillionth time you fall asleep at the wheel. It doesn’t help that this radio-friendly record is dragged down by “Nothing Else Matters” and “Unforgiven,” two sappy ballads with none of the balls or raging build-up of “Fade to Black.” I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to playing the hell out of the thing when it came out. But as time passed it didn’t sit right. And with the benefit of hindsight I, like many others, now mark this record as beginning of the end of my teenage love affair with metal. More power to the millions who aren’t mad about this record, but for the rest of us it’s the ultimate buzzkill—a flashback to the year heavy metal got castrated.

Black Sabbath – Technical Ecstasy

The escalator-riding, spit-swapping robots on the cover of

Technical Ecstasy

might lead you to believe this album is one of those weird electronic diversions that rockers in the ‘70s took after hearing Kraftwerk. Keyboards and synths—the bane of every metalhead’s existence—do turn up. But this is no

Metal Machine Music

. Iommi’s riffs still dominate—they’re just less brooding and doomy than we’re used to. If anything, this record feels like a lukewarm preview of Ozzy’s lesser solo work, but with more focus on those hooky, sing-songy choruses that he’d ride through the ‘80s. Drummer Bill Ward sings on the Beatles-esque “It’s All Right”—the least Sabbath-y track on the record, and maybe its coolest for being so damn weird. The best thing about

Technical Ecstasy

is the fact that it was recorded in the same studio that the Eagles were recording

Hotel California

and Sabbath’s coke-fueled, high-volume sessions frequently forced Henley and company to wait for the racket to die down.

Slayer – Diabolus In Musica

Thank Satan that whole nu-metal thing is over now. But back in 1998 it must have been tough to be a metal old timer and watch all those young turks in rubber masks hog all the glory. So Slayer (sans drummer Dave Lombardo) bunkered down with Rick Rubinto record their answer to Slipknot. The end result doesn’t suck quite as bad as you’d think—while it turns out you can’t take the Slayer out of Slayer, you can sure as shit water them down. Dropped guitar tunings make many of the tracks feel sludgy, which is cool, but when the band tries to groove it just feels wrong. Especially when the funky tempo forces Tom Arraya to veer dangerously close to rapping his anti-social lyrics. For all the noble (and maybe slightly desperate) experimentation on

Diabolus In Musica

Slayer can’t help but include one classic shredder. “Scrum” sounds like a circle pit incarnate—it’s short, sweet, and proof that Slayer never needed to change a thing.

Iron Maiden – No Prayer For the Dying

Iron Maiden flinched coming off their Orson Scott Card-inspired prog metal classic

Seventh Son of A Seventh Son

.

No Prayer For the Dying

ditched the band’s trademark Encyclopedia Britannica subject matter in favor for more topical themes. Songs like “Holy Smoke” and “Public Enema NumberOne” take on televangelists and urban blight, like there was some kind of shortage of metal songs tough on preachers and politicians. For this grittier subject matter Bruce Dickinson ditched his signature operatic style and affected a gravelly bark. And, for the first (and last time) he lowered himself to profanity. Vulgar subjects like shit and Cadillacs feel unseemly coming from a guy who fences in castles and pilots 747s. Still, the UK gave Iron Maiden their only number-one single for the dorky, palpably unsexy “Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter.” Despite that success, make no mistake, this record is the one that sunk Iron Maiden, and they haven’t made a great record since.

Judas Priest – Turbo

This is the one that the haters are dead wrong about. Fans cried foul that Priest “went glam,” but from this distance the nuances between leather daddy and post-apocalyptic biker are easy to miss. They’re right in that

Turbo

is a record full of party anthems, the kind of tunes you blast out the windows of your Trans Am on a summer night. Nobody ever mistook these upbeat ragers as a call to eat a shotgun. And the introduction of synths in tracks like “Out in the Cold” definitely feel like the band was giving in to the prevailing winds of the heavy metal keyboard. But “Turbo Lover,” easily the best track on the record, wouldn’t be the same without those chugging electronics. Priest, like Dio, bent that shit to their whims and made it all the better to serve the metal.

Gus Mastrapa plays videogames and writes and fathers. He's on Twitter - @triphibian