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Greatest Album Openers


RelentlessOblivion

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I should thank Count Requiem for this since his best closers thread gave me the idea. So what do we think are the best opening tracks in music? Not just metal but in anything you like listening to.

 

Here are some of my favourites:

Death - Scavenger of Human Sorrow - The Sound of Perseverance

Megadeth - Holy Wars...the Punishment Due - Rust In Peace

Judas Priest - Exciter - Stained Class

Iron Maiden - Moonchild - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son

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These threads are cool:

Blind Guardian - Sacred Worlds - At The Edge of Time

This is one of the most perfect examples of orchestral integration with metal music ever for me.  It builds so well, is just so well arranged all round and feels a complete track as it fades out the guitars to allow the orchestral elements to close the track.  The chorus is complete chest-beating, anthemic majesty and yet never once feels wanky!

Judas Priest - Painkiller - Painkiller

I mean, come on?  This sets the tone for the entire album perfectly.  Driven intensity from the word go as Scott bashes the living bejesus out of his drum kit before KK and Glenn get let loose with those fucking duelling guitars!

Pantera - Cowboys from Hell - Cowboys from Hell

I still lose my shit to this, years after first hearing it.  Whilst the rest of the album hasn't quite stood the test of time so well, the opening track makes for a nostalgia driven piece of brilliance for me.

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Got a few -

Aces High- Powerslave, Iron Maiden

As Daylight Dies - ADD, Killswitch Engage

Battery - Master of Puppets, Metallica

Angel of Death - Reign in Blood, Slayer

Dead & Bloated - Core, Stone Temple Pilots

And one of my all time favorites-

Shine On You Crazy Diamond - Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd


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I don't know if Painkiller counts as much as an opener of an album as a closer of a genre. I'm sorry to say that I just don't see how it's even possible to carry "traditional heavy metal" beyond that declaration of ultimate mastery. It's the reference song. That which you might suggest that people who have never heard about metal before should perhaps start with. Seriously. If Painkiller appeals to you, you belong in metal. If not, not. Nothing personal. That's just how the genre rolls.

That being said, I like the opening of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Whatever lies beyond that may be "something" but it's not for me. This is when I say enough is enough. This is as good as it will ever get,

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Finally getting around to posting some tracks that didn't just open their albums, it opened my world. I'm also not listing intros and non-lyrics songs. Proper opening tracks only. And all that...

Megadeth - 'Holy Wars... the Punishment Due' from 'Rust in Peace'

Obvious perhaps, but it just has to be listed. A lot of great memories with this one and it perks me up when I feeling flaccid. 

Blind Guardian - 'Sacred Worlds' from 'At the Edge of Time'

I agree with everything that @MacabreEternal said. This is my favourite opener in power/adventure metal, with the huge orchestra, choruses and amazing everything. Like stepping into another world. 

Burzum - 'Dunkelheit' from 'Filosofem'

And @Balor also has the right idea. 

Amorphis - 'Better Unborn' from 'Elegy'

This is one of the all time great songs and a beautiful epic start to the best Amorphis album. 

Paradise Lost - 'Enchantment' from 'Draconian Times'

From those initial piano notes the grand ending, this is a gothic metal classic. 

My Dying Bride - 'The Cry of Mankind' from 'The Angel and the Dark River'

Speaking of gothic metal classics, this gothic/doom capital e Epic was a life-changer.

Rapture - 'Misery 24/7' from 'Silent Stage

Anyone into 'Brave Murder Day' with a bit more pep needs to hear this anthem immediately. 

Saturnus - 'Starres' from 'For the Loveless Lonely Nights'

A fabulous doom classic to start their best release. 

Satyricon - 'Hvite Krists Dod' from 'The Shadowthrone'

Possibly the greatest song in black metal, this is next level. 

Funeral - 'This Barren Skin' from 'From these Wounds'

I'm listing lots of doomy stuff here, but it's so good. This song is an amazing opener for the album. 

 

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Even though Deicide's Once Upon The Cross hasn't gotten much play around the Alabaster household for years, the opener and title track is still one of their most iconic and satisfying listens. Pummeling headbanging fury with Glen Benton's classic roar in top form. This song helped to show 16-year-old me what death metal was all about.

 

Speaking of what death metal is all about, Suffocation's "Pierced From Within" (again the title track as well as the opener) completely crushes. This song is one of my favorite DM songs ever. Dynamic, technical, bludgeoning: it has all of the things. Rip faces, crush skulls.

 

Since we're going with first proper tracks, excluding intros, My Dying Bride's "Sear Me" (from As The Flower Withers) sums up a lot of what I love about them - sullen doom, brooding atmosphere, guitar lines intertwining in lilting melancholy, how about them violins though, and Aaron's unmistakable vocal attack. He sounds so good, I don't care how badly he butchers that Latin.

 

"Schatten Aus Der Alexander Welt", from Bethlehem's Dictius Te Necare, is a stark and vicious statement that lets you know exactly what you're in for if you choose to listen to the rest of the album. The combination of moody gloom and simmering anger that characterized their first album is taken over the top by Rainer Landfermann's extreme vocal assault.

 

Well before I came around to Opeth's Ghost Reveries taken as a whole, "Ghost Of Perdition" spoke my name. The lightest acoustic passages and ethereal vocals blend gracefully into complicated, angular aggression through intuitive leaps that most bands couldn't hope to pull off. Let's hear it for Opeth... gosh I miss them.

 

"I Troldskog Faren Vild", the opener of Ulver's Bergtatt, is a beautiful song in its own right - a seven minute and fifty second folk-metal canter through some wooded, hilly region somewhere in - almost definitely - the far North, with one of Garm's most memorable melodies delivered in a youthful version of the chanting vocal style he'd develop to such great effect on later albums. It's also an act of misdirection, before the second track slaps you in the face with blastbeats and caustic screams. Breathe in that mountain air.

 

That'll do for now, I guess.

13 hours ago, Requiem said:

Finally getting around to posting some tracks that didn't just open their albums, it opened my world. I'm also not listing intros and non-lyrics songs. Proper opening tracks only. And all that...

Megadeth - 'Holy Wars... the Punishment Due' from 'Rust in Peace'

Obvious perhaps, but it just has to be listed. A lot of great memories with this one and it perks me up when I feeling flaccid. 

Blind Guardian - 'Sacred Worlds' from 'At the Edge of Time'

I agree with everything that @MacabreEternal said. This is my favourite opener in power/adventure metal, with the huge orchestra, choruses and amazing everything. Like stepping into another world. 

Burzum - 'Dunkelheit' from 'Filosofem'

And @Balor also has the right idea. 

Amorphis - 'Better Unborn' from 'Elegy'

This is one of the all time great songs and a beautiful epic start to the best Amorphis album. 

Paradise Lost - 'Enchantment' from 'Draconian Times'

From those initial piano notes the grand ending, this is a gothic metal classic. 

My Dying Bride - 'The Cry of Mankind' from 'The Angel and the Dark River'

Speaking of gothic metal classics, this gothic/doom capital e Epic was a life-changer.

Rapture - 'Misery 24/7' from 'Silent Stage

Anyone into 'Brave Murder Day' with a bit more pep needs to hear this anthem immediately. 

Saturnus - 'Starres' from 'For the Loveless Lonely Nights'

A fabulous doom classic to start their best release. 

Satyricon - 'Hvite Krists Dod' from 'The Shadowthrone'

Possibly the greatest song in black metal, this is next level. 

Funeral - 'This Barren Skin' from 'From these Wounds'

I'm listing lots of doomy stuff here, but it's so good. This song is an amazing opener for the album. 

 

Big ups for Better Unborn, Cry Of Mankind, and Hvite Krists Dod, favorites all.

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Yeah Opeth ... hehe ... that was an impressive opening, the first time ever I heard that band ... which was "My Arms Your Hearse" with the pling plong piano ambient thing at first, and then KABOOM. I remember thinking "god damn, they mean business". Which of course they always did. Still do, I suppose, but I don't like their new stuff.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

What you think is great in metal is probably a function of how you got to the table in the first place. For me, personally, being now 56 years old, I don't have to "look back" because I can remember when there was no metal. Not in the same way. There was hard rock, heavy rock, whatever. The word "metal" was only used to describe a certain guitar sound. The screechy fuzz thing. Honest to God, that's what it was like in the mid 70s, when I came of age. In 1975, we thought Kiss was pretty "metal". They kind of collapsed a couple of years later though ... imagine if Slipknot had started playing "electronic beat music" a couple of years in, and you will kind of get the "oh no" feeling that we had at the time. 

I say all this to defend why I think that the song I'm about to link was a major great album opener upon its release. That boy still had something special going on with his guitar work ... even though they had seemed less than interesting on their previous two or three releases (I'm not a VH historian). Because at the time, this was pretty impressive ... and if a good opener is intended to be the best selling point of an album, right next to the cover art (and its attention trapping value), then this one is genius:

People some times look at me in disbelief when I cite Fair Warning as one of the great albums from the good old days, and I do mean specifically the times when also Iron Maiden released Killers ... which seemed about as awesome as it could get right there and then (needless to say, it has also a killer opening). For resons unrelated to any of the albums themselves, they kind of sit right next to eachother in terms of how I define my musical tastes.

Produced by Ted Templeman who also produced the legendary album Montrose in 1973, this album has a "funky" feel to it, like it's meant to be "danceable" ... which isn't a quality that's held in high regard within metal proper. From a production perspective, it wouldn't take much tweaking and trickery to turn Fair Warning into an outright disco album. (It was also the year before Eddie Van Halen for some obscure reason decided to get associated with Michael Jackson. Not a great idea.) We have to keep in mind that "heavy metal" in 1981 was not the same thing as "heavy metal" is today. Not by a 40 year long shot. 

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  • 1 month later...
  • 4 months later...
  • 1 month later...

Mercyful Fate - Don't Break the Oath - "A Dangerous Meeting" 

The first 45 seconds or so...fucking sick. Kind of surprised no one's mentioned it yet.

Mayhem - Deathcrush - "Silvester Anfang"

Even more surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet. One of the most infamous and recognizable intos in black metal.

Oh you know what? To add to that -

Queensryche - Queensryche - "Queen of the Reich"

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

This is a nice question. 

One great opening  song is davidian by machine head. For me it's there best track. It's heavy, got an interesting story behind it with the davidian cult standoff, and very interesting drum beat by chris kantos and great chorus.   Even better live. I would love to see machine head play it live but I saw think it was once human play it live with old machine head member Logan  at the forum london. Great night with fear factory headlining 

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  • 1 year later...
On 3/22/2019 at 12:56 PM, MacabreEternal said:

These threads are cool:

Blind Guardian - Sacred Worlds - At The Edge of Time

This is one of the most perfect examples of orchestral integration with metal music ever for me.  It builds so well, is just so well arranged all round and feels a complete track as it fades out the guitars to allow the orchestral elements to close the track.  The chorus is complete chest-beating, anthemic majesty and yet never once feels wanky!

Judas Priest - Painkiller - Painkiller

I mean, come on?  This sets the tone for the entire album perfectly.  Driven intensity from the word go as Scott bashes the living bejesus out of his drum kit before KK and Glenn get let loose with those fucking duelling guitars!

Pantera - Cowboys from Hell - Cowboys from Hell

I still lose my shit to this, years after first hearing it.  Whilst the rest of the album hasn't quite stood the test of time so well, the opening track makes for a nostalgia driven piece of brilliance for me.

macabre sir. i largely agree with your comments re cowboys from hell but what about cemetery gates track. i think thats pretty killer track. 🤘

 

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Greatest opening tracks, good idea for a thread. I don't tend to to think of black and death metal albums broken down into the individual tracks the way I used to in the 70's, 80's and 90's. I think of these albums as whole units since I rarely skip tracks the way I did back in the day and I don't sit and inspect the album covers while the album's playing like I used to back then either so I don't even know the names of most of the individual songs even from my favorite albums anymore. People give me shit for not caring about the lyrics in extreme metal, little do they know I don't even care about the individual song titles. So most of these songs I'm listing will be older stuff from the 70's, 80's and 90's. I'm taking Greatest to mean albums where the first track is a real banger but not just a really good song, it also has to be the standout as clearly or at least arguably the best song on the album. I'm ignoring intros in some cases and using the first actual song on the album as the opener.

During my teenage years my favorite album opener hands down was Hole in the Sky, my favorite Sabbath song on my favorite Sabbath album.  Later on there were others:

Bounty Hunter from the Molly Hatchet debut

I Just Want to Have Something to Do from Ramones' Road to Ruin 

Ace of Spades from the Motörhead album of the same title

Put Your Love In Me from Plasmatics' Coup D' Etat 

Neon Knights from Sabbath's Heaven & Hell

Fast as a Shark off Accept's Restless & Wild

Hard Lovin' Man off Riot's Restless Breed

Evil from Fate's Melissa

Solitude on the Candlemass debut

Headbanging Man from Gravedigger's Heavy Metal Breakdown

Into the Crypts of Rays from Celtic Frost's Morbid Tales

The Usurper off To Mega Therion

Black Planet off the Sisters of Mercy debut, First and Last and Always

Deaf Forever off Motörhead's Orgasmatron

Limpwristed off GBH's Midnight Madness and Beyond...

Angel of Death off Reign in Blood

Deny the Cross off Overkill's Taking Over

Die By My Hand off Coroner's No More Color

Don't Dog Me off the Raging Slab S/T debut

Motor off the Circus of Power S/T debut

Override of the Overture off Like An Everflowing Stream

Coma off Overkill's Horrorscope

Electric Crown off Testament's The Ritual

Cold Feelings off Social DIstortion's Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell

Awakening off Necrophobic's The Nocturnal Silence

Refuse-Resist off Sepultura's Chaos AD

Apocalypse off Hypocrisy's The Fourth Dimension

Gardenia off Kyuss' Welcome to Sky Valley

Necroshine off Overkill's album of the same name

Melt off Monster Magnet's God Says No

Beyond the Green Hills off Morrigan's Enter the Sea of Flames

The Hills Have Eyes off Dozer's Call It Conspiracy

Stonebreaker off COC's In the Arms of God

Teutates Warcult from Morrigan's The Damned

Under the Stench from Coffins' Buried Death

 

 

 

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11 hours ago, MacabreEternal said:

This is a thread about album openers.  Why would I comment on a track 7 or 8 tracks in?

good point macabre.😁👏 i mention this track as your comment gave me the impression this was only track thats still amazing while the rest are a bit dated. i was just standing up for the cemetery gates track thats all. 

 

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31 minutes ago, blaaacdoommmmfan said:

good point macabre.😁👏 i mention this track as your comment gave me the impression this was only track thats still amazing while the rest are a bit dated. i was just standing up for the cemetery gates track thats all. 

 

No worries. Apologies my reply seemed quite grumpy in the cold light of day.  No offense intended.

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BLACK FLAG - My War..... "My War"

BAD BRAINS - Quickness..... "Soulcraft"

KRAFTWERK - Autobahn...... "Autobahn"

JOY DIVISION - Unknown Pleasures..... "Disorder"

MEGADETH - Rust In Peace..... "Holy Wars"

HUSKER DU - New Day Rising..... "New Day Rising"

MILES DAVIS - Tribute To Jack Johnson.... "Right Off"

STORMCROW - Enslaved In Darkness.... "Enslaved In Darkness"

FRANK BLACK - Frank Black..... "Los Angeles"

G.I.S.M. - Detestation..... "Endless Blockades For The Pussyfooter"

 

 

....if I had to choose just one....I'd have to go with "Disorder".....that whole record is so influential and memorable for me and any time I hear that song I'll stop dead in my tracks until the final cymbal crash.....it's also the first song I ever learned on bass....

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2 hours ago, MacabreEternal said:

No worries. Apologies my reply seemed quite grumpy in the cold light of day.  No offense intended.

👍 macabre eternal i appreciate the comments as you came across a bit grumpy but id say it was both our faults, probably makes no sense this comment but its my opinion 😀.

also your a top moderator imo, no comments needed as im going way off course⛴️🛥️in the greatest album  opener thread. 😂

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