10 Metal Albums With ONE Bad Song
Punishment for headbanging.
Anyone going into a metal album pretty much knows what they're getting.
While you do have the occasional band who messes with the formula, the beauty of a metal release is songs that will make you bang your head for a solid hour and leave who happily exhausted by the end. Within that hour though, things can take a few left turns that you weren't expecting.
As perfect as some of these records seem, there are always those handful of tracks that tend to screw up the rest of the songs by comparison. That shouldn't be fair though, right? After all, when you have 9 out of 10 tracks that are great, having just one clunker isn't the be all/end all for the project. And you'd be right...if you didn't take into account the flow of everything.
Since most of the albums on this list have a lot of great individual moments on them, knowing that you have to glance over songs like this completely take you out of the experience.
Thanks to these tracks, all you have to do is just sit there and patiently wait for the song to be over. You may have been cruising, but this is where each of these albums hit a collective brick wall. You'd better brace yourselves.
10. United - Judas Priest
Most of Judas Priest's catalog is the building blocks of what we consider to be metal today. Across albums like Screaming for Vengeance, this is the kind of dark hymns that made an entire generation of musicians want to blast their distorted guitars and annoy their parents to high heaven. Though there is a sort of universal appeal to a lot of their music, the Priest may have bit off a little more than they could chew on British Steel.
While it might be considered heresy to dunk one of the most celebrated albums in metal history, the single United is one of the most by the numbers tracks that the original incarnation of Priest ever made. Whereas a song about being united against any sort of injustice would be perfect for the metal community, the hook of the song is so flimsy that it starts to sound like a parody of itself halfway through.
From the looks of some of the promotional performances, it didn't look like the band themselves were all that keen on it either, including one lip synced version of the song where Rob Halford looks like he'd rather be anywhere but onstage at the moment. Even though Priest have written an entire songbook of epic tracks, this is the kind of cheesy metal that seems better suited for a kids TV show.