10 Albums That The Critics Got Wrong

For years, the music reviewer crowd has always had a love/hate relationship with heavy metal. Even though plenty of acts get top billing from critics for being abrasive with their presentation, the earliest metal bands were treated with either indifference or downright hatred compared to the connoisseurs of rock like....Emerson, Lake and Palmer. So imagine if you actually made a metal album that made the listener think.

Although Tool may have not had the most substantial discography, no metalhead is going to tell you that Lateralus isn't spectacular, taking psychedelic and prog rock influences and amplifying them to a thousand. It was groundbreaking, forward-looking, and absolutely loathed by Brent DiCrescenzo on Pitchfork. While it comes with the territory that the Pitchfork crowd might not love Tool, this guy treats Tool like they're the most pretentious people on Earth.

Throughout most of the review, our guy here seems to get more and more perturbed that this album...actually has something to say. If he stopped caring about the insults for one second though, he might have seen the brilliance on display, from the shifting time signatures in Schism to the cerebral headtrip going on in the Grudge. Say what you want to about Tool's complexity, but it's not their fault that you don't want to go along for the ride.