10 Perfect Albums That Started Heavy Metal

Most of the bands coming out in the wake of the British Invasion seemed to be finding their feet a bit in the States. While it might have been easy to just do a carbon copy of what was happening with the Beatles and the Stones, the likes of the Stooges and MC5 had a much more raw take on the genre, culminating in what would become known as garage rock just a few decades later. This kind of music was meant to be noisy, but Blue Cheer managed to define the sounds of punk and metal in one go.

That's not to say that they were really looking to break any new ground or anything. If you listen to most of the songs on here, you can hear the influences from the likes of Cream and Led Zeppelin pretty clearly, just jamming on different blues licks and seeing where things go. What these guys were after though was volume and fury, turning their amps up as loud as they could possibly go and moving something in your gut that you never knew was there.

Even if you've heard the original version of Summertime Blues countless times, hearing their take on the song feels like a completely different experience, with the guitar having to be restrained like a wild animal before the whole thing starts to build on each other in the mid section of the song. We were already worried about different catastrophes with nuclear war, but this is the closest that rock had come to sounding like a nuclear bomb went off.