10 Perfect Rock Albums That Critics Got Wrong

Oh, and you thought that critics would be a little harsh for prog rock for being something that they couldn't understand? Yeah, just you wait until they tried their hand at trying to decipher heavy metal. Because once the godfathers of the genre first started to make their way into existence, you would have thought they were signaling the death of rock and roll based on what the magazines were saying.

Despite having some of the building blocks for modern metal like the title song, Black Sabbath's debut was met with spite across the board from critics, including one critic who thought that everything they were doing was just a worse version of what Cream was doing just a few years prior. And it's not hard to see why he would think that at the time, with Tony Iommi's licks being definitely blues soaked at this stage.

Then again, even someone like Clapton probably couldn't have come up with the devilish tritone riff that has become synonymous with heavy metal music. In fact, you can make the case that metal got its name specifically from a disgruntled journalist, with bassist Geezer Butler saying the first time he heard the phrase was when someone compared their sound to a load of heavy metal being dropped. Funny how just a casual jab at an artist can somehow turn into their greatest strength.