The Batlord

Of me. Not metal. You're still a bog-jumping loser.

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Trollheart

I know. And how dare you? I've never jumped in my life!

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

RebelliousTaco

Batlord, you've opened my eyes. Ke$ha is not to be disrespected.

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I used to do drugs
I still do, but I used to too
~R.I.P. Mitch Hedberg~

The Batlord

Everyone loves Ke$ha... or else.

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The Batlord

Supergirl premieres tomorrow at 8:30, so stay tuned...

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DeadChannel

Probably gonna suck.

The Batlord

It kinda did, but I'm hopeful. It's done by the same people as Arrow, so I can't believe that it's gonna be totally awful, and pilots aren't exactly the best way to gauge a show's true quality. Either way I'm too lazy to make an entry about it.

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Chula Vista

yesistrue.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

The Batlord

The Batlord's 1st List of the Top Ten Most Badass Metal Songs of All Time

Disclaimer: When it comes to metal my word is law, so if you disagree with any of my entries then it's because you're a poseur. Anyways...

"Badass" is a nebulous term. It doesn't necessarily mean the most intense or brutal. If it did then this would be nothing but death metal and grindcore. It's more a general vibe of "**** the hell yeah!", and if that doesn't make sense to you then you can **** off. I'm too drunk to make any more sense than that.

I was going through my library looking for a definitive top ten, but that quickly went to **** as my list grew and grew and grew, so I'm going to keep my giant list of badass metal songs and just pick and choose whenever the hell I feel like making another entry in this series. Ten songs each works, as it's not too much work for one entry, and most importantly, I can only put ten Youtube videos in one post. So in no particular order...





Amon Amarth are one of the melodic death metal bands who sound the least like Iron Maiden of all of their Maiden-thieving brethren, but this song captures that dynamic, galloping metal onslaught that Harris and crew perfected all those years ago far more effectively than In Flames or Soilwork ever did.

It's also ****ing badass. It's the end of the world on a broadsword basically. Makes me wanna kill something. With a broadsword.






OMFG that riff is so insane. All I wanna do is beat up small children while listening to this song on repeat. And Danzig is just the perfect singer to back it up. White boys generally suck at the blues, but guitarist John Christ (no relation) knew just how to drag them kicking and screaming out of the Bayou and down into the darkness of hell and metal. **** the hell yeah.






This song has had me by the nuts for months. It's so simple, yet so amazing. It combines primitive death metal fury with Asphyx's knack for absolutely crushing heaviness into a song that destroys everything in its ****ing path. And that breakdown around 2:15, right after vocalist Martin van Drunen barks the command "On your knees!", is one of the most badass things to ever happen to humankind.






It's a shame that Diamond Head's most badass song was made even more ****ing badass by another band, or else they might be sitting here instead, but Metallica did, so Diamond Head are not.

That riff is one of the most monstrous things ever spewed forth from metal, and it's made even more amazing by that crunchy, lo-fi, early Metallica production, and James Hetfield's roar improves upon the vocal delivery of the original in ever way that matters to sheer badassery.

I could drown babies to this song.






Riffs are everything that is good in life, and this song has one that obliterates. The energy, the brutality, the manic insanity (literally, cause that dude is clinically insane!) of Jaz Coleman's vocals all combine to make a badass metal song of epic proportions that has no business being made by a post-punk band. ****ing epic.






Being quite possibly my favorite metal band of all time, Bathory are going to feature in this series a lot. So let's start with a song that is right in the middle of their black metal and Viking metal phases, and also a song so badass that the English wet themselves at the very thought of it.

A riff from hell, mid-paced chuggery, and epic Viking-tasticness make The Batlord a happy Batlord, so it's no wonder that he considers this such a ****ing badass ****ing song. It just destroys in every possible way that a thing can be destroyed.






As I did Ke$ha, I brought Arkangel to MB, and for much the same reason: Satan fears their badassness. Picking the most badass Arkangel song is like picking your most badass kid. Except I like Arkangel.

Slayer leads combine with 90s hardcore breakdowns to pummel all but the most badass of metalheads into a fine paste, and that guitar feedback intro, which drops without warning into a pure metalcore hatefest, is a stroke of genius.






I could give a **** whether or not Magrudergrind are technically a metal band, cause this is sludge metal by any other name, and it is ****ing badass as all ****. The riff is monumental, the production gloriously fugly, and... that dude's vocals are just so hateful that I want to homo marry him. The only people who can't dig this song are bitches and Canadians.






I'm not always the biggest Pantera fan, but when they hit, they hit hard as a mother****er, and by their very nature, they hit badass pay dirt. They'll feature disproportionately in this section for that very reason, so I'm just going to pick what I consider to be their most brutal song for their first entry. This song is heavier than your mother's ass. Straight up.






This song is bad-to-the-****ing-ass. It's the death metal equivalent of a ballad (i.e. mid-paced, sludgy, and menacing), and it's the most evil-sounding thing the band ever did. The original is awesome, but just like every song off of the Covenant album, its production was kind of lightweight, but the Laibach remix makes everything even muddier and more ****ed up sounding. That's all the remix did, but that's all that I wanted in the first place, so thank you, Laibach, for doing your job correctly.

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The Batlord

Machine Head's first album might have been kind of samey, but song-for-song it's one of the most badass albums ever recorded, and "Davidian" is the most badass song on it. Just crushing, with a riff to die for, and vocals to punch Barrack Obama in the face to. And the last minute or so of that one riff repeated over and over and over again is just brutal to the max. ****ing insane.





On their Blind album COC took Metallica's Black Album sound and made it not suck. I guess you'd call it post-thrash, but I just call it badass. "Vote with a Bullet" was one of, if not the only track with Pepper Keenan on vocals (I'm too new to COC to know), and as such it is the best of the bunch -- since Pepper Keenan is a true Metal God on the mic -- and crushes in much the same way as Machine Head. If you can't mosh to this track then your are a pussy.






HoF's Death Is This Communion was their first album I ever heard, and this being the opening track, "Fury Whip" was also my introduction to the band. It's definitely not the only song on this album that will be featured in this series, but it's the one that still resonates with me the most (only just). It's a crushing combo of stoner, doom, and post-thrash that beats your head into the dust in the most painful possible way. **** you and **** yeah!






Slaughter of the Soul is one of my fav metal albums of all time, but it's kind of a downer, so many songs that are truly badass are just a tad too nihilistic to really make the cut (which isn't a knock against them at all). "Suicide Nation" isn't quite my fav from the album, but it is the one track that I would say is elevated to pure badass status. That riff and the gun slide being wracked at the beginning are pure awesomeness embodied. More evidence that melodic death metal can be badass too.






TBH this song is almost too tongue-in-cheek and silly to qualify for true badass status, but its badass pedigree overcomes any possible asterisk. As always, this song has a monumental riff, and the lyrics about Christian armies crushing "heretics" (a thinly-veiled metaphor for doom metal legions obliterating all non-doom poseurs) are hilariously badass. A weird band, but truly badass when they can be bothered to dispense with depressing droning.






I wouldn't necessarily call this band underrated, as they have the one thing they do and not much else, but when it comes to truly brutal death metal that is also totally catchy, they stand toe-to-toe with Cannibal Corpse (while also being just as gloriously one-dimensional). I've only really checked out the one album -- Rise to Dominate -- but this song is the most brutal and badass of the lot, with the possible exception of "Helel Ben-Shachar", "Caressed By the Holy Man", and... other songs (might include at least one of them in later entries, cause they ****ing rule!).

Aeon are not a band to convert a non-death metal fan, but if you dig your DM brutal and fun and Satanic, then listening to one album of theirs is a must. And this song in particular will blow your socks off into the realms of Hades and beyond.






Goatsnake has many badass songs, ranging from stoner to stoner doom to pure doom, but this song in particular is the epitome of badass. It's absolutely heavy as **** stoner metal -- with a more-than-proper amount of mind-altering distortion -- while also being catchier than a slow, fly ball in baseball... but infinitely less boring. One of the hallmarks of a great song is that when it's short you feel satisfied with it's awesomeness, while being equally dissatisfied with its length. The great thing about stoner is that the songs are often simple and repetitive enough that repeated plays are just an exercise in getting exactly what you want without having to wait for the "good parts", since the whole thing is what you want all the time (just listened to this song four times in a row while doing this entry, and I'm just as happy as the first time it played).

Props for the Molly Hatchet-ish, Southern rock vocals which are just as badass as they are melodic.






Danzig are one of those bands that are going to feature more than once, so here's another track. Their first album (from which I took "Twist of Cain") was as much of a rock album as a metal one, but by their third album (which this song is from) they were very much a metal band, but unique in their influences and final sound. They were uncategorizable in much the same way that High on Fire are, with blues rock, doom, trad metal, and goth rock combining to somehow form a sound that encapsulated everything that was metal, while also sounding like no other metal band on Earth.

This song is one of the best from Danzig III: How the Gods Kill, and it is also arguably the most straight up badass (though other songs from that record will also feature later on). As always, John Christ delivers metallic blues riffs that are evil to the core, brutal yet catchy, and as badass as Hitler's German pinschers.






Much of early nineties thrash was just a tad too complex for its own good (due in no small part to the influence of Metallica's ...And Justice for All) and Devastation's final album fell prey to this to an extent, but the title track is just too heavy to deny. The whole song ****ing rules, but the bridge (or whatever), chorus, and riffs immediately after are just immense, and prove that badass can transcend wannabe-complexity-for-the-sake-of-complexity.






I don't have to explain what this song sounds like. You've either already heard it, or you are a poseur who likely has no interest in one of my journals and is therefore not even reading this (good!).

This song proved that falsetto vocals could be immensely badass ("Freewheel Burning" did to an extent, but "Painkiller" showed that song to be merely a taste of what was to come); the guitar work isn't quite thrash, while also putting 99% of thrash guitar to shame; and whoever the new drummer is is just a monster, bringing the band to previously unattainable levels of sheer badassery.

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