Best Year for Metal in the 80s?

[Zzzptm]

Charger asked the question about just two of the years and it got me to thinking of the other ones... the 80s were definitely some of the best years of metal, but how do they stack up against each other? Do we add points for great albums and take away for bad ones? Or just add up for the good and pretend like Europe wasn't being packaged as a metal band?

Once we can settle on some criteria, we can get to ranking the 80s... and it would give us an excuse to plow through albums we've loved over the years as well as to try out ones we may have missed out on, but others can recommend to us.

[Zzzptm]

BRB, gonna start on the listening with 1980's Heaven and Hell.

[Charger]

Pretty cool idea...we should go through year by year....starting obviously with 1980.

We could end up with the ultimate year in metal for the 80s...and honestly there are quite a few stellar years for sure.

[Zzzptm]

But there's also the question of the posers... the industry-made bands that got marketed to the metal crowd with all their hair ballads and stuff. There needs to be a way to account for those. But I wouldn't want it to detract from the good being done, so maybe come up with a measure of how many epic albums / good, but not epic / meh / this is a bad album in each year and then work with that. And there were LOTS of albums that went under the radar because they weren't all that great. We also have to look at albums we personally don't care for, but made a huge impact nonetheless.

For example, I am not a Mercyful Fate fan, but damn if that band didn't inspire a whole lot of metal acts in its wake. Gotta give props to them for that.

[Jack the Stripper]

We had a thread/polls on this.

https://www.komunumo.net/forumo/index.php?PHPSESSID=geh7b8tu7i9n8o9jinbe3nms80&topic=489.0

We got up to 1986 but I lost the heart to keep it going after Billy passed 

[Zzzptm]

Oh yeah!

Man I miss Billy.

But maybe it's time to dust these off again and keep things rolling:
1980 - https://www.komunumo.net/forumo/index.php?topic=444.0
1981 - https://www.komunumo.net/forumo/index.php?topic=448.0
1982 - https://www.komunumo.net/forumo/index.php?topic=456.0
1983 - https://www.komunumo.net/forumo/index.php?topic=465.0
1984 - https://www.komunumo.net/forumo/index.php?topic=471.0
1985 - https://www.komunumo.net/forumo/index.php?topic=478.0
1986 - https://www.komunumo.net/forumo/index.php?topic=489.0

Just need 1980, 1987, 1988, and 1989. Don't know if we need them in poll form if we want to do a year-on-year comparison that's not looking for the best of the year but is considering the year as a whole.

So JtS, where did you get your list of albums by year?

[Jack the Stripper]

Google for a lot of them outside of the obvious. I’m sure we did 1980 though and Heaven and Hell won?

[Charger]

I had forgotten that we already did something bit like this...But that had been in the early days though so that's beyond my memory capacity anyways!

So thinking about the years we did do...

1981:
Top 5 were:
Mob Rules - Black Sabbath (18.8%)
Diary Of A Madman - Ozzy Osbourne (15.6%)
Moving Pictures - Rush (10.9%)
Killers - Iron Maiden (9.4%)
Too Fast For Love - Mötley Crüe (6.3%) / Fair Warning - Van Halen (6.3%) TIED

1982:
The Number Of The Beast - Iron Maiden (16.9%) / Screaming For Vengeance - Judas Priest (16.9%) TIED
Black Metal - Venom (10.2%)
Iron Fist - Motörhead (6.8%)
Restless And Wild - Accept (5.1%) / Metal On Metal - Anvil (5.1%) / Signals - Rush (5.1%) / Death Penalty - Witchfinder General (5.1%)  4 WAY TIE
Magic - Gillan (3.4%) / Blackout - Scorpions (3.4%) TIE


1983:
Born Again - Black Sabbath (16.1%)
Piece Of Mind - Iron Maiden (11.3%) / Kill 'Em All - Metallica (11.3%) TIED
Holy Diver - Dio (9.7%)
Show No Mercy - Slayer (6.5%)
Balls To The Wall - Accept (4.8%)  / Melissa - Mercyful Fate (4.8%) TIED

1984:
Ride The Lightning - Metallica (17.6%)
Powerslave - Iron Maiden (13.7%)
Perfect Strangers - Deep Purple (11.8%)
The Last In Line - Dio (9.8%)
Morbid Tales - Celtic Frost (5.9%)

1985:
Hell Awaits - Slayer (12.5%)
Killing Is My Business... And Business Is Good - Megadeth (10.4%)
Bonded By Blood - Exodus (8.3%)
Sacred Heart - Dio (6.3%) / To Mega Therion - Celtic Frost (6.3%)
Fly On The Wall - AC/DC (4.2%) / Metal Heart - Accept (4.2%) /Done With Mirrors - Aerosmith (4.2%) / Spreading The Disease - Anthrax (4.2%) / The Return...... - Bathory (4.2%) / Feel The Fire - Overkill (4.2%) 6 WAY TIE!!

1986:
Somewhere In Time - Iron Maiden (13.8%) / Master Of Puppets - Metallica (13.8%) TIED
Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? - Megadeth (12.1%)
Reign In Blood - Slayer (8.6%) / Seventh Star - Black Sabbath Featuring Tony Iommi(8.6%) TIED
The Ultimate Sin - Ozzy Osbourne (5.2%) / Orgasmatron - Motörhead (5.2%)
Epicus Doomicus Metallicus - Candlemass (3.4%) / Turbo - Judas Priest (3.4%) /Pleasure To Kill - Kreator (3.4%) / 5150 - Van Halen (3.4%)


So what can we make out of that?
1981 only had 6 albums in top 5
1982 had 10
1983 had 7
1984 had only 5
1985 had 11
1986 had 11

So if we base things on those then 1986 and 1985 would be the top years in metal as seen by the Community....and 1984 would have been the weakest..

BUT can we just look at the sheer numbers?
1981 had the top % of 18.8 for the winner and 1982 TIED winners with 16.9%! And 1985's winner only got 12.5% !!

1981 the top 5 albums got a total of 67.3%
1982 78%
1983 64.5%
1984 58.8%
1985 69%
1986 80.9%

Total % 1986 wins again but 1982 takes the second place.
But we can turn this around saying 1984 might be the overall best year in metal as more albums got votes than any other as the top 5 only got 58.8% of the votes...

There's a lot of interesting figures here to consider...


I couldn't find 1980 so I guess that wasn't originally done by Jack... Heaven and hell and British Steel probably would have tied for the win on that one...but hard to say about the %...


YIKES!
This became a bit longer of a post than I had intented...

[Zzzptm]

Looking at it another way, if we were to pick not our favorites, but *most significant* albums, we'd have a strong consensus for the top ones there. Likewise, if we were to pick out the most commercial ones, we'd see another tale.

By "commercial", I mean ones where the industry started lashing around and signing anything that sounded metal to get the money. The poser bands, in a word.

So if we went back over the lists and picked out the ones that were our faves, significant discs, poser platters, and ones that were turning points or starting points for the genre, we could get a better picture of how that Year in Metal went.

[Jack the Stripper]

Wow that’s some good number crunching you did there Charger!

There we go. I knew we done 1980
https://www.komunumo.net/forumo/index.php?topic=444.0

[KiloDeltaCharlie]

^^^
Just reading through that thread and it's sad that a number of the guys no longer post here.

[Zzzptm]

Having the 1980 entries is great, thanks for digging those up! I'll get started on the discussion page for The Year in Metal: 1980. Once we wrap that up, we can move through the other years.

[Zzzptm]

I'd like to have a color scheme to highlight different albums, to make them easier to identify...

Not 100% Metal, but will lead to other, more metal-y things -
Hard Rockin' Metal -
Regular Metal -
Speed Metal -
Death Metal -
Pop Metal -

Any other categories?