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Robot Emperor wrote: I have "The Collector's Guide To Heavy Metal Volume 1: The Seventies" by Martin Popoff which is... eccentric, yet brilliant. The rating system ("first number is a heaviness number, second number is how good I think the album is" - so who decides how heavy the record is?) is so unapologetically subjective that it says more about the author than the record. He is often wrong (again - subjective/objective, who decides?) but suprisingly often on the money.
In its favour, never swayed by popular opinion (or the vagaries of what from the past is trendy today), and never a mention of the montary value of a record, this is all about the music.
I think Cope had a moan at this book on this site, without mentioning author or title, in regards to money wasted following the tips in a book about seventies metal. Worth getting but treat it with a pinch of salt. The same, I would suggest, would be true of the title being discussed.
As an aside, on Hawkwinds' Space Ritual (6/4 - see above rating system) he says the following "this tortuous flood of distorted chords, feedback, and exhausting synthesizer workouts, Hawkwind (create) a document akin in metal-stamping mechanics to Lou's Metal Machine Music.... It is considered one of the band's classics. This is troubling, as is the fact that the album reached no.9 on the UK charts" (he is, I think, Canadian). How I swelled with rarely felt patriotic pride at those words.
EDIT : erm, removed one of the punctuation errors I spotted.
I love this book. As the Emperor says, it's inevitably subjective, but it's pointed me in the direction of many a great album. It's Anglo-America centric, but does take the trouble to survey albums from other parts of the world - first time I heard about Flower Travellin' Band's Satori was here.
Overall, probably the best and most entertaining introduction to this period in rock history I've read.
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