zadsterboombox wrote:
metalhead wrote:
zadsterboombox wrote:
metalhead wrote:
maiden are the best heavy metal band ever, imo...
although priest are cool aswell-but i hate it when they say they created metal when it was sabbath.
Priest were the first band to call themselves metal, Iommi always called the Sabs 'heavy jazz'.
yes, but imo sabbath still created the genre.
LED ZEP!!!!!!
:!:
The only thing Sabbath had was the down-tuning induced heaviness. Zep had the speed, the range (of dynamics, tempos, and influences), the will to experiment, and the mythology and the otherwordly stuff that would often pop up in their lyrics. Sabbath may have been more specialized in the slow, heavy crunch that would later characterize Doom, as well as exert a considerable influence on the Nu-Metal movement (along with Metallica and others, notably Faith No More), but it was Zeppelin (as well as more experimentally inclined groups like King Crimson) that had the blueprint for so much of what metal would become, and their influence was much broader than Sabbath's. For all their range, though, Zep could still dish out some heavy numbers. Moby Dick and Heartbreaker (both from the second album) featured some quality heavy riffage. And they did it all a full year before Sabbath, releasing two albums before the boys from Birmingham had even made their debut.
I could also offer up that Zep were the superior musicans and songwriters, but I suppose that's beside the immediate point.
And honestly, early Priest isn't much more "metal" and certainly not significantly more threatening, intense, or extreme than either Sabbath or Zep's efforts until that point. So for them or anyone else to attempt to claim that they had equal or more part in creating the genre than either of the aforementioned two groups would be insane. They took a stab at moving it along when the supporters of the genre were still scarce, but they didn't lay the seed.
As for the topic at hand, I went with Maiden. Not only were they more consistent, but their best is better than Priest's, just as their worst was also superior to Priest's equivelant.