Unitron The birth of Heavy Metal. In simple terms, metal was born out of a combination of heavy blues rock and psychedelic rock. While metal has gone in several different directions, the earliest forms of metal from the 60's and 70's still live on, especially in the doom metal, grunge, and stoner scenes.

Blue Cheer might not have been the first band to make a metal song (that honor goes to either Riders of the Mark or Clear Light), but to my knowledge they were certainly the first metal band and Vincebus Eruptum the first metal album.

Vincebus Eruptum is one of the heaviest albums ever recorded, as it's dominated by such a wall of distortion that it sounds like their amps are about to blow. The recording technology at the time couldn't even pick up the pure volume. It works though, the playing is so frantic and primal that it all sounds like pure instinct.

The booming cover of Summertime Blues was their only hit, and it's good as are the other covers, but it's the original songs where this album shines. There's no better showcase on this album for heavy metal in full force than Doctor Please. The anxious vocals, booming distortion, the speed of the bridge, and the dark theme of the song all show the beginnings of the genre. Out of Focus and Second Time Around are great too, with the latter shining with wild drumming.

If there's any complaints I have, it's some of the jamming. I'm fine with jamming to an extent, but sometimes it sounds too much like noodling and gets a bit annoying. The following album Outsideinside would improve the band's sound, cutting the annoying jams and improving the production (Even though the production works for how this album sounds).

If you're used to the metal sound of the 80's and 90's or even the 70's, this might be a hard listen. It's really noisy, but every metal fan should hear this album if only to hear the genre's first real album.

Warthur Blue Cheer's debut album is one of those pieces which is more innovative than it is actually successful in its own right. With its cranked-up amps and distorted guitar, it clearly hit a new bar for heavy psych music and helped pave the way for metal to come - but as for actually being pleasant to listen to, well, that's another story. The cover of Summertime Blues it opens with is excellent, no doubt about it, but the covers of Rock Me Baby and Parchment Farm don't accomplish much beyond demonstrating that Led Zeppelin weren't the only ones plundering the blues for material.

As for the original material, that really highlights the band's shortcomings - they just weren't that good compositionally, and their improvisations get a little dull and interminable. The end result is perhaps the most important and influential two-and-a-half star album ever.

siLLy puPPy Although this is often called the first heavy metal album, this is in fact nothing more than heavy psych and blues. The reference makes more sense when it is tweaked over to the proto-metal category because this probably indeed was one of the first albums where the Marshall amps were turned up to 11. The feedback is so thick that it actually interferes with the melodic flow at times.

The album begins with a cover of Eddie Cochran's “Summertime Blues” and then quickly retreats into some serious blues and heavy psych with some feedback freakouts that leave only the excellent metal worthy drumming of Paul Waley to keep the backbone of the music going to prevent a total entry into avant-free-jazz cacophony.

This is one of those albums i've always heard about but never was interested in hearing but after finally hearing it I actually like it. I find it to be more than a museum relic and actually a decent listen. Anyone with an adversity to noise may have a hard time with this, but without a doubt this is the heaviest album i've heard from 1968.