Another list of another great band. Blind Guardian wasn't among my favourites in my teens even if I liked plenty of their songs, in later years I however have started to appreciate them much more.

So yeah, here's the list with some top picks. I have not included the orchestra album as I really don't know how to rate it compared to their other albums. Maybe i'll add it in the future.

1.Blind Guardian - A Night At The Opera

2.Blind Guardian - Somewhere Far Beyond

3.Blind Guardian - Battalions Of Fear

4.Blind Guardian - Tales From The Twilight World

5.Blind Guardian - A Twist In The Myth

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These are MY Top 250 Albums that are featured on Metal Storm in chronological order to celebrate 50 Years of Metal.

Some bands are featured on this list with more than one album, which means that they are perticulary amazing to me.

I listen to a wide spectrum of metal genres, which is why I tried to keep it diverse and not focus on one genre.

1.Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath

2.Deep Purple - In Rock

3.Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV

4.Uriah Heep - Demons And Wizards

5.Alice Cooper - Billion Dollar Babies

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A list ranking the studio releases of Blind Guardian.

Just like I did with my list of Iced earth albums, I've added the names of the tracks that I feel are the most notable.

1.Blind Guardian - Imaginations From The Other Side

2.Blind Guardian - Nightfall In Middle-Earth

3.Blind Guardian - At The Edge Of Time

4.Blind Guardian - Somewhere Far Beyond

5.Blind Guardian - Tales From The Twilight World

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1.Overkill - Ironbound

2.Sodom - In War And Pieces

3.Helloween - 7 Sinners

4.Halford - Halford IV - Made Of Metal

5.Rob Zombie - Hellbilly Deluxe 2: Noble Jackals, Penny Dreadfuls And The Systematic Dehumanization Of Cool

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I began this decade in my final year of high school, in the early phases of my metal journey (Mastodon, Machine Head, Dream Theater, Pantera and Avenged Sevenfold were still recent discoveries). One Masters degree and one PhD later, I'm now a tax-paying Londonian, and have ploughed through what must be comfortably over 2000 new releases during the previous ten years. To commemorate the end of a turbulent decade, I've put together a list of the albums that have stuck with me throughout this decade - I wouldn't consider this to be a 'best albums' list, as there have been some truly ingenious works released in more avant-garde territories, but ultimately these are the albums that have ended up dominating my listening habits, or otherwise making a sufficient impression to make this list.

1.Sylosis - Monolith

2.Sylosis - Edge Of The Earth

3.Amorphis - Under The Red Cloud

4.Be'lakor - Of Breath And Bone

5.Cult Of Luna - Vertikal

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1.Rhapsody Of Fire - From Chaos To Eternity

2.Blind Guardian - At The Edge Of Time

3.Symphony X - Iconoclast

4.Powerwolf - The Sacrament Of Sin

5.Iced Earth - Dystopia

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1.Behemoth - The Satanist

2.Rhapsody Of Fire - From Chaos To Eternity

3.Mors Principium Est - Dawn Of The 5th Era

4.Insomnium - Shadows Of The Dying Sun

5.Wintersun - Time I

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This is a list of all the power metal albums I have listened to that are worth remembering. Like my other genre lists, this is not meant to be a definitive guide to power metal or a binding judgment on what power metal is or is not. The list exists purely for my own organizational purposes and may contain bands or albums that are not strictly True Knights of the Eternal Thundersword.

The first cluster includes my favorite albums in the genre (and a significant number of my all-time favorites); beyond that, they are listed by rating from 9/10 down to 6/10 and alphabetically within each bracket.

Last updated November 27, 2021.

1.Blind Guardian - Nightfall In Middle-Earth

2.Blind Guardian - Imaginations From The Other Side

3.Blind Guardian - Somewhere Far Beyond

4.Jag Panzer - Thane To The Throne

5.X Japan - Art Of Life

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2000-2004 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5844
2005-2009 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=5838
2015-2019 list: http://www.metalstorm.net/users/list.php?list_id=6722

I sure do love this site and it's rating system, it makes finding great music so easy and, even more importantly, when an album is overlooked for a while but starts getting a buzz a few months later, boom, there it appears in the top 20.

All that being said, I still wish there was some way to get a weighted ranking that not only takes the rating of the album into account, but also the number of votes that were cast. For example, an album with a rating of 8.8 and 1000 votes would rank higher than an album with a rating of 8.9 and 20 votes. So, I scraped all the albums on the site with at least 1 vote into a database. Then, taking a leaf out of IMDb's book, I used Bayesian estimation (like the IMDb's Top 250) to calculate a weighted rating for each album based on its Metal Storm rating and the number of votes it had received.

The formula for calculating the Top 100 Albums gives a true Bayesian estimate:
Bayes rating (BR) = ( C × m + R × N ) ÷ ( m + N ) where:
C = average expected rating given...
m = minimum number of votes
R = average rating for the album = (Metal Storm rating)
N = number of votes for the album = (votes)

The way the Bayesian estimator works is that all albums in the database are given and additional m fake votes with an average rating of C, irrespective of how many true votes it already has. Then a new weighted rating is calculated...
If the album has no true votes ( N = 0 ), then BR = ( C × m + R × 0 ) ÷ ( m + 0) = C × m ÷ m = C (the average expected rating).
If the album has a number of true votes equal to the minimum ( N = m ), then BR = ( C × m + R × m ) ÷ ( m + m ) = ( C + R ) × m ÷ 2m = ( C + R ) ÷ 2 (halfway between the two ratings).
If the album has a very large number of true votes ( N >> m ), then BR = ( C × m + R × N ) ÷ ( m + N ) ≈ R × N ÷ N = R (the Metal Storm rating).
This means that the Bayes rating will never equal the Metal Storm rating but will approach it as the true votes grow arbitrarily large.

Now that the maths bit is out of the way, here was my methodology:
Only Studio and EP album types, from the years 2010 to 2014, with at least 1 vote, were included.
The average expected rating (C) was determined by averaging all the Metal Storm ratings from 2010-2014.
The minimum number of votes (m) was determined by calculating the 75th percentile of the votes, rounded to the nearest 10.
I also decided that if an album's Bayes rating was within 0.005 of #100, it would be included too; hence the +2.

C for 2010-2014 = 7.478
m = 20

Number of albums from each year in the list:
2010 - 24
2011 - 28
2012 - 16
2013 - 22
2014 - 12

Ratings are accurate as of 30/10/2023

1.Gallowbraid - Ashen Eidolon

2.Enslaved - Axioma Ethica Odini

3.Aquilus - Griseus

4.Ne Obliviscaris - Portal Of I

5.Be'lakor - Of Breath And Bone

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I've been listening to Metal since 2005 and it has become my biggest passion in life.

Rarely a day goes by where I don't listen to it in one form or another. The bands I listened to in my teens inspired me to pick up the guitar (and later drums) and start making music of my own.

So here are the albums that have stood out and made the largest impact on me. To be as transparent as possible, I've labelled albums as 'nostalgia bias' where my memories of the album give it an advantage over others.

(Score is an average of each album's song ratings, full list located here. There are a ton of albums that I've rated 9/10 in the 'TBR' tab that may never make it to this list, be sure to check those out.)

If you discovered any new albums or like the same sort of metal, be sure to give this list a thumbs-up and leave a comment so more people can find these amazing bands!

My other lists:
Top 25 EPs (ordered & rated)
Top 200 Overlooked Albums (with genres)
Top 200 Overrated Albums (trigger warning)
So I Heard You Like Wintersun... (Time II find new bands)

Genre-Specific:
Top 50 Black Metal Albums
Top 50 Melodic Death Metal Albums
Top 45 Thrash Metal Albums
Top 40 Power Metal Albums
Top 30 Doom Metal Albums
Top 30 Heavy Metal Albums

1.Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral

2.Opeth - Blackwater Park

3.Metallica - Master Of Puppets

4.Edge Of Sanity - Crimson

5.Opeth - Still Life

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1.Skyclad - Wayward Sons Of Mother Earth

2.Running Wild - Pile Of Skulls

3.Skyclad - Jonah's Ark

4.Amorphis - Tales From The Thousand Lakes

5.Moonspell - Wolfheart

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1.Helloween - 7 Sinners

2.Soilwork - The Panic Broadcast

3.Treat - Coup De Grâce

4.Pretty Maids - Pandemonium

5.Blaze Bayley - Promise And Terror

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1.The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are You Experienced

2.Deep Purple - The Book Of Taliesyn

3.Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin

4.Deep Purple - In Rock

5.Deep Purple - Fireball

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1.Iron Maiden - Iron Maiden

2.Iron Maiden - Killers

3.Iron Maiden - The Number Of The Beast

4.Iron Maiden - Piece Of Mind

5.Iron Maiden - Powerslave

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My Favorite Albums Of The Year \m/

1.Iron Maiden - The Final Frontier

2.Star One - Victims Of The Modern Age

3.Blind Guardian - At The Edge Of Time

4.Rhapsody Of Fire - The Frozen Tears Of Angels

5.Eluveitie - Everything Remains (As It Never Was)

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