ags_rule

Iron Maiden's only No. 1 single 'Bring Your Daughter...To The Slaughter' had very low sales, I believe. Still a good achievement though, seeing as the BBC banned it. Things haven't changed much - radio still hates anything with distortion.

Yes and yes. Said it before that RATM succeeded and BITW failed because RATM was a rebellious rock song, while BITW was just annoying. Smells Like Teen Spirit is a classic rock anthem, many people including myself have fond memories of it. Would love to see it get to No. 1, would be a great way to mark Nevermind's 20th anniversary year as well, with a victory over manufactured tripe! I think it will succeed if it's support keeps growing at the current rate.

My favourites would be 'The Change', 'Lost In Paradise' and 'My Heart Is Broken'. Can definitely see all three of those having singles chart potential (although perhaps not in the UK with our terrible musical taste in the singles chart), bizarre that they chose 'What You Want' as the lead single - it's by no means bad, but very average compared to most of the album. Definitely worth it picking up the Deluxe Edition, the extra tracks are good.

Well maybe Denmark was more pop-rock than Georgia's nu-metal entry, but it still qualifies as a rock entry in my book - it did have guitars, bass and drums, with distortion :P

Really pleased for Georgia and Denmark, both finished very high up the leaderboard! Goes to show that the Lordi effect is still there, and that a quality rock song can do well in the competition.

If anything, this is proof that political voting doesn't exist to the extent some people claim. The only countries Blue is doing well in the charts are in Western Europe. As expected, Eastern Europe couldn't give a rats arse about them.

Very Good 1. Georgia 2. Moldova 3. Denmark Good 4. Estonia 5. Serbia 6. Romania Average To Poor 7. Austria 8. Hungary 9. Germany 10. Slovenia 11. Azjerbaijan 12. Ireland 13. Finland 14. United Kingdom 15. Ukraine 16. Switzerland 17. Bosnia 18. France 19. Iceland 20. Russia Diabolical 21. Italy 22. Sweden 23. Lithuania 24. Spain 25. Greece

You're all crazy, Moldova was the greatest thing ever witnessed at Eurovision! At least it was in tune, unlike Mr. Popular :P

A tenner on Moldova...what a bloody brilliant performance and a ridiculously catchy song! It has the Lordi effect and people are talking about it, so I think it's gonna get it! :D

I'm gonna make a bold prediction - Georgia for a Top 5 finish. It has power, it has a catchy chorus, it is by far the strongest rock entry. Not to mention that female-fronted rock/metal bands tend to be very popular on the rest of the continent, but for some reason they never do well in the UK. I'd been saying it would qualify all along and people poo-pood that idea, so what do y'all know anyway ;)

You do have a point there, I actually forgot that Muse were a strong singles band as well. Although the extent to which either The Killers or Coldplay are true rock bands is a debatable matter!

The simple answer to that is very easily. If a band is good enough, the rock/metal community will start talking about them. People will go to their gigs and buy their albums. They'll probably download their singles illegally or listen to them on YouTube, or increasingly the band themselves will give them out for free. Why? Because if you are a rock band, in this day and age, success in the singles chart is irrelevant to your overall success. I realise this is controversial here on Buzzjack, but it's as close to a fact as you can get. Who was the last rock band to have sustained success in the UK singles chart? Probably The Darkness, and we all know what happened to them. Conversely, look at the success bands formed in the early 00s are now having, such as Avenged Sevenfold, Bullet for My Valentine, Lamb of God, Disturbed etc. Not in the singles chart, but more in album sales and touring. Heck, this trend is even starting to be found in pop music - aside from 'The Flood', Take That's latest album has failed to meaningfully impact the singles chart. Yet it hasn't affected the performance of the album one bit. The world has moved on. The singles charts are merely one way of measuring popularity, no longer the be-all-and-end-all of it. Particularly in the UK and US over these past few years the singles chart has merely become a selection of generic club and R&B tunes, with the odd exception. Rock music may not be in vogue in the singles chart atm - in fact it may never be again - but ALL the other evidence points towards the fact that it remains strong in album sales, and particularly in touring performance. There are hundreds of thousands of people attend Download and Sonisphere in the UK each year, yet the media like to pretend they don't even exist. Rock is not a genre in decline, but a genre in transition between the old media and the new.

The reason rock isn't in the singles charts is simply because they are irrelevant to the success of the genre. Look at the most recent evidence - Foo Fighters single 'Rope' is one of their lowest charting ever. The album hits No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic (their first US No. 1) and breaks digital records in Australia and New Zealand. Iron Maiden release the lead single from their new album as a free download, making it ineligible in the charts. The album tops the charts in over 30 countries worldwide. The fact is that rock music continues to be strong in album sales and particularly in touring/live performance, where it is easily the highest earner. Success in the singles chart is in this day and age a total irrelevance for the vast majority of rock acts. And also another thing that irks me is all this talk about UK artists 'breaking' America as though it's something impossible to do. Bullet For My Valentine, a Welsh metal band, are very popular over there with their latest album hitting No. 3 on the Billboard 200. So much for a band that Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell had never heard of on X-Factor!

No. 16 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8f/BHARCOVER.jpg Artist: Muse Album: Black Holes and Revelations Released: July 2006 UK Chart Position: 1 Genre: Alternative Rock/Progressive Rock Description: When I first started this thread, one of my Top 40 albums was Muse's Origin Of Symmetry, an album which I described as their best. Yet as months passed, my mind began to change...for me, this is Muse's finest hour. The main reason is that Matt Bellamy is on fire on each and every one of these tracks, with outstanding riffs and technical virtuosity. From the tapping solo in Invincible to the spaced out riffs of Map of the Problematique, this is perhaps the one album where the guitar really takes centre-stage. Of course, you can't talk about this album without mentioning Knights Of Cydonia, almost unquestionably a 21st century rock masterpiece that straddles an invisible line somewhere inbetween Queen, Pink Floyd and Metallica. BHAR undoubtedly divided Muse fans, in a similar way to Metallica's Black album, but I sit on the side of the fence that says while it was different, it was still bloody good. It is stadium rock at it's best, and I have no doubt that decades from now, rock fans will still be discovering and rediscovering this excellent album.

No. 17 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/38/GunsnRosesUseYourIllusionII.jpg Artist: Guns N' Roses Album: Use Your Illusions II Released: 1991 UK Chart Position: 1 Genre: Hard-Rock Description: It is easy to forget just how big a band Guns N' Roses were in the early 1990s. The release of the two Illusions albums ranks up there with some of the most hyped releases of all time, with queues forming around street corners awaiting for record stores to open. On both sides of the Atlantic and in many countries around the world, the albums hit the top of the charts in positions 1 and 2 - it was UYI II that usually came out on top, thanks to the storming lead single 'You Could Be Mine', which was also featured prominently in Terminator 2. It was in many ways the end of an era from that point of view, as few albums would capture the public's imagination in such widescale fashion after it's release - and, equally importantly, it was also the last Guns N' Roses album recorded by the classic line-up of Axl, Slash, Izzy and Duff (Appetite for Destruction drummer Steven Adler had already been fired), and therefore for many fans, the swansong of classic Guns N' Roses. GNR fans remain fiercely divided even today on a 50/50 basis as to which was the better album. Generally speaking, the concensus is the UYI I is the 'harder' album, but features a great deal of filler, while UYI II is experimental and varied, with songs taking influences from blues, country, jazz, funk, and in the case of the album's utterly bizarre closing track, even hip-hop. But, for me, UYI II shows why Guns N' Roses were more than just a run-of-the-mill hard-rock band - there is real songwriting variety and talent here from all of the band's members. The blistering rock of 'You Could Be Mine' and 'Get In The Ring' showcase GNR at their vicious best, particularly Axl's verbal abuse of as many journalists as he could name in the latter song providing one of the albums most memorable, yet surreal, moments: "That means you Andy Sesher at Hit Parader, Mick Wall at Kerrang...what you pissed off because your Dad got more p*ssy than you?". Yet it is when GNR step outside their comfort zone that one really sees the songwriting talent that they had in abundance; from Izzy's Stradlin's blues ode '14 Years', to Slash's jazz influenced riffs in 'Locomotive', to the (arguably now definitive) cover of Knockin' On Heavens Door, to Axl's anti-war rallying call in 'Civil War', this album really offers something that was not found in Appetite From Destruction. We see a softer, dare I say it, emotional side to the 'most dangerous band in the world', but without sacrificing the quality songwriting that made them such a success in the first place. This is most obvious in 'Estranged', a 9 minute epic of piano, guitar and Axl's best ever vocal performance - indeed, it frequently tops GNR fan polls as their best ever song, and perhaps more than any other GNR track shows why Axl was just as indispensable to Slash, Izzy and Duff as they proved to be to him. Use Your Illusions II may not sound like 'classic' GNR all the time, yet it is indisputably one of the most varied and complex hard-rock albums ever released, with songs that appeal to a very broad spectrum of listeners.