Favorite Album Openers

The list of great album openers is really long and even more subjective. Many bands have had many great album openers, but I've tried my best to make sure that only one track per band makes an appearance here. Quite an incredible task when you think about it. Now there are a few obvious ones I avoided such as Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love and Motorhead's Ace of Spades. It seems I like those songs less the more I hear them. Of course, there are many other openers that will be left off because there are just too many to list. But I'll do my best to make sure I list all my favorites...

• Welcome to the Jungle (Appetite for Destruction) / Guns N' Roses
• Battery (Master of Puppets) / Metallica - Blackened would have been a good choice, too. I happen to think that the album Master of Puppets is a bit overrated and that ...And Justice for All is actually Metallica's best release. But Master of Puppets has the better opener, I believe. 
• War Pigs/Luke's Wall (Paranoid) / Black Sabbath
• Mouth for War (Vulgar Display of Power) / Pantera - Toss-up between this and Cowboys from Hell.
• Overkill (from Overkill) / Motorhead
• Holy Wars...The Punishment Due (Rust in Peace) / Megadeth - Rust in Peace is not my favorite Megadeth album. (Countdown to Extinction is... Yeah, I'm sooo helplessly mainstream.) I do think RIP has four or five good songs and the rest is kind of forgettable, but the first song in an absolute beast. 
• For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) (For Those About to Rock We Salute You) / AC/DC
• Among the Living (Among the Living) / Anthrax
• Angel of Death (Reign in Blood) / Slayer
• Why Don'tcha (Why Don'tcha) / West, Bruce, & Laing
• Burn (Burn) / Deep Purple - Highway Star would have made for another great choice, but I honestly think Burn is the better song. 
• Achilles Last Stand (Presence) / Led Zeppelin
• Aces High (Powerslave) / Iron Maiden 
• We Rock (The Last in Line) / Dio
• Painkiller (Painkiller) / Judas Priest
• Refuse/Resist (Chaos A.D.) / Sepultura - Easily the most angry song on this list. 
• Black Metal (Black Metal) / Venom
• I Don't Know (Blizzard of Ozz) / Ozzy Osbourne
• Evil (Melissa) / Mercyful Fate
• Don't Look Around (Nantucket Sleighride) / Mountain
• Man on the Silver Mountain (Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow) / Rainbow
• Ghost of Perdition (Ghost Reveries) / Opeth - Acoustic sections, death metal growls, alternate guitar tunings, complicated arrangements, and a singer who can actually sing when he is not growling. What more could you want from a progressive death metal band?
• Twilight of the Thunder God (Twilight of the Thunder God) / Amon Amarth - It was either this or War of the Gods.
• Peaches en Regalia (Hot Rats) / Frank Zappa - Narrowing it down to one Frank Zappa tune was tough. Just look at how many albums (posthumous or not) he has in his catalog. 
• School's Out (School's Out) / Alice Cooper
• Runnin' with the Devil (Van Halen) / Van Halen
• Unsuccessfully Coping with the Natural Beauty of Infidelity (Slow, Deep and Hard) / Type O Negative - Twelve and a half minutes of anger and borderline misogyny with a wicked, but catchy chorus. 
• 2112 (2112) / RUSH - Twenty minutes of joyness. 
• Through the Fire and Flames (Inhuman Rampage) / Dragonforce - I hate Dragonforce. Well, maybe "hate" is to strong of a term. Let's just say that I think all of their songs sound the same and their "Dio meets Bon Jovi meets Nintendo" power metal shtick gets really old quick. But they do have one really good song and that is this one.