Who Decides: Worst Intro Songs

A nice quick list for everyone today. Intro songs are "songs" that really bug the heck out of me. They are usually a minute or less and lead striaght into the next song. So you have to wonder, why not just make it apart of the regular song? It is a waste of a track on the album and when you listen to your cds or ipod on random it really ruins the flow of the music. How about this; you still have to pay $1 for these songs...man, you must be a hell of a fan to want these.

6. Signs of Chaos - Testament (The Ritual): just some guitar noise that leads into probably their "poppiest" metal song ever, Electric Crown. The same notes are played during Electric Crown as in Signs of Chaos. Now don't get me wrong, Testament can play a great intro. For the Glory Of... is a solid track, yeah most of the notes are brought up in More Than Meets the Eye, but it is over a minute long and there is something going on there that isn't background noise. Signs of Chaos isn't worth a track all by itself.

5. Prologue - The Autumn Offering (Embrace the Gutter): just as bad as Signs of Chaos, same notes played in Decay, the next song. What makes this one worse? The fact they called it Prologue, like it is some important part of the album. It is 20 seconds of noise with about 10 seconds of music that could have easily been added onto Decay.

4. Intro 1 through Intro 11 - Ayreon (The Human Equation): that's right 11 intro songs that are a combined total of 53 seconds. That's not a typo either. At least there is some reason behind it. The Human Equation is a 2 disc album that is spread out over the span of 20 days, each song is a day. So Day 1 is track one and so forth, kind of cool. So when you put in the second disc, it is on day 12, but the track on the cd is #1. So what does he do? Well put in 11 intro tracks that are just mainly keyboard noise, until Intro 6 and then you get a beat. Now of course all of these intros play right into Day 12. In fact if you listened to it without looking you would be hard pressed to realize you just listened to 11 songs.

But with the advent of iTunes, you don't get the 11 intros anymore. At least they didn't try to make you pay $11 dollars for 53 seconds.

3. Demonic (Tonus Diabolus) - Deadlock (Earth.Revolt): an ochestral piece of work that is the same notes played over and over again until it leads into 10,000 Generations in Blood. Deadlock is notorious for intros, but this one is bland and unoriginal. Plus less than 15 seconds into the next song, you hear the exact same notes and instruments. At least the other two waited until about a minute into the song before you heard the intro again.

2 (TIE). Intro - Halford (Live Insurrection) & Jet - Megadeth (That One Night): a tie for these two. They are both live albums and they both have the fans cheering for the entire track. Let's look at them a bit closer. Halford's track is just the fans chanting "ole ole ole" over and over again for 15 seconds. Couldn't you edit that out or just throw it at the beginning of the next song?

As bad as that was, Megadeth's might be worse. You listen to crowd noise for about 25 seconds, that's it no chanting or anything. Then you hear a jet sound for 5 seconds. Worst part is that the jet noise is on the song Blackmail the Universe on the album. So why now did they decide to give it it's own track?

1. Unleash - My Own Grave (Unleash): possibly the worst intro song ever. Why? It's the title track of the album. Think of great title track songs, Master of Puppets, Ride the Lightning, Among the Living, Slaughter of the Soul, Number of the Beast, Painkiller, even Buried in Oblivion was great despite being totally different from the rest of the album. But this is an embarrassment.

It's just background noise and then a lion roaring and some lady screaming. Huh? That's the title track? Really?

Honorable Mention
Untitled - The Absence (Riders of the Plague): Ok this isn't an intro song, but it is the worst track ever...ever. To find my list, I put my iTunes in order of track length. This was the shortest song on there at 4 seconds. Believe it or not it is in the middle of the album. It is just silence for 4 seconds. Worse than that? It is for sale on iTunes. A 4 second song of silence...shouldn't they give it away?

Now Soulfly had a silent track, but that was in memory of 9-11. So what is the point of this? I got nothing. Riders of the Plague is a great melodic death metal album, but this is just stupid.

Now there are a ton more that just bug the crap out of me and I can't really say why I chose these 7. Just remember if it doesn't add something to the album or go over a minute it's probably a waste of a track number.