Unfortunately, for some reason Rage is a band that's pretty difficult to be impressed by after only glancing at a few mp3s. I'll repeat the quote that Raggi posted from Erik Ravn (yeah, I really love this quote): "I love RAGE, it’s one of my favorite bands, but they’re only getting better and better every fucking record, you know?.....It’s hard to talk to people about RAGE, it’s hard to explain what the fascination is. What do they do? They play heavy metal. It’s hard to explain that they do it better than everybody else. They make one great song after another, without any gimmicks."
So in these days of a million metal releases per month, mp3s everywhere, and the rapid rate at which people "consume" albums, I can't really fault people for not going through the time and effort required to comprehend the genius of Rage.
It's only after listening to several of their albums over a period of time that you realize "oh my god, this band is just better than everybody else, and they NEVER do anything that sucks!"
For proof of that, look at the thread "Rank the PP4 Bands". Rage is either ranked right at the bottom, or in the number one spot. They're never in the middle. That tells me that most people ranking them at the bottom just don't know enough about them, but once people "discover" them, they move straight to the top of the list.
If I didn't know about Rage, and heard a bunch of people talking about their 20 year career, I'd think "oh, great, a bunch of washed up old-timers living off nostalgia from the '80s". But amazingly, that's not the case with Rage at all; they're the only band I can think of who have had a career that long and NEVER had "down" period, and that makes them all the more incredible. Can you think of any other bands that released one of their best albums 14 albums into their career? And it's not like they had 13 crappy ones before that either.
As far as recommending best albums, that's pretty difficult, since they're basically all really good, and it just depends what style you like the most (as they've moved quite naturally through a variety of styles). My personal favorites would be The Missing Link, Black in Mind, Welcome to the Other Side, Trapped!, Perfect Man, Secrets in a Weird World....ok, I'll stop there before I name them all. In general, I'd say that Unity, Black in Mind, and The Missing Link would all be good places to start, and XIII or Ghosts if you want to hear their orchestral stuff.
Neil
