1980 Hard rock/metal awards

I have spent some time listening to albums from 1985 in preparation for compiling my top ten metal albums for that year. In doing so, I decided to go back a little further and document my top tens for the beginning of that decade. So I will start with 1980 and there will be four categories, two are favorable and two are not. The main one is the top ten albums ranked in order then the other good list is the top five album covers. On the downside will be the worst album cover and the golden turd award. The latter will be given to an album that obviously is bad, but a bit of a disappointment in some ways as well. So more than likely the winner of this award will either be a band I liked at some other time or a band that had a lot of hype around them, but failed to live up to it. The only rules are live albums and ep's cannot be considered for the top ten or the golden turd, but they can be considered for top or worst album cover.

Here are the awards for 1980.

Top ten albums
1)Rush-Permanent Waves
This was a tight pick over Ozzy, but I think everything falls into place on this one.
2)Ozzy- Blizzard of Ozz
Just gets edged out for the top spot.
3)Motorhead-Ace of spades
Motorhead were perhaps getting to their peak at this point.
4)Judas Priest-British Steel
Takes the sound that started on Hell bent for leather one step further.
5)Black Sabbath- Heaven and hell
Sabbath's best album in five years.
6)Scorpions-Animal Magnetism
Another solid album for the Scorps and sometimes very underrated.
7)Iron Maiden
A strong debut that showed a little of what was to come.
8) Van Halen- Women and children first
It's DLR era Van Halen so it has to be good, but too many filler songs keeps it out of the top five.
9)Saxon-Wheels of steel
A good, basic straight to the point heavy rock/metal album.
10)Ted Nugent- Scream Dream
The last really good Nuge album for quite some time.

Best album covers
1)Black Sabbath-Heaven and hell
2)Motorhead- Ace of spades
3)Iron Maiden
4)Rush-Permanent Waves
5)Def Leppard-On through the night

Worst album cover
1)AC/DC- Back in black

Golden turd award-
Kiss- Unmasked
Maybe it should have been called Unflushed. Just a weak blending of several bad styles of music. Sadly enough I think Kiss have at least two albums worse than this one.