Album Reviews

[binnie]

Cheers, guys.

I think alongside Megadeth Ozzy is the 'most reviewed' artist in this thread. Weird, because it was never intended that way.

[binnie]

Stlll Zakk's best work to this day.

In terms of guitar playing or the overall quality of the album? He probably solidified his sound on 'No More Tears', but I think the overall quality of material on that record is poor (especially in the secon half).

I'm not really qualified to split hairs on the guitar playing side of things, but in terms of 'best Zakk Wylde album' I'd opt for the first Black Label Society record 'Sonic Brew' (which I'll be reviewing soon, so I won't say much more). 'Pride & Glory' had some decent stuff on it (seem to remember that there is a monster guitar solo on the end of one tune, the name of which escapes me) but Zakk's voice wasn't quite strong enough to carry those Southern Rock tunes off. Shame (although I still enjoy it).

[fourthcoming]

I honestly am not afmiliar enough with too many Black Label tunes...but for me anyway, I enjoy Zakk's playing on no Rest more than anything else I've ever heard from him.

[fourthcoming]

Im not FAMILIAR either....dyslexic moment.

[katina]

Don´t worry, I didn´t notice and I also make similar mistakes

[DLR Bridge]

I always thought NRFTW had guest undercover backing vocals by Mike A. Anyone? Anyone?

[binnie]

Is that true?

[katina]

I think Flo and Eddie from Frank Zappa´s from the Mothers of Invention did the backing vocals, but someone called Michael Sadler also.
Could be this Michael ?? , not Mike. A.

[katina]

I found this and I copied it, from an interview to Michael Sadler from SAGA
If someone wants I will post the link.

Michael: "I have always enjoyed singing on other things. They give me a chance to sing differently than I normally would. Here’s something left-field for you: I did all the backing vocals for Ozzy Osbourne’s No Rest For The Wicked."

CRR: Really? Wow. Why did he choose you?

Michael: "What happened was we were in the studio in LA next to the studio Keith Olsen was using (Olsen and Roy Thomas Baker co-produced Wicked). They were recording 'Wildest Dreams' and (Olsen) said, 'You have to help me.' I said, 'What’s wrong?' It turns out on the Ozzy record, he used two guys from THE TURTLES. He said it was too 'nice' for Ozzy. He recorded their vocals for two daysw, 12 tracks on each song."

CRR: What did you think when you heard the final product?

Michael: "It’s great. I just thought it was fun to sing lyrics to 'Devil’s Daughter' and 'Crazy Babies'.

[binnie]

Black Tusk – Passage Through Purgatory

You look at the artwork and think: ‘it’s going to sound like Mastodon’. And in a sense it does – metal in a non-staccato way, devoid of histrionics and much-machismo, the sort of primal, elemental metal of the beast laid bare. But – like fellow Georgians Kylesa and Baroness – Black Tusk offer a far more sparse and spartan aesthetic than metal’s premier behemoths. Indeed, there are no prog leanings, complex arrangements or quantum mechanics time signatures here. This is a sludgey, punk infused take on stoner metal rooted in the dystopian noise rock of post punk, a sandblasted skin approach to music which leaves the sound stripped to its most barren. And it rules.

Fuck labels. Fuck everything. This is rock ‘n’ roll – HEAVY rock ‘n’ roll – at its most concentrated form, neat anarchy if you will, and devoid of artifice. The sheer savagery of the wall of sound which propels ‘Mind Moves Something’ is terrifying, and the range of influences channelled here is staggering. ‘Falling Down’ sounds like Karma To Burn would if they’d smoked crack instead of pot, whilst ‘Fixed In Ice’ is as indebted to the hardcore stylings of Minor Threat and Bad Brains as it is Neurosis, turning on a series of switchblade-to-the-face time changes into a shit kicking melee. With a raw production which captures the live in the studio sound with finesse, this is a band which those who love the fluidity that comes with playing in a three piece will relish. Oh, and there’s enough bottom end to rival a Kardashian.

There are so many vibrant and vital bands emerging from the underground in the modern metal scene – so much sonic and emotional depth – that you can’t help but think that we’re experiencing a golden age. Black Tusk are never going to change the world in a commercial sense. But they have made a significant contribution to a movement which is injecting considerable depth back into heavy music. Their three vocalist approach renders their sound somewhat unfocussed (and you can’t help but think that hiring one guy with a great voice would add another string to an already lethal bow), but this sludgey brew has a real kick to it.

[DLR Bridge]

That's what I love about this place. All of my guesses and curiosities are either confirmed or debunked in no time at all! It was Crazy Babies and Breaking All The Rules that I thought had a Mike Anthony register and tonal quality to the back ups. He too had said that he enjoyed doing guest vocal appearances here and there but uncredited. He did back ups on Autograph's album and I think he even may have been mentioned in the credits, so to me, the Ozzy assist seemed, possible. Until now.

[katina]

That's what I love about this place. All of my guesses and curiosities are either confirmed or debunked in no time at all! It was Crazy Babies and Breaking All The Rules that I thought had a Mike Anthony register and tonal quality to the back ups. He too had said that he enjoyed doing guest vocal appearances here and there but uncredited. He did back ups on Autograph's album and I think he even may have been mentioned in the credits, so to me, the Ozzy assist seemed, possible. Until now.

I found the original interview where Michael Sadler confirms he did the backing vocals on NRFTW (in the half of the interwiew) , it was posted in 2006, amazing. I will copy the link:

http://www.bravewords.com/news/48445#.UA6mSGHOUmU

[binnie]

From the vaults: Slayer – Diabolus In Musica (1998)

Slayer’s reputation as ‘the AC/DC of thrash’ is a recently earnt prize ,a paen to their seeming – or at least reputed – refusal to change (or ‘evolve’, depending on your opinion) their sound. In truth, however, it is a lie, or at least the appropriation of a failure into a success. For during the ‘90s Slayer learnt the hard way that both critics – and their fans – would not let them evolve: if 1990’s epic ‘Seasons In The Abyss’ was the culmination of a distinctive sound they had begun to hone 7 years earlier on ‘Show No Mercy’ the records that followed – 1994’s ‘Divine Intervention’ and 1998’s ‘Diabolus In Musica’ – showed a band treading water and grasping for a new sound, respectively. The fact that so few of the songs on those records make up the band’s recent setlists is an indication of how poorly they were received.

That waywardness was not unique to Slayer. In the post Cobain world most of metal’s stalwarts didn’t know the path to choose. Maiden were playing to smaller and smaller audiences as they pushed their trad metal sound into progressive territories, Sabbath had lost their legendary status to all but a few stoners before their reunion in 1997, and even the other members of thrash’s ‘Big 4’ were wavering creatively – Metallica and Megadeth tried to reinvent themselves as ‘rock’ rather than metal with ‘Load’ and ‘Cryptic Writings’, and Anthrax were a wounded beast, a half band releasing a grunged up ‘Stomp 442’ and ‘Volume 8’ to a public which wasn’t listening. The merits of those albums aside, the point remains that success had allowed the space to grow, and survival depended on it (or so it seemed). And so ‘Diabolus In Musica’ sported a new ‘Slayer’ logo, and saw the band complementing their sonic arsenal with more atmospheric sounds, slower tempos and nods to metal nu and industrial.

Ask a Slayer fan about this record now and they’ll wince. They’ll remember the band co-opting bouncy-bouncy riffs into their sound on the nu-metal clunker ‘Stain Of Mind’, or writing a song about rugby – ‘Scrum’ – which was presumably conjured up on an etch-a-sketch. They will also lament the lack of speed throughout the record, or remember that those songs which did resemble ‘THE SLAYER SOUND’ – ‘Screaming From The Sky’ – were oddly charmless. And all of this would be true. But approached with an open mind, there is a great deal of merit to this record. You want heavy? ‘In The Name Of God’ delivers in, but it is sllllllooooowww rather than fast. You want twisted? ‘Death’s Head’ – possibly the most underrated of all Slayer’s songs – is an eerie post-punk take on the mentality of a serial killer, an epic lyric wrapped around a rumbling riff – this is no comic book evil, but a mature exploration of humanity’s dark side. Equally disturbing is ‘Desire’, a tingling, tortuous tease of evil which demonstrated that even when they weren’t doing bludgeon, Slayer could do powerful. Best of all though is ‘Overt Enemy’, an effect laden vocal and sparse, jam like music delivering evil in another, almost formless way.

The problem is that these songs do not really gell with the more traditional Slayer blazers – closer ‘Point’, the unrelentingly heavy ‘Perversions Of Pain’ and frenzied ‘Bitter Peace’, which features a riff which could cut flesh from the bone – rendering ‘Diabolus In Musica’ an unbalanced affair. Those songs are all the torrential hellfire you’d expect from Slayer, hardcore infused thrash amped up by beefy production and Paul Bostaph’s remarkable drumming, the sort of piss your pants metal which Slayer made their name on. But sitting alongside those moments of experimentation they speak of a band not quite ready – or not quite brave enough – to push beyond their trademark. And if Slayer should not be any one thing, that thing is half arsed.

On 2001’s ‘God Hates Us All’ Slayer had put all of the experimentation behind them (a few nods to Slipknot aside) and gone back to their face-ripping heavy tradition. Even when Dave Lombardo returned for 2006’s ‘Christ Illusion’, however, there was a sense that the law of diminishing returns was setting in. For although those records were damn fine affairs, having a classic sound means that people only want to hear the classics, regardless of how good the new stuff is – Motorhead have made half a dozen records as strong as ‘Ace of Spades’, but no-one yearns for them. Slayer are now in the same situation. Masters of their craft, they are left to exist on yesterday’s glories – if only their fans would let them change. No one would put ‘Diablous In Musica’ at the top of their ‘favourite Slayer’ album lists – but it stands as a testament of a band would can do far, far more than they are credited with.

SLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEER!!!!!

[binnie]

More Slayer reviews to come.........

[binnie]

From the vaults: Anathema – The Silent Enigma (1995)

The evolution of Britain’s Anathema from gothic-doom pioneers to prog-metal masters has been as unique as it is fascinating. Starting off life in the ‘90s pushing extreme metal – alongside Katatonia – into more expansive, orchestral and cinematic soundscapes by welding the torturous doom riffage of Candlemass and St. Vitus to the gothic tinges of early Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride created a sound which was cavernous. It’s not a chirpy listen, but it is an uplifting one – a bitter sorbet to cleanse the soul through an exploration of sadness, solitude, bitterness, and anguish. Thematically, it treats the futility of human ambition in the face of the world, the desire to submit to quiet desperation in moments when the human condition seems unbearable in an antagonistic universe.

That is a bold musical ambition. But Anathema’s treatment of it is never overbearing. It is staggering to think that this was only Anathema’s second record and their first with Vincent Cavanagh on vocals. Few bands this young are this confident, or capable of balancing so much music into one coherent aesthetic, an aesthetic in which the hypnotic delicacy of ‘Cerulean Twilight’ sits alongside the sprawling – almost formless – beat of ‘Sunset of Age’ without contradiction. It’s the balance that stops it descending into self-parody. Witness ‘Restless Oblivion’. A Sabbath riff twisted by a prog arrangement creates a seamless grandeur – which never quite teeters over into melodrama – of metal’s beauty and beast together in an exploration of the darker side of human feeling. But for all the heaviness, for the Cavanagh brothers songs have always come first – whatever the urge to showcase, whatever the strength of the riffs, melodies take pride of place. How many other extreme metal bands would produce ‘…Alone’, a hauntingly simple, almost medieval choral (sung perfectly by guest vocalist Rebecca Wilson) which showcases that extremity doesn’t have to be needlessly clever to be affecting?

This was a long way from Anathema at their best – Vincent Cavanagh had not yet quite decided what vocal style he would opt for, rendering the sound somewhat disjoined, and the very top heavy mix robbed the sound of depth by prioritising guitar and vocals over the rhythm section – but even at this stage Anathema were as talented as they were unique. ‘The Silent Enigma’ was the sound of a band exploring its capabilities and for all purists lament their recent voyage aboard the odd ship prog, in retrospect it is clear that those leanings were present at their inception. The sound of heavy to come……