Album Reviews

[binnie]

Fallujah – Dreamless (20160

We have a tendency to celebrate bands who cross genres as inventive. But sometimes the results just sound messy rather than memorable. ‘Dreamless’ – album no. 3 from San Francisco’s Fallujah – is a case in point. This is essentially Death Metal spliced together with the more atmospheric end of djent, a sound which feels schizophrenic – like Mike Tyson suddenly interrupting a beat-down to offer his thoughts on whether essence precedes existence. It’s all very admirable – ‘Face of Death’ injects the normal Death Metal pummel with programming to make it more affecting, if less immediate – but it often feels like music stuck between two worlds rather than moving forward. There are certainly moments to celebrate here – ‘Abandon’ sounds like a heavier Deftones, and the proggy-groove of ‘The Prodigal Son’ makes for a killer tune – but elsewhere (‘Amber Grace’) ‘Dreamless’ is an impenetrable mess.

[binnie]

Goatsnake – Black Age Blues (2015)

The component parts of Goatsnake are highly impressive – vocalist Pete Stahl (Scream, The Desert Sessions), guitarist Greg Anderson (Sunn O))) and rhythm section Guy Pinhas and Greg Rogers (The Obsessed) all of have impressive pedigree on the metal underground – but the whole is all the more staggering. ‘Black Age Blues’ is a perfect title for this doom perfection, an album which is heavier than Iron Man’s insurance premium without being remotely extreme. The songs take the elemental parts of rock ‘n’ roll an amped them up, existing on the cusp of where jams become fully songs to contain the looseness and vibrancy of a performance. It is a wonderful affair. Opener ‘Another River To Cross’ begins proceedings with a swift kick to the nuts – Sabbath is a lazy comparison, the spartan wall of sheer power owes far more to Kyuss or Candlemass. ‘Elevated Man’ is dinosaur-plodding majesty, a slab of doom from the finest blacksmith’s anvil, and the album progresses with riff after riff after riff (‘House of the Moon’, the title track) delivered by Anderson’s guitar replete with a tone which could make Satan shit himself – there are moments here where the band sounds as powerful as the sun dying.

Like the best doom and stoner, the songs are simple and uncluttered and played with tons of balls and zero pretence and the power that this produces is perfectly captured by Nick Raskulinecz’s crisp production. ‘Black Age Blues’ is a rampantly old skool record, but it is not an exercise in indolent nostalgia. Rather than trying to re-capture the past, Goatsnake serve up a very human, genuine album. Closer ‘Killing Blues’ captures the essence – an explosion of riffs which marries metallic majesty with the purest emotive expression.

[Von Halen]

Gojira – Magma (2016)

Gojira are perhaps the best metal band of their generation. Heavy, but with a knack for hooks, intelligent without ever losing immediacy, and in-tune with metal’s past without being constrained by the slavish worship of tradition, over the course of 3 superlative releases – ‘From Mars to Sirius’ (2005), ‘The Way of All Flesh’ (2008) and ‘L’Enfant Savage’ (2012) – this is a band which have carved their own path and made music of spellbinding immediacy. ‘Magma’ – album no. 6 – sees the band at a cross-roads. Do they continue to walk the path well-trodden or try new paths? Much like Mastodon several years earlier, this is an album which sees Gojira polish their rough edges, simplify their sound somewhat, and put their melodic tendencies to the forefront. Unlike Mastodon, however, Gojira still sound very, very convincing when they are not trying to be the heaviest matter in the universe.

‘Magama’ is not a sell-out record. The may be less blisteringly heavy than the band’s past three releases, but you can’t really imagine much of this getting prime-time rotation. The sense you get when listening to this record is that things have softened somewhat for artistic reasons: the lyrics frequently touch on the loss of the Duplantier brother’s mother, and the sombre, more melancholic feel of the album seems genuinely result from that. This, then, is not an ‘up’ album, despite its simpler approach. Nor is it an instant record in a way that earlier Gojira albums are – there are subtleties and nuances at work, and the songs are very much ear-worms. Where in the past Gojira had a tendency to go all-out all of the time, here the dynamics are subtler. There are lashing of Killing Joke-style atmospherics at work, and this makes some of these songs more moving than metal-staccato usually allows. Joel Duplantier’s use of clean vocals adds to this, making these songs touching and elevating them above much of metal’s middle-ground.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that Gojira have ditch their cornerstones of their sound. The polyrhythms, eerie melodies, and crunching bottom-end are all still there in droves. And the riffs are typically mighty – this is a band that can compete with the Mustaines, Hetfields, Dimebags and Tipton/Downings in that area. ‘The Cell’ has a riff which could level blocks; ‘Silvera’ is a twisted rhythmic assault which combines complexity with catchiness; and ‘The Shooting Star’ features a dinosaur heavy riff which captures all that this album is about – less frenetic than in the past, more sparse in approach, but still utterly mesmerising. There is little here that doesn’t sparkle.

Many have already hailed ‘Magma’ as the metal album of the year. I’m not so convinced. It feels like a transition record, the sound of a band in transition between their ultra-metal phase and whatever will come next. Whatever you think about Gojira, however, they are one of those handful of bands – like Meshuggah, early-Mastodon and Faith No More – who don’t lend themselves to easy categorisation; the sort of band where the memory of the first listen is ingrained in the memory. ‘Magma’ is certainly a noble addition to that legacy, even if it doesn’t quite reach the status of classic. A beautiful, moving musical statement.

Binnie, please stick to reviewing albums that rock about as much as the Van Clichegar catalogue. That's all these "rockers" around here, can handle. I posted a full length Avatar concert, and it was too heavy for them.

[binnie]

From the Vaults: Bathory – Twilight of the Thunder Gods (1991)

Bathory are a band which has been much emulated but never replicated. Hordes of copyists have emerged since their mid-80s eponymous debut, but few have really come close to capturing the evil magic – the presence – of this band’s music. Like Celtic Frost, Death and Hellhammer, Bathory must be seen as one of the most important extreme metal bands, part of the DNA of the darker end of metal. What strikes you about Bathory, however, is how un-extreme it is. Growly vocals aside, much of ‘Twlight….’ – Bathory’s sixth album – is restrained, with the emphasis placed on composition and when they thank a host of classical composers as inspiration, you get the sense that is more than pretentiousness – rather than just being gun-metal grey, there are lashing of atmospherics here which add to the eeriness. Equally, while Bathory are clearly satanic, they are not so in the same way that Mercyful Fate are – quoting from Nietzche, this is meant to be provocative rather than cartoonish, and the title-tracks exploration of the end of idols is sophisticated indeed. This music is less for the mosh-pit and more for those dark, introspective moments.

In 1991 Metallica took a feral type of metal into the mainstream. In 1992 Pantera repeated the trick. Despite being established, Bathory at this moment in time were making music for the underground – this sounded (and sounds) like it belongs in an evil little corner of the cosmos which is not quite of this earth. The usual metal clichés – machismo, hyperbole, over-playing – are absent. It is noticeably less heavy than the albums which preceded it, ‘Hammerheart’ (1990) and ‘Blood, Fire, Death’ (1988), but don’t be fooled into thinking that this means it lacks oomph. Put simply, the riffs are unreal: ‘Under The Runes’ and ‘Blood and Iron’ are propelled by gargantuan guitars. Like much of the doom music which would come later in metal history, the aim here is to use the repetition of simple patterns to create an all-encompassing musical vision. The results are not necessarily instantaneous, but on repeated listens you get the sense of something very powerful bubbling away at the blackened heart of this music. Above all else, ‘Twilight…’ is a testament to main-man’s Quorthon’s abilities as a songwriter: ‘To Enter Your Mountain’ is what Page and Plant would have sounded like with Nordic blood pulsing through their veins.

The reverb-heavy production may date this album, but getting past it reveals a bonafide classic. Often described as an ‘epic’ album due to the length of its songs and scope of its soundscapes, ‘Twlight…’ is in fact something more than that. It is, like the best of music, a spiritual experience.

[binnie]

Haken – Affinity (2016)

London’s Haken are one of the very best twenty-first century heavy-prog bands. This is undoubtedly music for the neck up, but it is drenched in emotion and humanity; and although the playing is dazzling, it never obscures the emergence of often stunning songs. ‘Affinity’ is the band’s fourth and best record. Balancing a conscious display of majesty without ever veering into pomposity, being heavy without ever becoming over-bearing, and using complexity to enhance rather than to obfuscate, this is a genuine contender for rock record of the year.

Haken certainly keep their ears tuned into prog’s passed. There are more than knowing nods to Floyidian soundscapes here, for example. But ‘Affinity’ is no exercise in nostalgia. With a very crisp, contemporary production this is a world away from bands which share the ‘prog’ label – Dream Theatre, for example. It seems that ‘prog’ is now more of an aesthetic than a sound: ‘Death Metal’ or ‘Thrash’ give you a good sense of what a band will sound like and what the component parts of its sounds will be, where ‘prog’ doesn’t. Opener ‘Initiate’ balances Anathema-esque beauty with slashes of heavy guitar injecting violence and menace, building and spiralling through multiple parts to become something startlingly good. ‘1985’ takes things in a heavier direction, making nods to the ‘80s without trying to sound explicitly like that decade and displaying a sonorous muscularity which is never quite abrasive enough to be ‘metal’. Haken are certainly up-to-speed with developments in that genre, however, with the odd nod to djent and the jazz infused metal of bands like Meshuggah. Fifteen-minute epic ‘The Architect’ is propelled by riffs which are highly complex but still crush, and throughout the record the control of the composition is dazzling, with tightly-wound melody lines from vocalist Ross Jennings holding everything together. Jens Borgen’s sympathetic mix only enhances that sense of control, making very complex, sophisticated music feel instantaneous.

This is an album which can be enjoyed in equal measure by those who come to with no sense of prog’s history and those who do. For the latter, there are knowing winks to the dark, synthy moments of ‘80s prog. Think Yes on ‘1983’ or ‘90125’. Think reverb. Think epic orchestration and lavish production. But don’t be fooled into thinking there is no emotion here. ‘Eathrise’, for example, is utterly uplifting and irresistibly catchy, and driven by a luscious opening riff. For all the labyrinth playing, complex arrangements and super-human musicianship, at its heart Haken is a band, a bunch of people united in performance. And it is that performance which makes this more than merely impressive and takes it on to something moving. Previous albums ‘Aquarious’ (2010), ‘Visions’ (2011’) and ‘The Mountain’ (2013) had hinted that Haken might be more than just an exceptional prog band – by growing together as a band, they’ve become something like Rush or Iron Maiden, a great band period.

From acoustic shimmer to metallic bluster, this is a band which deserves to share some of the success which other ‘proggy’ bands (Opeth, Dream Theather) have had in the previous decade. When you can write songs as achingly beautiful as ‘Bound By Gravity’, you are capable of making life a little bit better.

[binnie]

Binnie, please stick to reviewing albums that rock about as much as the Van Clichegar catalogue. That's all these "rockers" around here, can handle. I posted a full length Avatar concert, and it was too heavy for them.

I'm guessing a black metal album and a prog album are a bit out of place, then?

[binnie]

From the Vaults – Motorhead – Another Perfect Day (1983)

There is a myth that Motorhead never really evolved. Although their sound is instantaneous – you know Lemmy and co. within 4 bars of a song – that is not the same as it being static. They were no AC/DC, and routinely tried new sounds and feels in their career – the acoustic lament ‘1916’, the straight-up 12 bar of ‘Whorehouse Blues’ or the wealth of experimentation of the ‘Bastards’ album being just the obvious examples. The band’s recruitment of former Thin Lizzy axe-god and all-round live-wire Brian ‘Robbo’ Robertson in 1983 was something of an odd choice in retrospect: Lizzy were a rock band, for sure, but one based on delicacy and restraint rather than ‘head thunder. Relationships with the Lemmy and Philthy – two equally volatile figures – were famously cool, but if anything Robbo’s ear for melody gave ‘Another Perfect Day’ a feel which earlier Motorhead records didn’t have. The thunder was still there, but it came wrapped in some very sinewy, melodic guitar lines.

Often maligned as the nadir of Motorhead’s catalogue, ‘Another Perfect Day’ is really no such thing. In truth, many of the songs here are superior to the last album made by the classic Lemmy-Taylor-Clarke lineup, ‘Iron Fist’, which was patchy at best. Opener ‘Back At The Funny Farm’ kicks things off with pure sonic violence: Lemmy’s trademark bass thundering in competition with Philthy Taylor’s double-kick drums, where Robbo plays elegant, blues lines over the top, injecting proceedings with slashes of violence. ‘Shine’ keeps the Motorhead approach to rock’n’roll going, but sees Lemmy inject more melody and smoothness into the vocal that had hereto been the case – chosen as a single, it really is an unheralded classic. ‘Dancing On Your Grave’ has all the witty lines, gravelly bottom-end and relentless jack-fuelled energy which made this band so utterly unique, and Robbo’s guitar certainly takes it up a notch or three. ‘One Track Mind’ goes for the same vibe as ‘Bombers’ ‘Metropolis’, but to these ears Robbo’s slippery, emotive guitar lines makes it a superior cut to the more heralded tune.

There were moments where Robbo feels out of places. On ‘Rock It’ he seems to play over the band rather than with them. The title track is a good song – the problem, however, is that is perhaps veers too far away from what you expect from Motorhead to be acceptable – more straight-ahead rock than bombastic bass ‘n’ roll – in the same way that ‘Load’ was a good album, just not a good ‘Metallica’ album. On ‘Marching Off To War’, the band feels less instinctive and spontaneous than you expect – you can feel them thinking about how they should sound rather than just….sounding. But these oddities are the exception, not the rule, to what is a damn fine record which crackles with energy, vim and VOLUME!

‘Another Perfect Day’, then, is not so much a noble failure as no failure at all. Fans would have to wait 3 years (a lifetime between albums in the ‘80s) for the follow up – 1986’s ‘Orgasmatron’ – which saw the band bulked out to a two-guitar four piece which would lead to a further evolution of their sound. Perhaps the fact that is marked the beginning of an odd time in ‘head history has marked its place in their canon unnecessarily. It’s hard to argue with tunes as strong as ‘I Got Mine’ or ‘Tales Of Glory’. And for those who thought that this was a wimpier Motorhead……album closer ‘Die You Bastard’ is surely a fitting response!

[binnie]

^^^^^^
Someone requested a review of that one years ago - apologies for taking so long to getting around to it!

[binnie]

If anyone has any requests, I'm happy to take them (assuming I own the album in question, of course).

[Kristy]

1. Spice Girls
2. New Christy Minstrels
3. Anything pre-1982 Barry Manilow
4. Any "Jock Jams" Album
5. 5 Seconds Of Summer

Think you could handle that, limey?

[Terry]

Binnie’s Dirty Dozen: Van Halen – Women and Children First (1980)

I found this record at a car boot sale when I was nine years old, in 1991. A discarded cassette tossed amongst lots of other discarded cassettes in (if memory serves) a green plastic washing basket. It cost me 25 pence. At that point, I’d exhausted my dad’s and uncle’s vinyl collections (AC/DC, Nugent, Deep Purple, Hendrix……you know the score) and was always hunting for whatever metal I could find cheaply on our excursions to car boot sales (a nigh-on weekly event in the binnie household). I’d heard the name ‘Van Halen’ from the copies of Kerrang! I’d begun to buy, but I had no idea what to expect from ‘Women and Children First’, a record I bought purely because on their cover shot I thought that band looked cooler than anything I’d ever seen. I got home, re-wound the tape, pressed play and……………..BOOM! Life was never quite the same ever again.

What struck me about the record – even at nine years old – was how different it sounded from all of the other Hard Rock/Metal I’d been scoring. It was HEAVY, but it wasn’t metal. Van Halen were always more than that, they had a feel to their sound, a sense of spontaneity that made the music sparkle and crackle, swing in a way that made almost everything else I was listening to seem rigid. And ‘Women and Children First’ captures that spontaneity, that spark on the horizon, at its absolute best – to these ears, the whole essence of Van Halen can be summed up in the magic – and I mean magic, the sense of something so pure its power is beyond human – of the couple of bars of music on which ‘Romeo’s Delight’ spins from the loose verse into the muscular chorus, ‘Oh baby please, I can’t take it any mo-wor’…….Has rock ‘n’ roll ever had so much life-affirming energy? I seem to remember that I broke the stereo I had at that time playing that song over and over. My dad’s response? A bigger stereo!

And then, there was the guitar. This was a sound that plugged straight into the little boy in all men – a sound so outlandish that you HAD to listen. Some things just don’t need to be explained, their appeal is elemental, chemical even. And Eddie Van Halen’s guitar, like the Cindy Crawford poster that had recently been added to my bedroom wall, made me tingle in all of the right places. It made me want to fuck before I even knew what fucking was. And the intro to ‘Fools’ – easily the most underrated song in Van Halen’s catalogue – still hits me like a kiss from an angel with a dirty smile to this day.

Van Halen’s third record saw the band at their freest, their most in the moment. ‘Loss of Control’. ‘….And The Cradle Will Rock’, these are not songs that sound like anyone else. What Van Halen served up here was something that is almost completely absent from music in the pro-tooled age: a sense of performance. A sense of humans playing instruments in the now. It’s the imperfections, the nuances, that make it special. People often write Hard Rock off as big and dumb, but when you listen to something as delicate as ‘Could This Be Magic’, you hear something fragile – you can almost sense the band breathing and hear their heartbeats. The polar opposite is the filthy ‘Everybody Wants Some’, on which David Lee Roth plays his best pied-piper-of-poontang part – the mid-section (which was famously improvised in the studio) is pure bar room bravado distilled to its essence. What is there to say about Diamond Dave here? You can’t deny his heroic talents as a frontman, but the music press as a whole has yet to truly give him his dues as a lyricist. To these ears, ‘Women And Children First’ was Dave’s best set of lyrics – uncomplicated, but full of spice, warmth and humour. Whether it’s the energy of first love (‘In A Simple Rhyme’), or the morning-after-the-night-before (‘Take Your Whiskey Home’) here we have the bar fly as philosopher in his very best shirt and tails. Listening to Dave’s baritone – a husky gravel track in a landscape over-populated with shrieking belters – I was quickly transformed in a cock-strutting, jive talkin’ hound dog long before I could even come close to grasping much of the sub-text. Sometimes you understand by instinct, not cognition.

Van Halen’s third album is not their best – that, surely, would have to be ‘Fair Warning’. But it remains my favourite, the one I fell in love with. The things that can come from a dirty, old wash basket………

It's probably the murkiest CVH album, and even more so when considering the relative concision of the tunes that comprised the first two albums. With Van Halen and Van Halen 2, the tunes were all performed in that high-energy CVH style yet one could tell the recording of them was the result of having been honed over several years of being played night-after-night in clubs. Most of the songs were short, to-the-point and didn't sound like the band was really 'jamming' while doing the takes. This makes WACF all the more jarring, because the band - and Eddie in particular when soloing - sound very, very loose and willing to semi-improvise in the studio. This is added to a much more eclectic range of styles on WACF that were only hinted at on the first two albums. Could This Be Magic was quite unlike anything Van Halen had put on record up to that point. In A Simple Rhyme was (dare I say) almost pretty-sounding.

WACF probably comes the closest of all the CVH albums to sounding like recordings of the band rehearsing at Dave's fathers basement for the album sessions than an actual album recording session itself. The band sound like they were half-drunk at times. I agree 100% with Binnie that Van Halen's third record exhibits the band at their freest in a studio context. Virtually none of the rough edges have been refined. Not just the intro, but the entire Fools track is just so raw and unrefined. There are so many moments on the album (abrupt endings, unplanned feedback bursts, intermittent microphone bleeding, random sonic interludes a la Tora Tora, the ending to Take Your Whiskey Home, Growth) left intact that probably would have been left on the cutting room floor or smoothed over in the overdub process with any other band.

With Fair Warning, the band returned to a more practiced type of performance with the tracks. Shades of the WACF looseness returned with the Diver Down release (mostly because the band recorded DD very quickly), but unlike WACF the DD album sounded a bit dry in terms of sonics vs. WACF's reverb-laden atmosphere. Plus, with DD one can easily discern which tracks the band were specifically targeting for radio play. With WACF, virtually none of the tunes outside of ATCWR immediately jump out as a hook-laden, radio-friendly track. WACF is the band at their most spontaneous, roughest, loosest and toughest (see Romeo Delight).

[Terry]

From the vaults: Aerosmith – Permanent Vacations (1987)

The ‘80s killed many a great ‘70s band. Those skinny-hipped, groupie destroyin’, cocaine bingin’ rock ‘n’ roll circuses of the post Summer of Love era became boufon sportin’, shoulder-pad flaunting, flaccid and flabby limp-dick parodies of their former selves in the decade of reverb. Aerosmith certainly fell victim to many of their peers crimes – the Toxic Twins cleaned up, got all philosophical (well, sorta) and realised that a band was a business. And businesses need hits, hits which Tyler and Perry could no longer deliver: enter a raft of outside songwriters to tease out the benjamins from the kids who loved the Sunset Strip sound (and their parents).

1987’s ‘Permanent Vacation’ was Aerosmith’s second attempt at an ‘80s comeback after the career low of 1985’s woeful ‘Done With Mirrors’. Re-recording ‘Walk This Way’ with Run DMC a year later certainly garnered them some momentum, and ‘Permanent….’ coupled the R’n’B goodtime of the band’s yesteryear to those shinny bought-in hooks. In truth, there’s nothing wrong with wanting your record to be a success – but what has always stuck in the craw of many Aerosmith fans is the fact that this second stage of the band’s career was so calculated that it robbed much of the music of feel and authenticity (how else do we explain the appearance of Bon Jovi’s production team – Bruce Fairburn and Bob Rock – to oversee the ageing band’s makeover for the poodle rock era?)

And to these ears, at least, it is the production which is the problem. Riffs are buried in the mix, there is an absence of soloing, and the overall guitar sound lacks the grit and gristle which made this band cool. Take uber-hit ‘Dude (Looks Like A lady)’ as an example – it’s more brass than sass. This, then, was a blues band in some shinny new clothes, and on the likes of ‘St. John’ and ‘Hangman’s Jury’, the pumped up nature of the production is overbearing and renders an art form at its best in an understated form chronically artificial. But having said that, if I’d been a 13 year old kid in 1987 I’d much have preferred to listen to this than Bon Jovi or Whitesnake – ‘cos ‘Smith had a couple of tricks left up their sleeves. The blues of ‘Rag Doll’ has a floating presence than none of the bozos on Sunset could have pulled off, and for all the poppier hooks ‘Heart’s Done Time’ really is the bluesy sort of funk that this band made its name on. You try to fight the hook in ‘Simoriah’, but it’ll get you nonetheless. Even ‘Angel’ – so soppy it sounds like it should soundtrack a montage of Tom Cruise films – is one of Aerosmith’s better power ballads.

Like it or not, for Aerosmith to survive something had to change. If ‘Girl Keeps Coming Apart’ was the best that Tyler/Perry could deliver, it’s no surprise that outside songwriters were suggested. But ‘Permanent….’ had its moments. The rejuvenation to pop-rock superstardom which had begun with ‘…Mirrors’ and would peak with ‘Pump’ had flounced its way to mediocrity six years later in the overbearingly flabby ‘Get A Grip’ (which, in ‘Angel’, ‘Crazy’ and ‘Cryin’ featured three versions of the same radio friendly unit shifter). They may have been sober, but they were still colourful – even if those colours were in more restrained hues than they had been in the band’s heyday. ‘Permanent….’ was an important part of hard rock in 1987. As important in its own way as ‘Hysteria’ or ‘1987’, it at least had a merit which those albums didn’t have – it was not the signature album of the band that made it.

Indeed, Aerosmith in 1986/1987 made a choice to survive. And it was a top-to-bottom choice throughout the entire Aerosmith organization, down to all the members of the band getting clean and sober, embracing new band management, listening to record company A&R concerns, contemporizing their image and embracing outside songwriters and producers who were creating records that were selling millions of albums.

There is little doubt, even though it's hypothetical speculation, that the reformed band going the 1985 Done With Mirrors route would not have went on to become the business juggernaut they did in the post-Mirrors years. They opted to alter the musical approach to appease the business side of the venture. It's not called the music business for nothing.

On a personal level, I have little use for what the band has done post-Mirrors. Mostly because so little of that RUN DMC and beyond output has either balls or resonance. I wouldn't say the entirety of Aerosmith's output from Vacation onward is useless, but it's kind of like a prospector showing up at a gold or diamond mine long after all the initial vein was tapped: you have to do quite a bit of sifting to come up with precious few granules, in many cases coming up with little more than some random sprinkles of gold or diamond dust among a lot of rocks spray painted gold and chunks of zirconium.

My litmus test for any band's output would be wondering what it would be like to see them live and picking a particular point in their discography as a demarcation line. For example, say I saw KISS in concert. If the band played a set list containing tunes strictly up to and including the album Love Gun, and nothing after it, I wouldn't walk away feeling let down. The same applies to Aerosmith and the album Rock In A Hard place.

[Von Halen]

I love the song "Hangman's Jury".

[Seshmeister]

On a personal level, I have little use for what the band has done post-Mirrors. Mostly because so little of that RUN DMC and beyond output has either balls or resonance. I wouldn't say the entirety of Aerosmith's output from Vacation onward is useless, but it's kind of like a prospector showing up at a gold or diamond mine long after all the initial vein was tapped: you have to do quite a bit of sifting to come up with precious few granules, in many cases coming up with little more than some random sprinkles of gold or diamond dust among a lot of rocks spray painted gold and chunks of zirconium.

It was a slower death for me until the cheese content got just too high that I stopped listening even glancing to see if there was any sprinkles there at all around the time of Nine Lives came out.

It's funny to read the Binnie review because much of this album is so wrapped up in my memories I can't be objective about it. If I hear a song like Dude Looks Like A Lady or Rag Doll, I don't think 'Is this a good song?' or 'Is there too much brass?'

I just think about being in black painted night clubs, the smell of tobacco with a hint of dope, dry ice, certain brands of beer like Red Stripe and most of all the feeling of wandering about in a haze on sticky floors. Angel becomes that cheap magic act video.

I haven't listened to it in many years but I would argue that album has some gold ignoring the big singles - only 2 songs are Desmond Child efforts plus the Beatles cover.

That leaves Simoriah, Hangman Jury, Permanent Vacation, St John even Girl Keeps Coming Apart. Also I had forgotten about 'The Movie'. That's more good songs than would find on any Motley Crue album.

Actually I'm away to listen to it now. I should make up a playlist stripping out all the stuff that made me stop listening to this era of Aerosmith...

[Mr. Vengeance]

^^^^^^
Someone requested a review of that one years ago - apologies for taking so long to getting around to it!

Another Perfect Day is my favourite Motorhead album, and one of my favourite albums, period.