Album Reviews

[Dave's Bitch]

I have two that i am guessing you will own.

Grave - Back From the Grave

Death - Scream Bloody Gore

[binnie]

Cheers.

You've just reminded me that there is a review of Death's 'The Sound of Persevernce' in this thread, too.

I'll add the requests to my list......

[Dave's Bitch]

Great album yes.Do you have back from the grave?

[binnie]

I have something by Grave - I'll have to check if it's the right one.

[binnie]

Marko Cain, I should add that there are also reviews on In Solitude, Dark Tranquility, Darkest Hour, Skeletonwitch, and Black Breath in here, which might float your boat.

[binnie]

Ministry – Relapse

It’s always hard to hear once great bands getting old, those who were once innovators treading water. Ministry – alongside or (if we’re being honest) slightly before NIN – paved the way for industrial metal and, more importantly, delivered up some truly classic and EXCITING music in the late ‘80s and (most of) the ‘90s. ‘Relapse’ – the title is a beautifully sick joke on Al Jourgensen’s own past and recent promise that the band were no more – is the first Ministry record since 2007. It is, typically, a heavy record which paints anger in shades far more colourful than metal’s steel-grey: keyboards, samples, programming and other audio warfare complement the guitars, offsetting and unnerving throughout. But in many places it feel rushed and under-developed – strong riffs are not surrounded by the music to maximise their impact and, for all their anger, the lyrics don’t contain the wit, or the melodic prowess, to match Jourgensen’s best work. At their best Ministry were dark and poetic, harrowing but inspiring – ‘Relapse’ only shows us the tunnel, not the light.

But it is no disaster. The presence of Prong’s Tommy Victor ensures that the guitars a furious throughout, and the title track is the aural equivalent of sticking your head in a giant food blender. Elsewhere ‘Blackout’ – an industrial take on country rock – is an evil-grinning genius of a song, and ‘Kleptocracy’ and ’99 Percenters’ serve up anthems of FTW proportions. A particularly frantic cover of S.O.D’s ‘United Forces’ also adds plenty of bite but it – alongside ‘Ghouldiggers’ rant at the music industry – serve to make odd additions to what is a political album at heart.

Given Jourgensen’s near death experience in 2010 (due to a ruptured ulcer) any work we get from him is a bonus and should serve to remind fans of heavy music how damn lucky we have been to count him as one of us for 25 years – like Trent Reznor, like Motorhead, and like Killing Joke, Ministry will leave a void which no-one can fill when they finally are no more. ‘Relapse’ will not be a record for which they are remembered. But it contains moments of sonic terrorism which hint at former glories and remind us why this band ripped the world a new one in the first place.

[binnie]

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.

[binnie]

From the vaults: Katatonia – Viva Emptiness (2003)

The evolution of Katatonia has been truly remarkable. Paving the way for the hybrid of Death & Doom metal at the turn of the ‘90s they – alongside Paradise Lost, Anathema and Paradise Lost – showed how extreme metal could be more than just heavy or shocking, but could connect with the most fragile of emotions and tackle the most extreme boundaries of the human condition. Making a series of albums which pushed metal into new territories and challenged even the most hardy of listeners to bear the weight of their despair, the end of the decade saw the band slowly change direction to something altogether more serene. ‘Viva Emptiness’ was in many ways the culmination of this process. Labels don’t really apply to innovators, but this record channelled prog, alternative rock, electronica and post metal into something darkly hewn and utterly, utterly beautiful. The aural equivalent of a sparse, winter barren Scandanavian landscape, Katantonia has quite a trick up their sleaves: songs. Great, great songs which were distinctive but well matched and impactful, playing to a common aesthetic, channeling dark, chiselled emotions through fragile melodies and creating an album which was far more than the sum of its parts. What the band eschewed in extremity they certainly made up for in power.

A track by track guide would only serve to demonstrate how quickly I would run out of superlatives. ‘Sleeper’ is metal’s granite spliced with The Cure, The Cult and Echo & The Bunnymen, whilst ‘Criminals’ is latter-era Soundgarden jamming with Jane’s Addiction. But this was not alt.rock trip. ‘Wealth’ and ‘Walking By A Wave’ demonstrated that Katatonia could still do heavy when the desire took them: on ‘One Year From Now’ – an ode to lover’s aching despair – they showed that they could do heavy in the other sense of the term, too. And yet it is never overbearing. This is a band devoid of histrionics and revelling in tone and atmospherics to create depth. Indeed, Jonas Ranske’s sparse, matter of fact vocal delivery bristles with emotion precisely because he is not overselling the sentiment of his crisp lyrics. Coupled to a band who can move from cold beauty to sonic warfare on the flip of a coin, looping swirl upon swirl of mood without ever losing the song and you have something very special indeed. It is almost cinematic in its scope.

Few bands can do epic in 4 minutes. Fewer still can push the boundaries of a genre. Katatonia have done so twice, and if a list of the most innovative metal bands of the past 20 years were to be compiled, their name would have to be near the top. Only a handful of bands are this moving.

[binnie]

From the vaults: Dokken – Tooth & Nail (1984)

Dokken clearly had something, but I’m fucked if I can work out what it was. Glancing at the band mugshots in the linear notes it clearly wasn’t looks. And within ten minutes of listening to ‘Tooth & Nail’ it is also apparent that it was not songs. Indeed, this was a band who had clearly borrowed WASP’s copy of Reader’s Digest’s ‘Book of How To Write Songs’ – indeed, the likes of ‘Heart’s Heartless’ cling so feebly to the rules of songwriting rather than pushing them you wonder how much they paid the A&R guy who signed them. Nor did Dokken have a charismatic/charming/funny in a ‘jack the lad’ kinda way singer – Don Dokken’s voice possessed all the spark of damp cardboard, and his clean vocals sounded odd in front of a rock band.

‘Ahhhh’ I here you say, ‘but Dokken has axe-wielding demi-God George Lynch, he was their X-Factor’. Mmmmmm. Only an idiot would deny that Mr Lynch was near the front of the line for shredding abilities, or that his speedy and colourful soloing and riffage added plenty of meat to these most skeletal of songs – witness the snarly riff to ‘Don’t Close Your Eyes’ or the sheer raucous power of the title track to hear what it was which set Dokken aside as a more metallic cousin to their Hair Band peers. But speed and technique are one thing. Melody and memorability another. Of the Sunset Strip trio who led the ‘80s guitar goddathon, Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhodes played on classic, classic songs. Lynch didn’t. Unless you genuinely think that ‘When Heaven Comes Down’ is any approaching a classic.

And yet, despite all of this I love ‘Tooth & Nail’. Every unoriginal, ploddingly mid-paced, ‘lets take a tour of ground which had been over-ploughed’ second of it. Few records make me more likely to dance around a room like no-one’s watching than this one. Like I said, they had something……

[binnie]

From the vaults: Bruce Dickinson – Skunkworks (1996)

It was always going to be a brave move: one of the High Priests of metal going all arty rock on us. But that’s the problem with success, isn’t it? Artists face such resistance if they do anything which steps outside of the boundaries of what they became successful for. On its releases in 1996 ‘Skunkworks’ was roundly panned or abruptly ignored with the kind of intolerance which metal fans and press excel themselves at. But should it really have been that surprising? Much of Dickinson’s solo work up to that point was a significant departure from Maiden – ‘Balls To Picasso’ and ‘Accident at Birth’ are more rock than metal, no? ‘Skunkworks’ just felt like a man who had become restless with his own genre taking experimentation further.

And for the most part, it works. The trippy blues of ‘Meltdown’ has a real bite drive by Dickinson’s vocal; the loose and pulsating soft/heavy dynamic of ‘Octavia’ oozes groove; and the thudding presence of ‘Innerspace’ is remarkable and uplifting in a way which only really good rock – as opposed to metal – can be. At times spacey and proggy – witness ‘Back From The Edge’ and the pink Floyd pretensions of ‘Strange Death In Paradise’ – it still possess enough spike and edge to keep fans of the abrasive engaged. Whilst there are certainly weak moments – ‘I Will Not Accept The Truth’ is too teasingly Maiden to be satisfying – this is the work of an artist experimenting with a new line up and forging forwards into pastures new.

But there is a niggle. There is a sense that, for all the protestations of artistic integrity, this was the sound of a man jumping ship at a time when metal was in the commercial doldrums. At times this is so self-conscientiously un-metallic – right down to the guitar tones employed – that it feels somewhat contrived for the band wagon. The post-grunge of ‘Space Race’, for example, feels geared towards the Stone Temple Pilots/ Soundgarden audience. Whether there’s truth in that or not, it didn’t work, and even Dickinson wasn’t convinced with his new clothes. Two years later 1998’s ‘Chemical Wedding’ would be the heaviest thing he ever put his name too (including Maiden) – make of that what you will……

In truth, none of that matters. This is an underrated record full of rich and expansive songs which deserve to be enjoyed on their own merit. If only Iron Maiden would make room for these kind of sounds they might finally make that prog album they’ve been half-heartedly gearing up for since re-forming in 1999.

[binnie]

Bloodbath – The Fathomless Mastery (2008)

Album number 3 from Bloodbath – an extreme metal ‘supergroup’ featuring Mikael Akerfelt (Opeth) and Jonas Renske (Katatonia) – is Death Metal the way it used to be: gnarly, dirty, and not taking itself too seriously in an endless pursuit of complexity. ‘The Fathomless Mastery’ captures the sound of those early DM pioneers who picked up the gauntlet thrown down by thrash and just came out swinging with boulder-bollock sized riffs. It’s the musical equivalent of a classic horror flick, and it’ll make your kid sister shit herself. Which is what Death Metal should do. Oh, and it’s also rather good.

Opener ‘At The Behest of Their Death’ is a melee of power chords, blast beats, atmospherics and NWOBHM arrangements which announces that they’ll be no fretboard staring laser-guided complexity here – the heaviness comes in great slabs of granite chiselled guitars fit to send the initiated into fits of headbanging fury. ‘Process of Disillumination’ is twisted metal blasted into the ether, the sound of five geezers building a battleship in a shed. If your neck survives ‘Hades Rising’ – a monster of a song which gives way to a sort of pseudo form of prog – then that eternal teenager in you obviously upped and left. Big, fat juicy riffs are welded to perfect dynamics which never switch and turn so much as to lose the song and allows the band to make 3-4 minute songs sound epic.

Lyrically, its all ghoulish horror and faux-Satanism. But it fits the nightmarish aesthetic perfectly and is complemented by the art work – a serious of souls twisted in purgatory. You’ve heard it all before, but sometimes familiarity adds flavour – ‘The Fathomless Matery’ is – crucially – a DM album that is as fun as it is evil. And that makes it as much a rock ‘n’ roll record as a DM one.

[binnie]

Heart of A Coward – Hope & Hindrance

Well, well, this is a surprise. A big, shinny, all-my-birthdays-have-come-at-once kind of surprise. An extreme metal/ post rock band which realises that hooks, melodies and groove are important because they hold songs together and pull viewers through the madness of such an expansive aesthetic. There is some serious groove here, a rhythmic sort of hookiness which makes extreme metal’s torture more captivating. If this debut is anything to go by, HOAC may one day produce a classic.

Take ‘Killing Fields’ for example. Heavy and scarily aggressive, it is nonetheless washed over with electronica and melodies which render it at once desperate and beautiful. There is a perfect balance of beauty – the effervescent, delicate lament of ‘Light’ or the luscious guitar of ‘All Eyes To The Sky’ – and beast here – the hardcore fury of ‘We Stand As One’ or the jealousy-inducing-brilliance of ‘Around A Girl (In 80 Days)’. The root of the sound is Meshuggah and the slew of recent Djent bands – downtuned, bowel collapsing riffage which solders extreme metal to hardcore through songs that flip between time changes like a desperate fish suffocating out of water. It is a testament to this band’s songwriting capacities that that spasmodic aesthetic is so captivating.

So, the future is bright for Heart Of A Coward. You can’t help thinking that if they push the post-rock aspects of the sound over the metaliic brutality they will be at their most powerful and affecting – it is so refreshing to hear a heavy band who can push beyond aggression into the ethereal. I doubt they’ll be a better debut this year.

[binnie]

From the vaults: Ozzy Osbourne – No Rest For The Wicked (1988)

When it was first released in 1988 this record was clearly conceived as something of a creative rejuventation for the double OO. Hot new young guitar slinger Zakk Wylde (yes, it really was that long ago) promised to be a much needed shot in the arm, and combined with the rekindled presence of the songwriting talents of Bob Daisey, ‘No Rest….’ Was clearly intended to build on the commercial momentum of 1986’s ‘The Ultimate Sin’ by presenting Ozzy’s ever expanding audience with a platter of decent tunes dressed in the stylistic trappings of the middle of the decade. As such it was something of a mixed bag: a record which was not as distinctly ‘Ozzy’ as we might like, but was, nevertheless, crackling with energy and bite.

Wylde himself stepped into the very large shoes of Jake E Lee with gusto. He plays here like a man who’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime and knows it. Almost 25 years later we have become ‘accustomed’ (read: bored witless) with his busy style and pinch harmonics, but here he was at his most focussed. ‘Miracle Man’ is something of a lost Ozzy classic, and on it Wylde delivered both his best riff and best solo. Elsewhere he manages to provide the highlights to songs which are often fairly prosaic, soloing with a control he lost in subsequent years – listening to ‘Devil’s Daughter’, ‘Breaking All The Rules’ and ‘Fire In The Sky’ you realise why he put the hard rock world on notice. His playing – combined with evil little ditties like ‘Demon Alcohol’, ‘Crazy Babies’ (which still sounds HUGE), and ‘Breaking All The Rules’ – which is just a great ‘80s rock tune – makes for a record which features some incredibly underrated moments in Ozzy’s canon. You can’t help but wish that some of these tunes would get some live rotation.

But there are plenty of clunkers, too. Continuing a process begun on ‘The Ultimate Sin’, we get Ozzy the cartoon character on ‘Bloodbath In Paradise’ (a sort of ‘Mr Crowley’ for the shoulder pad age) and ‘Tattooed Dancer’, whilst the sprinkling of Sunset Strip’s popisms on ‘Devil’s Daughter’ is a lot more schlock than rock. But the biggest problem is the production. Lord knows what Keith Olden and Roy Thomas Baker were thinking, but ‘No Rest…’ feels stiff, rigid and cumbersome, a treble happy affair which robs these songs of much of their power by burying Randy Castilo and Bob Daisy so low in the mix and making the whole thing feel tinny – with a frontman as charismatic and warm as Ozzy, that’s a real crime.

Even the biggest Ozzy fan would have to admit that the post Randy years yielded records which were patchy (if loveable) at best. To these ears the Jake E Lee era Ozzy records were superior to the Zakk Wylde era ones. Although both ultimately suffer from the same problems – muddy production, a frontman who was more preoccupied with booze than melody, and a large dose of filler, there’s just more attitude, more bite on the material that Jake delivered. But for all of its flaws, at least ‘No Rest…’ is still a rock ‘n’ roll record, perhaps the last rock ‘n’ roll record Ozzy would deliver for almost a quarter of a century (until ‘Scream’). 1991’s ‘No More Tears’ certainly sounded better, but it was a slick, polished and clinical affair created cynically with an eye on the mainstream with a series of ‘hit making’ songwriters and big time ballads drafted in to boot. In those circumstances artists inevitably lose some of their bite. Treated as what it is – a good time record from a good time guy – ‘No Rest…’ still stands up all of these years later.

[fourthcoming]

Stlll Zakk's best work to this day.

[Seshmeister]

From the vaults: Ozzy Osbourne – No Rest For The Wicked (1988)
...
Even the biggest Ozzy fan would have to admit that the post Randy years yielded records which were patchy (if loveable) at best. To these ears the Jake E Lee era Ozzy records were superior to the Zakk Wylde era ones. Although both ultimately suffer from the same problems – muddy production, a frontman who was more preoccupied with booze than melody, and a large dose of filler, there’s just more attitude, more bite on the material that Jake delivered. But for all of its flaws, at least ‘No Rest…’ is still a rock ‘n’ roll record, perhaps the last rock ‘n’ roll record Ozzy would deliver for almost a quarter of a century (until ‘Scream’). 1991’s ‘No More Tears’ certainly sounded better, but it was a slick, polished and clinical affair created cynically with an eye on the mainstream with a series of ‘hit making’ songwriters and big time ballads drafted in to boot. In those circumstances artists inevitably lose some of their bite. Treated as what it is – a good time record from a good time guy – ‘No Rest…’ still stands up all of these years later.

Excellent, I couldn't agree more.