Verily I say unto you, that Lucifer got ripped off in that dealOriginally Posted by Seshmeister
Verily I say unto you, that Lucifer got ripped off in that deal
Exciteable he may be, but he's not stupid. He's proven very good at surviving in the business, and had carved out a decent enough career for himself post-Skid Row. There were plenty of good singers in hair metal, but most fell by the way-side in the '90s.......
The Power Of The Riff Compels Me
Alkaline Trio – This Addiction
Before it became the lens for mumbling, awkward, drenched-in-black adolescents to screen their view of life through – and consequently placate the misguided notion that to experience sorrow, even faux sorrow, is to be somehow more alive – emo was a vibrant extension of punk, an extension which channelled punk’s passion to insular targets rather than outward ones. Alkaline Trio made a slew of records which exemplified that potential, before going all grown up (read: expansive and overblown) in later records. ‘This Addiction’ attempts to capture their initial spark, and does so with some success. ‘The American Scream’ is cinematic post-punk for a new age of discontent; the oddly Men At Work sounding ‘Off The Map’ perfectly captures the terror of the post-arguments lull; and with its knowing wink to The Misfits ‘Dine, Dine My Darling’ proves that emotive content doesn’t have to come at the expense of humour.
Sure, there are some misfires. ‘Eating Me Alive’ tries to force synths into crusty angst, and fails; and ‘Dead On The Floor’ and ‘Draculina’ feel like Alkaline-Trio by-numbers. But in the presence of the title track – a beautifully twisted love song – all can be forgiven. Alkaline Trio are a band who deliver b-movie cool and sincere emotion in a manner void of overkill or melodrama, and ‘This Addiction’ is a damn fine record. The problem with looking back, however, is that you’ll never quite re-capture your former self. Consequently, for all ‘This Addition’s’ promise, it falls short of those early golden albums.
I firmly believe these guys peaked with Maybe I'll Catch Fire (which came out around 10 or 11 years ago) and have been treading water ever since. I mean, the follow-up to This Addiction is an acoustic covers album (Damnesia) of their own material.
Maybe I'll Catch Fire was as good (and in places, better) an album as Husker Du ever put out. For some proof of this, I offer a track from that album called "She Took Him To The Lake."
PLAY LOUD!
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”― Stephen Hawking
I agree, although I think 'treading water' is a little harsh. It just seems that they were a little aimless in recent years. 'This Addiction' tries to re-capture the glory years, and comes up a little short. 'Good' rather than 'great'.
August Burns Red – Leveler
‘This song is music to my ears and is a new production on an old stage’ (Internal Canon)
Pretty much sums it up: over the course of their career, ABR have injected a much needed dose of ingenuity and emotivity into the increasingly staid scenes of post-hardcore, metalcore and extreme metal. Jamming the hulking power of metal into post-hardcore reflexivity, the band deliver something more than 12 focussed slabs of brutality – these songs relate to one another and hang together as an album. That’s so often the difference between good and great, and it sets ABR apart from the pack. Similarly refreshing and impressive are the simply staggering set of lyrics delivered here: beyond the staid angst and malevolence of the misery competition which is modern metal, ABR construct songs around provocative and emotive images which, quite frankly, propel their music to another level without overpowering it. Words act like an additional instrument, and it’s played poignantly here.
They also cram a lot of music into each song whilst managing to keep control of the reigns. Opener ‘Empire’ is pure brutality on the ‘enth’ level, bridging one foot in the euphoric aggression of hardcore and another in the pomp and majesty of heavy metal. ‘Internal Canon’ is an equally frenetic assault, but the range of tempos employed prevents from becoming an inviscerating but forgettable WHHHHOOOOSH delivered by many extreme groups; and ‘Division’, with its off-kilter rhythms, pulverizing percussion, shifting structure and enflamed vocals, is a 5 act play in 4 minutes. Anyone in possession of doubts that extreme metal can do moving should listen and learn – the band’s treatment of their faith on ‘Boys of Fall’ and the title track is also anguished and heartfelt, whatever your views on divinity.
What ultimately sets ‘Leveler’ apart is ABR’s ability to maintain the balance of the beauty and beast. The choking heaviness of ‘Poor Millionaire’ definitely fulfils the latter; whilst ‘Carpe Diem’, with its subdued intro and alt.country interlude, embraces the former. You quickly run out of superlatives, and picking the superior tracks is like looking for the best looking girl at a supermodel convention : ultimately pointless. What we have on ‘Leveler’ is a special band on special form.
Did you hear the new Mastodon CD yet Binnie?
Sounds pretty fucking good so far... Imagine the best parts of Sabbath, Soundgarden, AIC and throwing them in a blender with some Floyd and a bit of The Beatles (don't know why, but I felt it in the music)... that should give you a good idea of what you'll get when you listen to 'the hunter'
Last edited by Mr Walker; 10-05-2011 at 12:11 PM.
Oh man, I've been obsessing over it. Mastodon are so talented it must makes lesser bands cry.
I'm currently absorbing that record, plus the new Opeth record, and the new Machine Head record. They all very important records in their own way.
My ears are hurting at the moment!
Listened to the Machine Head CD yesterday and I liked it... Haven't got hold of the Opeth CD yet but hope to in the future.
From the vaults: Bleeding Through – This is Love This is Murderous (2003)
Released some 8 years ago, TILTIM has proven to be one of the most influential metalcore albums. The reasons for this are twofold: 1) the richness of BT’s sonic tapestry, which combines throaty guitars, wild soling, atmospheric synths and multiple vocals into something tight, focussed and on permanent ‘KILL’ mode; and 2) the band’s willingness to eschew the machismo of most metal lyrics in favour of raw nerves and broken minds. The result was an album which subsumes ‘heavy’ in both senses of the term.
The tortuous rumble of broken love still seething on ‘Revenge/Seek’ makes for uncomfortable listening, and the hyper fast beat down of ‘Love Lost in a Hail of Gun Fire’, with its post-hardcore welding of multiple sections in a song structure which continually mutates, sees the band almost wrestling the listener into submission. Elsewhere ‘Number Seven With A Bullet’ evokes early Avenged Sevenfold, smashing Maiden-esque gallops into breakdowns, and ‘Sweet Vampirous’ sounds like a punch-drunk death metal band. It’s invigorating, overwhelming stuff. It’s not all plain sailing, however. The Slipknot-isms of ‘City of The Condemned’ and ‘Mutilation’ allow the sign of the times to creep through, and the death metal postering of ‘Shadow Walker’ feels out of place. But, these mishaps aside, we are still in the presence of a minor classic here. BT’s use of massive hooks and gripping rhythms ensures that their heady brew of extreme metal never pushes beyond the boundaries of palatability – that is quite a delicate line to tread. At their expansive best – witness ‘Murder By Numbers’ and ‘Dead Like Me’ – they evoke a whirling menace of groove which reminds us exactly why metalcore gave heavy music a deserving kick up the ass almost a decade ago. Why did anyone listen to Killswitch Engage when this was on offer?
From the vaults: Sunna – One Minute Silence (2000)
The debut album from this British band saw heavy music fused with industrial elements, trip hop and the darker edge of dance music. No-one sounded like this before; and no-one has since. You can tease out some of the influences – Killing Joke, The Prodigy, Misery Loves Co. (remember them?) – but in truth, this was much more than the sum of its parts. The smokey vocals and grungy lament of the acoustic ‘Pre-occupation’ contrasts with the glorious hooks, frazzled guitars and loops of ‘I’m Not Trading’; and whilst the industrial stomp of ‘Power Struggle’ evokes The Prodigy mating with tar thick grunge, the dripping, drugged-out acoustic beats of ‘O.D’ and ‘Too Much’ offer something less instantaneous, but rich in all its seeping glory. Indeed, ‘Forlorn’ is music to melt too.
This was not metal – it eschews histrionic and wails of the that genre – but it is a warm and glistening record full of dark moments. ‘Instant Pulse’ combines a teasing vocal with the sonic boom of a distorted bass and the incessant mantra of ‘I wanna know if I wanna know if’ to drill itself into your brain. Powerful, delicate, and unique.
Really like the new Machine Head release.
Love their covers...thought this was outstanding...great to see them do a Rush song.
Machine Head and Mastodon reviews will be coming this weekend.......
Not sure about the vocals on this...
I'm not sure about the vocals on most Rush records.....
Take that back!!!!
Saw Dan Andriano on the Revival Tour a few weeks ago. Great night. He was probably the weakest set of the four (Brian Fallon, Chuck Ragan, Dave Hause and Andriano), but then the fire alarm went off 3 times during his set...so I'm guessing he was a wee bit distracted.I firmly believe these guys peaked with Maybe I'll Catch Fire (which came out around 10 or 11 years ago) and have been treading water ever since. I mean, the follow-up to This Addiction is an acoustic covers album (Damnesia) of their own material.
Maybe I'll Catch Fire was as good (and in places, better) an album as Husker Du ever put out. For some proof of this, I offer a track from that album called "She Took Him To The Lake."
PLAY LOUD!
Fast & Bulbous, Got Me?
Not so much a review of the content... but IMO, they did an exemplary job on the remasters in the new Pink Floyd Discovery Box Set. In this day and age where 'remaster' means 'brickwall the fuck out of the source material to make it as loud as we fucking can'... these remasters are very dynamic and a real pleasure to listen to.
You're such an audiophile Jack...
A wannabe audiophile
Pink Floyd are a case some other bands I could name should learn from. A load of guys who loathe one another but still seem to manage to protect their legacy....
Machine Head – Unto the Locust
After 2007’s ‘The Blackening’ – awarded ‘album of the decade’ by UK magazine Metal Hammer – Machine Head’s next record seemed destined to disappoint. It’s is refreshing, then, to discover that ‘Unto The Locust’ is such an invigorating album. Choosing to move into new pastures rather than try – and ultimately fail – to top the epic grandeur of their previous release, Machine Head smash their thrash roots into progressive metal, and take their sound a long, long way from the post-thrash urban rumble of their 1994 masterpiece ‘Burn My Eyes’, and album which was – no arguments please – the most accomplished metal debut ever penned. If ‘The Blackening’ was Machine Head’s attempt to match the metallic majesty of ‘Master of Puppets’ for this generation, ‘Unto the Locust’ tempers the fury which the control and sonic tapestries akin to Maiden and – believe it or not – Rush, pointing beyond their characteristic bluster to paint in shades other than anger.
The result sees a band with one foot in the past, and the other striving purposefully forward. ‘Unto The Locust’ is not as devastatingly anthemic as ‘Burn My Eyes’, or as staggeringly epic as ‘The Blackening’. Yet it is ambitious and strident in its own way. Consider opener ‘I Am Hell’. A choral opening gives way to a bullish mid-pace riff overlaid with an harrowing chant, before opening up into a full on thrash cauldron which is as furious – and heavy – as Machine Head has ever sounded. Complex arrangements, beautifully held together by Dave McClain’s remarkable drumming, see the band evolving into a taut, lean and shit kicking machine overlaid with Flynn and Demmel’s frantic shredding. It’s dazzling, exhaustive stuff.
But it’s also a sign as the album as a whole. Early in their career Machine Head specialized in the metal anthem. Yet ‘Unto the Locust’ is not instantly gratifying – there is no ‘Davidian’, ‘Imperium’ or ‘Aesthetics of Hate’ – and rewards repeated listens. This is the sign of band not content to rest on their laurels, and to push the barriers of their sound. Thus ‘Darkness Within’, which eschews the thrashier assaults of their trademarks for a take on raw emotion. Here Flynn puts aside his typical visceral bark in favour of something tenderer, and the band, whilst still heavy, employs a series of arrangements more akin to Springsteen than Slayer. The result is something huge, something invigorating and almost operatic. Consider also album closer ‘Who We Are’, replete with prog leanings and a children’s choir (assembled from the band’s open children). Building and building towards its climax with a crushingly defiant chorus – ‘This is who we are/ This is who I am’ – it demands regular live treatment.
But you’d be mistaken if this desire to push beyond the thrash template has dampened the fury. ‘This Is the End’ is pure hard-core rumble, a hulking riff which most bands would sell their grandmothers to write propelled along at a dizzying speed by a frantic rhythm sections, before giving way to a series of tempos and melodic sections. ‘Locust’ combines a classic riff, instantaneous hook and huge groove into something truly special, and is the sound of a band in control of its compositional skills: pummellingly heavy and persistently melodic. Perhaps most impressive of all, however, is ‘Be Still And Know’. Another epic – and we mean EPIC – big, rolling groove of a crunching riff is given added dynamism by a beautiful and moving chorus. Powerful contrasts – beauty and the beast, metal and melody – work in near perfect symbiosis. Seven albums and almost 20 years in, you wonder where the hunger is coming from.
Slipknot’s Joey Jordison recently claimed that Machine Head are ‘amongst the top 10 metal bands ever’. That’s a big claim, and in truth it’s an overstatement. But in the modern-era – the era post-grunge – you would have to put them amongst the big hitters. Korn faded after their early promise; Max Cavalera-era Sepultura imploded after they hit their earth quaking stride; and Slipknot lost something when they branched into territories more melodic. Surveying the metal scene in 2011, it would certainly be fair to say that Machine Head’s peers Pantera and Fear Factory have undoubtedly been more influential on the blueprint of the modern sound – and the Texas groove masters certainly delivered more anthems – but I’m not sure even those metallic behemoths could claim to have tapped into the beating heart of positive aggression which makes heavy music so irresistible in a way that Robb Flynn and co. have. ‘Unto The Locust’ isn’t Machine Head’s best record - but it’s a damn fine solidification of their place at the top.
Suicide Silence – The Black Crown
The deathcore sub-genre has yielded attraction and repulsion in almost equal measures in recent years. Blending ‘traditional’ death metal with staccato burst of riffage which act as a pulse to the songs, the effect can be the aural equivalent of motion sickness. But it owns you. On ‘The Black Crown’ – their 3rd album – Suicide Silence deliver a collection of focussed and pithy compositions which push forward furious blasts of overkill which almost always manage to steer clear of overwhelming. Death metal purists will never be happen with anything which smacks of trendiness, but in truth much of the criticism levelled at this band focuses as much on their (trendy) dress sense rather than their music – indeed, only a wilful idiot would deny that ‘The Black Crown’ is a focussed, pulverizing blast of metal.
‘Fuck Everything’ – as puerile as it is pugnacious – would be anthemic in any genre. ‘Human Violence’ – with its downtuned, furious riffage and blast beats – achieves an almost inhuman speed, and is punctuated by tasty time-changes to adorn the fury with groove. ‘Slave to Substance’ is a mid-paced jack hammer, and the progressive passages of ‘Cross-eyed Catastrophe’ show the signs of band who could quite easily transcend their formula. Taking the courage to do so would be advisable, because as good as ‘The Black Crown’ is, for much of the time Suicide Silence are not terribly far away from Lamb Of God territory – in truth, The Black Dahlia Murder are doing much more in pushing the boundaries of death metal from within than SS are from the fringes. But it would be churlish to end on a note of criticism in the presence of such an accomplished record – indeed, you have to love a sense of humour in evidence in a band who put ‘muah’ in their lyric sheet! There is plenty of free thinking here. ‘O.C.D’ – an unusual subject matter for a DM band – is truly harrowing, whilst ‘You Only Live Once’ proves that DM can be uplifting and life affirming.
Mastodon – The Hunter
Realising that no-one – least of all the band themselves – could top the ever expanding temporal and sonic tapestries of ‘Crack The Skye’ without straining the limits of what composition can bear and leaping over the boundaries of taste headfirst into ‘up your own ass’ creak, Mastodon have opted to strip everything back for ‘The Hunter’. It’s a glorious middle finger to expectations, a collection of punchy and focussed forward-thinking heaviness from metal’s most copiously brilliant band, a reaction to their proggy leanings which proves that their song-writing talents can be realized in compositions of any length. Oh, and it’s also epically heavy.
Opener ‘Black Tongue’ is anthemic. A series of riffs most bands would sell an organ to pen are driven along by Troy Sander’s shifting, weaving percussive assault and overlain by the crisp, melodic vocals which the band have opted for on their recent records. It sounds like the birth of something which has been gestating in a swamp for millennia, something monstrous but also touchingly – almost achingly – human. It’s followed by a curve-ball of the most pleasant variety: on ‘Curl The Burl’ Mastodon delve into stoner vibes and gargantuan hooks, laying into some seriously heavy Kyuss-esque grooves which hit you in the chest like dawn air. It’s beautifully, spectacularly, uncomplicated in its brilliance. ‘Blasteroid’ – featuring another dazzling riff – grunts, swirls and pummels in a series of oft-kilter polyrhythms, and is easily the most aggressive the band has sounded since ‘Leviathon’ – it’s the sound of Sabbath smashing into Bad Brains through David Gilmor’s amp.
What impresses most is the variety of the band’s sonic palette. ‘Dry Bone Valley’ is outlaw punk; ‘Stargasm’ evokes the floating beauty of Jane’s Addiction, shimmering on the boundaries of what it means to by heavy in every sense of the term; ‘Spectrelight’ – featuring Neurosis’s Scott Kelly – is a slab of primal vengeance; and ‘Octopuss Had No Friends’ is almost a Wagnerian slab of weirdness. Perhaps most evocative of all is the title track, a choral, lyrical ode to loss and mourning which features a solo of such delicate power it thunders. This is a record of beauty, beast and barren, primal heaviness.
Where ‘Crack…’ existed in a timescale which was defiantly its own, ‘The Hunter’ sees a Mastodon which is altogether punchier, more anthemic, but still defiantly un-commercial. And yet, for all the brilliance in evidence here, this is Mastodon’s weakest studio record. In truth, ‘Remission’, ‘Leviathon’, ‘Blood Mountain’ and ‘Crack The Skye’ were all more than the sum of their parts – they contained a self-contained vision, and aesthetic, and sense of purpose which transcended the unique nature of each of their songs. In short, they were ALBUMS. ‘The Hunter’ is not a disjointed record by any means, but it’s more of a collection of songs than a self-contained whole, and it’s consequently not quite as unified aesthetically and emotionally as Mastodon’s other offerings. That being said, even a notch down from ‘kill’ mode, Mastodon can still deliver one of the best records of the year: they’re so talented you could punch them.
From the vaults: Baby Animals – Shaved & Dangerous (1993)
The Baby Animals were the rarest of things: a band that combines balls with pop sensibilities. ‘Shaved & Dangerous’ – their second album – combined huge hooks, sultry guitar work and no frills rock songs to immense effect, and the whole thing oozes class. Opener ‘Don’t Tell Me What To Do’ showcases Suze Demarchi’s smokey vocals, and introduces a sound which is both funkier and crisper than the raucous raw power of their debut album. ‘Buputa’ is a beautiful, twisted hard rock song which shows off the bands musicianship and sounds like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers with added grit; and ‘Backbone’ – with its whip-crack of a riff – is HUGE, passes from rock fury to Kate Bush folk. The combination of one too many mellower moments results in the album sagging in the middle, but with the likes of out and out rockers ‘Stoopid’ and ‘At the End of The Day’ (sung partially in French) around the corner, the Baby Animals soon redeem themselves. ‘Shaved & Dangerous’ was not as direct – or as much unadulterated fun – as their debut, but it is a record which rewards repeated listens and one of considerable substance and impact.
From the vaults: Metallica – Metallica/’The Black Album’ (1991)
‘Ba-da-de-de-dur, ba-da-de-de-dur, ba-da-de-de-dur, ba-dede-dede-de-dedur’. It’s a hell of a riff – as simple as it is powerful – and one which propelled a grubby metallic beast to the heights of a stadium crushing colossus. Whether they ultimately gained more than they lost in the process has been debated pretty much since ‘Enter Sandman’ hit MTV 20 years ago. Whatever side you take on that debate – that Metallica ‘died’ when they decided to write songs that a) had personal lyrical inflections and b) where not 8 minutes long; or that ‘The Black Album’ was the culmination of almost a decade of music revolutionizing heavy metal – it’s pretty hard to deny that it’s a classic record. To note that it’s the biggest selling heavy metal record ever is to be a little disparaging – it’s one of the biggest selling records EVER, in ANY genre. For a band who began life playing as hard, fast and aggressive as possible that’s something of an enigma.
So, they must have ‘sold out’, right? Who really cares? ‘The Black Album’ sold in droves because it contained fucking good songs: yes, it was promoted with lots of singles and videos; and yes, Metallica’s seemingly relentless ability to tour was a contributing factor, but you can’t peddle shit for long, and this record has been bought – and loved – consistently for 20 years. And those songs, man, those songs. The sheer heaviness of ‘Sad But True’ – a song which alternates from delicate to crushing, anthemic to unnerving, and is an equal to any other metal classic – still surprises all of these later. But listening to ‘The Black Album’ now, it’s the deeper cuts that hit hardest: the precision power riffage ‘Holier Than Thou’ – which builds and builds towards a torrent of energy – and savage rage of ‘The Struggle Within’ kick like mules and blow out of the speakers. Both were really thrash songs dressed in Bob Rock’s pretty production, and they snarl through the veneer. Indeed, for all the ‘sell out’ BS it’s hard to deny that ‘The Black Album’ was something of a Trojan horse – an album which smuggled a much heavier form of metal into the households of suburbia. The jackhammer riff of ‘The God That Failed’ – gaga gagagaga GA gaga GA gaga GA ga gaga GA – and primeval stomp ‘Of Wolf And Man’ are the bedrock of that power. And it’s in that heaviness that the real triumph of this record lies. By taking a much heavier form of music to the mainstream – or ramming it in there, you decide – Metallica opened the door for bands like Pantera, Slipknot and Lamb of God to be huge. Who could have imagined that in 1985?
When an album hits big, however, there’s always a downside: familiarity breeds contempt. Even the best songs suffer from being overplayed. ‘Nothing Else Matters’ – a beautiful and more rustic take on power-balladry – and ‘Enter Sandman’ suffer that bane. Metallica’s hardcore fanbase probably barely listen to them these days. That each saw a move forward on the ‘less is more’ approach to song-writing is significant, however, because it encapsulates the success of this record: the recognition that speed and violence do not necessarily equal power. You could argue that Hetfield and co. had recognized that as early as ‘Ride the Lightning’ – featuring mid-paced rumblers like ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and ‘Escape’ and the ballad-mongering ‘Fade To Black’ – but it found its greatest exercise here in the art of concision. ‘The Unforgiven’, ‘Wherever I May Roam’ ‘Through The Never’ and the aforementioned ‘Sandman’ all combined the hallmarks of Metallica’s earlier works – hulking riffs, thundering drums, histrionic solos and Hetfield’s aggressive vocal delivery – but welded it to bigger hooks and a production that left space between the players, allowing the songs to breathe and pulsate, and creating a sound that was cavernous, soaring, huge. Even 20 years on, the production astonishes.
But it’s that overplaying that has diminished the album’s reputation – we’re now so far away from its initial impact that it’s impossible to recapture it. No-one would argue that this album had the impact on music in a creative sense that the band’s earlier work had: it didn’t spawn copyists in the same way that their thrash masterpieces did. In a sense ‘The Black Album’s’ impact was more diffuse than direct. If ‘Kill ‘em All’ marked a beginning and ‘Master of Puppets’ showed heavy metal the possibilities of what it could achieve, ‘The Black Album’ marked an end: an end of heavy metal in its traditional form. It did so by being superlative. In the ‘70s ‘heavy metal’ was an umbrella term for a lot of bands that did not really fit into a pigeonhole: Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath, Rainbow and Judas Priest were all heavy, but they were also very different beasts. It was in 1980 with Priest’s ‘British Steel’ – an album which, like ‘The Black Album’, stripped back the somewhat fissiparous sound to something simpler and welded it to a bigger and crisper production – that heavy metal found a template, both creatively and aesthetically. The twin guitar assault, duel leads, speed, aggression and the sonic boom of the vocals all chrystalized there in a way which they hadn’t done before, and much of the metal of the 80s – at least in the centre-ground – replicated Priest’s mandate mercilessly. In one sense, ‘The Black Album’ was both its nirvana and nadir: the distillation of those component parts of their purest and most powerful, and wedded to the added heaviness of the underground.
That album – combined with the beginning of Maiden’s years in the wilderness and Halford’s exit from Priest – marked the end of a creative paradigm as much as it offered metal new creative opportunities. In the two decades since the genre has splintered into an array of sub-genres – death metal, black metal, grindcore, nu metal, metalcore – each of which have yielded considerable successes. Sometimes greatness doesn’t inspire diffidence but deviance – that Metallica had made ‘The Black Record’ meant that nobody else could do or had to. Loved and hated, revered and reviled in equally measure, it’s an album which opened as many doors as it closed, a capstone on metal’s past which meant that future bands had to forge very different creative paths. When you listen to the songs though, you can’t help but feel the gargantuan weight of its power: seismic, casuistic and boundlessly heavy metal propelled by riff after riff after riff.
I had to blast that record to remind me why I love that band so much having spent a fortnight recovering from ploughing through 'LuLu'. Why Hetfield, WHY????
From the vaults: Killing Joke – What’s This For? (1981)
It’s a truism that most bands, no matter how novel or innovative they first appear, are simply borrowing from the past and re-arranging the component parts in fresh ways. The list of true musical mavericks is a short one, but Killing Joke belong on it. Before The Prodigy, before Ministry, before Skinny Puppy and before N.I.N Killing Joke paved the way for industrial music, blend metal, punk, new wave and electronic in truly pioneering – and frankly disturbing – manner. ‘What’s This For? Was not as vitriolic as their debut, but it showcased the sheer inventiveness of their sound: the synths were downplayed and the songs were now propelled by tribal drumming and leftfield bass lines, all offset by Jaz Coleman’s soap-box-cum-preacher vocals. It’s terrifying stuff, but compelling too. ‘The fall of because’ is disjointed, fractured and angular, constructed from a juggernaut riff, tribal beats, electronic atmospherics and chanted lyrics, it’s as awkward as a rave at a funeral and sounds like post punk glassing new wave. Killing Jokes aesthetic has always been built around loops and loops of sounds which induce a form of hypnotic mania. ‘Butcher’ is a menace of electronica which is as chilling as the eyes of an unsatisfied rapist, and the deliberately repetitive ‘follow the leader’ is the soundtrack to a newsreal of violence. Swirling rhythms, discordant guitar, and frazzled melodies work together to both encapsulate the social turmoil of the time in which it was made and transcend them. Untouchable.
Earth Crisis – Neutralize The Threat
This is the sort of record that makes you happy to be angry. Blending hardcore and metal in ways which are actually interesting, Syracuse crew Earth Crisis have always been something a sore thumb. Initially making albums propounding their straightedge veganism, they ‘turned on’ their hardcore roots in 2000 by making the more metallic ‘Slither’ – and then disbanding. ‘Neutralize The Threat’ – their second ‘reunion’ album and seventh record overall – is the sign of a band who couldn’t care less what the purists think. Eschewing straight-edged lyrics, the band here touch upon heroism and vigilantism, the ethics of self-defence and the Black Panthers. Unique doesn’t come close. The songs here are visceral and achingly sincere. More importantly, they twist and turn on the simplest of ingredient – a great riff, a beautifully placed time changed, uncomplicated yet poignant lyrics. It’s difficult to make it look this easy. The title track is founded on a juicy riff of tar thick heaviness, ‘100 Kiloton Blast’ evokes Crowbar’s tortured Sabbath rumble at its finest, whilst ‘Total War’ and ‘Counterstrike’ are as brutal and heavy as any metal band – the different is that Earth Crisis’s hardcore concision makes the whole more impactful. Not everything is top tier – ‘Askari’ and ‘Raze’ struggle to dent the memory – but ‘Neutralize The Threat’ is certainly one of the year’s more pleasant (and pissed off) surprises.
Metallica's Black album IS a great album.
Even taking the sales figures and putting them to one side, it's full of great songs in a variety of rock styles and tempos. Metallica 'purists' may lament the passing of Cliff and point to Kill 'Em All, Ride The Lightning and Master of Puppets as the salad days of the band, but for me those records...there IS an intensity to them that the band perhaps never replicated post-1986, in terms of raw fury and speed. However, style-wise those three records had a very narrow focus, certainly in comparison to what followed. This may or may not be a bad thing depending on who you talk to. I can vividly remember when those first three records were released, and it was a wakeup call when thinking about the type of hard rock/heavy metal bands that were getting the most play/press at the time. I mean, there was no confusing of or lumping in Metallica with MTV friendly acts like Ratt, Quiet Riot, Poison and the like. Even Maiden and Priest at their mid-1980s heaviest fell a bit short of matching Metallica's intensity.
The Black album was a bit of a quantum leap for Metallica. Shades of it can be found on ...And Justice For All, but the Black album was just such a great all-around effort. Perhaps it WAS created with a larger audience in mind, but to my ears it didn't necessarily rock any less or sacrifice the band's integrity because of it (not an easy feat, either). For all the queasiness of Some Kind Of Monster, the Black album is while Metallica and Bob Rock got it right. The slower tempos and concentration on melodies was a bit shocking at first, but the focus placed on these aspects resulted in stellar tracks like Nothing Else Matters, which is taken so slowly and precisely at the beginning...building tension...when the guitar solo at the end arrives, it's a release. Excellent sense of pacing and dynamics, and quite removed from the earlier records where it was an out-and-out blitz. And Hetfield actually SINGS, rather than grunting. And this is just one example - the rest of the tracks are just as strong.
In truth, the Black album is probably the only Metallica album I still (on occasion) listen to from start-to-finish these days. I mean, yeah, it was played to fucking death on the radio, but so was Led Zep IV, The Who's Who's Next and AC/DC's Back In Black; doesn't mean they weren't exceptional records.
Last edited by Terry; 12-04-2011 at 08:58 AM.
Scramby eggs and bacon.
Bang on the money. That's exactly what I was driving at: being overplayed doesn't lesson greatness, nor does the fact that Metallica became a bit of a soap opera in the earl 00s. And despite the plush production, it's a fucking heavy album - I mean, I like HEAVY, HEAVY music, but people can confuse extremity and heaviness. A death metal band is more extreme, but there's so much clout on the Black record. It's juddering.
The first five Metallica records were great (crappy sound on '...Justice' aside) and the Black record was the captstone. I like the records after that, but no-one would put them in the same league.
Chthonic – Takasago Army
If there’s one corner of the metal universe I really don’t feel all that qualified to comment on then it’s Black Metal. Try as I might, it’s just never really held my attention: it’s so overtly earnest it feels faintly ridiculous to me. And then I heard this record. Blending extreme metal, keyboards and traditional Taiwanese folk music together, Chthonic adopt the grandiose soundscapes and melodrama of black metal to tell the tale of the Takasago Army, a fearless band of warriors adopted into the Japanese Imperial Army during the second war and subsequently at the forefront of the chaos that result from the South Pacific’s implosion in its aftermath, culminating in a series of martyrdoms at the hands of the Chinese. It’s a brutal and epic story set to brutal and epic music.
Opening with Taiwanese orchestration, the album quickly passes into ‘Legacy of the Seedig’, a piece of tort extreme metal as you’ll hear anywhere in Scandinavia. ‘Taken’ blends traditional instrumentation to dark keyboards and metallic rumble, a potent and malevolent cocktail which evokes Mercyful Fate, Celtic Frost and hints at Maiden. The lyrics are perfectly sparse for such a war torn subject matter, and the use of multiple styles – from Nordic chants, near spoken growls and banshee screams – makes the vocals another instrument in the band’s sonic tapestry. ‘Broken Jade’ is a jet black epic and ‘Quell the Souls in Sing Ling Temple’ is as cinematic in its scope as it is harrowing in its impact. The whole here is much more than the sum of its parts – Chthonic have delivered an album here, not just a collection of songs. And it may be a great one. One thing’s for sure, however. That an album this ambitious, this captivating and this fresh was made in a culture where being in a metal band means facing a hell of a lot more hostility than the odd sneer or disapproving look is a testament of Chthonic’s passion. That passion oozes from ‘Takasago Army’, which is easily one of 2011’s best heavy records.
From the vaults: Tad – Inhaler (1993)
If ever a band sounded like they looked it was Tad: fat, sweaty, menacing dudes seemingly more likely to be caught peeping at a ladies aerobics class than pressing their hands into the Hollywood walk of fame. Still, the music matched the (lack of) aesthetic: dirty, honed down 4 minute rock ‘n’ roll songs performed with thunder and oozing in heart. I’d forgotten just how good – and immediate – this record is: Tad blended punk and metal together in a way which Therapy? would perfect a year later. In a sense they were everything good about grunge: uncomplicated, dirty, broken and beaten heavy music stripped of all the sheen, hyperbole and pretense of Sunset Strip. ‘Grease Box’ rumbles into life on a battered bass line and features an almost apologetic, weazing chorus (they really couldn’t give a fuck) and a rusty guitar. No-one would pretend that Tad had the potential of a Nirvana or a Stone Temple Pilots, and nor did they possess the generation-saving pretentions of Eddie Vedder – but there’s a lot to be said for the unassumingly determined, and Tad occupy the same territory as Mudhoney in that regard. Live with their record for a while and it will own you. The crooked melody of ‘Leafy Incline’, the unbalanced rifforama of ‘Ulcer’ or the concrete slab of power ‘Just Bought the Farm’ all shudder from the speakers like that awkward dude down the street who the local kids run away from. By the time you get to the dirty thunder of the guitar melody in ‘Paregoric’ Tad are sure to be your seventh favourite band. And that’s precisely where they always wanted to be.
Black Stone Cherry – Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea.
Every band comes to a crossroads where they have to decide if they want to keep evolving organically or if they want to be steered towards the big time. On this, their 3rd album, BSC have opted for the latter: from the styling which is evident on the linear-note photo or the presence of song-writing credits for a series of extra-band ‘hit makers’ (Bob Marlette and John 5 amongst them), what we have here is a band repackaged and whipped into an arena smashing state.
It’s all topped off with a frankly huge production. Kentucky’s Southern Rock sons have never sounded so crisp, so concise, so…………..pristine. And in a sense it works. Opener ‘White Trash Millionaire’ – with its huge chorus and huger back beat – is a stripper anthem if ever there was one; and the nitro charged riffage of ‘Change’ is aural caffene. Hell, even the slightly kitsch tale of little girl lost (‘Such a Shame’) kicks like a mule underneath BSC’s shiny new clothes. But they’ve lost a lot in the wrapping. ‘Killing Floor’ – booming production aside – is a slice of glib angst and slick defiance which Nickleback peddle so well, whilst ‘In My Blood’ is a frankly appauling piece of trite heartache. There’s a sense of style over substance, too. But worst of all is ‘Blame it on the Boom Boom’ – easily the most cringe-worthy piece of nasty talk from rock’s most unlikely luvaman. No-one has ever looked to BSC for great lyrics, but we’re straight out of the big book of Southern rock clichés here: mama’s cry, hearts are broken, lemons are squeezed, roads are open and driven in daddy’s borrowed car. Tired? Yup. Effective? Bound to be – this record will sell in droves.
You just hope that the people who buy it pick up BSC’s earlier records, too (especially their bollock busting, riff shitting debut). There they were Southern Rock’s 3rd coming: a sloppy, gnarly, shot in the arm for a genre suffering a perpetual drought. With a rhythm section owing more to metal than blues, they even evoked the spirit of Molly Hatchet. Now it’s more Kid Rock. And that’s fine – they have the hooks to exist in a radio rock world. But this leaves a taste tinged with regret at what might have been – there is a sense of compromise, of packaging, that what we have here is a product not an album. It’s done with confidence and pinache: but will it be remembered? Yes, actually, but probably against your will. Try as I might, all that’s in my head today is: ‘If you wake up in the mornin’ in somebody else’s room room/ Blame it on the boom boom.’
Lord have mercy.
Assaulter – Boundless.
Assaulter are retro without being nostalgic. They evoke the spirit, the atmospherics of ‘80s metal in a way that is more tribute than homage. And by ‘80s metal, we don’t mean Sunset Strip. We mean a world of fanzines, of late night college radio and low production budgets, a world in which naïve charm and dogged determination ruled over technical prowess. All that comes into your head here are fanzines, bullet-belts, biker jackets and sown-on patches. Fuck yeah! A three piece featuring band members named G. Beserker and L. Hellfinder, Assaulter channel the spirit of Anvil, Mercyful Fate, Venom and Exodus. Their sound is dirt raw, gnarly and vicious. Indeed, the riff to opening tune ‘Entrance’ could cut through steel. Plank-spanking leads from the school of Schenker and more drum fills than you can, erm, shake a stick at are the rule of the day here – this is the glory of heavy metal in all its melodrama and twisted brilliance. Are any of the songs here ever going to win an Ivor Novello award? No, but that’s hardly the point. It’s all about the feel, the hypnotic power of the heaviness purely for its own sake. If you don’t headbang to ‘Dying Day’ or stand arms aloft ready to fight the world to ‘Exalt the Master’ then the 14 year old boy inside you died a long time ago. This nod to the world of pre-thrash metal is more substance than style, and it may be one of 2011’s metal highlights. Epic closer ‘The Great Subterfuge’ has a whiff of the Nordic about it: in the style of Celtic Frost, Bathory or Mercyful Fate, Assaulter have crafted a giant from the simplest of parts – big, fuck off riffs. Let’s hope this look to the past is the shape of things to come.
BANG THY HEAD!
The Answer – Revival
Album number 3 from Ireland’s hard rockers was recorded stateside, and sees the band expanding their sound. Elements of gospel and country creep in, and whole affair is more expansive and bluesier, developments felt most keenly on spacey closer ‘Light Are Down’. That’s not to say that there’s a radical departure in sound here – fans of the band’s much rawer, straight-up rocking first two albums will not be in for too much of a shock. But the cumulative effect of those changes – small as they may be – makes for an album which feels different from the sheer joy of the first two. As the budget has gotten bigger, so has the production. There are layers and layers of guitars here, and multiple vocal tracks: in an objective sense this may make for a record which sounds better, but in sounding bigger The Answer have also lost some of their power. Blues rock becomes more effective as it becomes simpler. Indeed, there’s a sense of moments being killed by overthinking here: combined with the lavish artwork featuring a rather preened and posed band, you get the sense that this would have sounded a whole lot better if it was looser.
There are certainly some spectacular moments. ‘Waste Your Tears’ is a blitzkrieg of guitars and sees the band on full tilt, the passion matching the playing. ‘Caught on the Riverbed’ equally sees the band on fire. ‘Nowhere Freeway’ (featuring a duet with Saint Jude’s Lynne Jackaman) is measured, beautiful and powerful. Elsewhere, we’re presented with some damn fine rock ‘n’ roll. But there’s something missing. The Answer – like Thunder before them – are destined to be an enigma of the heavy scene. Here is a band that has everything – the chops, the tunes, the songwriting talents – but falls several steps short of greatness. They’re enjoyable when you want eviscerating; over-cooked when you want raw and tender. All of the trimmings here seem to come from buying their own hype. Thus Cormac Neeson in the linear note:
'On the 1/1/2011 we were a band on a mission, and that mission was to revive this all encompassing force that we call rock ‘n’ roll……and you know what? That mission begins with the album you now have in your possession.'
If that’s the case, rock ‘n’ roll is in a dangerous situation. By nature hungry, feral and dangerous, ‘Revival’ is too flabby and comfortable to be its saviour. It’s worth your time, but not as much as The Answer’s first two records.
Megadeth – Thirteen
By the time that most bands get to their – you guessed it – thirteenth album, fans buy out of a sense of obligation and nostalgia not really believing that anything on it will revival the glory days. Such is the consistency of Dave Mustaine, however, that much of the music he’s made in his 40s is more than capable of living up to that which he cranked out in his 20s. Here he’s given us something joyous – a collection of anthemic, rifftastic, invigorating heavy metal tunes so well produced the boom out of the speakers. As with ‘United Abominations’ (2007) and ‘Endgame’ (2009) there are some songs on ‘Thirteen’ which don’t just deserve a place in the ‘deth canon, they demand it. Opener ‘Sudden Death’ is an amalgam of crunching riffs, incredible shredding and the archetypical Mustaine snarl, a brew of muscular thrash repeated on the vicious blast of ‘Never Dead’: this is Megadeth at their most concise, most venomous, and consequently most energized. Elsewhere we’re reminded that this was always much, much more than a thrash band. Mustaine has always been able to pen anthems at the slower tempos, too. Featuring a juggernaut of a riff, ‘We the People’ is all off-kilter hammer shocks; and ‘New World Order’ conjures a Judas Priest-like ability to create the presence of an epic in 4 minutes. Mustaine is staggeringly talented when he’s this focussed.
So, ‘Thirteen’ is yet another Megadeth classic, then? Not quite. Whereas ‘United Abominations’ and ‘Endgame’ saw Megadeth delivering the complex and epic thrash that they’re best at, ‘Thirteen’ is a step to the right: an album made of predominantly straight-ahead, no frills rock songs – it’s the ‘Countdown To Extinction’ to ‘Endgame’s’ ‘Rust in Peace’, if you will. In itself, there’s nothing wrong with that because Mustaine has always been talented enough to make Megadeth work in multiple guises. Indeed, ‘Public Enemy No.1’ is a crushing heavy metal anthem which you’ll be humming for days, ‘Guns, Drugs and Money’ and ‘Whose Life (Is It Anyways)?’ is the kind of hard rock streamlined metal they began penning around the time of ‘Youthansia’ and ‘Black Swan’ is a great song in any genre. Period. Most bands would kill to have these hooks – and these riffs – in their arsenals. The problem, however, is that the immediacy of the tunes is lessened by their being lumped together. Thirteen 3-4 minutes songs performed at very similar tempos is just too many, and the result is something of a long-winded affair – losing the likes of ‘Wrecker’ and ‘Fast Lane’ would have strengthened the whole, and made each of the tunes more memorable. Mustaine has given the fans what they wanted (and many bands could take a leaf from his book), but he’s given them too much of it. Sometimes the dependable teaters on the dull, but that’s the constraint that comes with being a legend: it becomes almost impossible to surprise people the way you did with your breakthrough records.
‘Thirteen’, then, is a good record, a very good record, but it’s not a great one. When – like Megadeth - you’re legacy is already set, I suppose in the end it doesn’t really matter. And when you’re cranking this – which you will! – you’ll probably not care either: the anthems just keep coming and coming. An air-guitar frenzy and a sore neck await you.
RATTLE YOUR GODAMNED HEADS!
For anyone who gives a shit, here's my albums of 2011:
1) Tesseract - One
Progressive and hooky; heavy and beautiful; cereberal and immediate. This was just a dazzling debut.
2) Trap Them - Darker Handcraft
Hardcore of the most evil variety. If you could distill violence to its essence, it would sound like this.
3) Chthonic - Takasago Army
The cinematic weight of black metal applied to the cinematic drama of war and loss. Powerful in a way that music often doesn't reach.
4) Mastodon - The Hunter
Their weakest album, but it's still chocked full of epic tunes. Riff, riff, riff - thunderously heavy, and at times desperately moving.
5) Anthrax - Worship Music.
Balls. Out. Heavy. Metal. Their best record in 20 years, and possibly the best 'thrash revival' record of recent years.
6) Krisiun - The Great Execution
Corn free death metal of the most brutal variety. This scarred and scared me.
7) Machine Head - Unto The Locust
The nost progressive thing they've done, and the most relentless. Pure metal fury, but perhaps lacking the big anthem moments we expect from a MH record.
8) Black Breath - Heavy Breathing.
Hardcore inspired thrash at its nastiest - music devoid of all pretention.
9) Crowbar - Sever the Wicked Hand
Heavier than anyone and channelling the spirit of Sabbath. Easily the most consistent record of their career.
10) Cavalera Conspiracy - Blunt Force Trauma
Not as good as their debut. But still fucking shit up like only Max Cavalera can.
11) Hate Eternal - Phoenix From the Ashes.
The record you wished Morbid Angel had made.
12) Revocation - Chaos of Forms
Masterful playing, masterful songs, maximum energy.
Honourary mentions: Michael Monroe, Megadeth, Foo Fighters, Opeth (still processing that), Will Haven, Wolves in the Thrown Room.
Foo Fighters – Wasting Light
When you’ve been in the biggest band in the world (twice), have more awards and accolades than you know what to do with, have run out of walls for the platinum records, and have sold out the biggest venues in the world, what the fuck do you do? If you’re Dave Grohl, apparently you go back to the garage. When most rock bands do that, disaster unfolds: the result is usually and over-produced and under-inspired collection of flabby songs which have been expensively recorded to sound dirty. Not so, here. ‘Wasting Light’ – the 7th and most consistently brilliant of any Foo Fighters record – is a collection of concise, focussed and skilfully hewn rock ‘n’ roll songs. It’s so immediate that when you hit the ‘play’ button you are reminded what it felt like to discover hard rock at 12 years old all over again.
At first, it’s difficult to see what exactly makes this so glaringly superior to every Foo’s records since 1997’s ‘The Colour & The Shape’. In reality, the component parts are the same as they always are: soft/heavy dynamics, clean vocals and screams, 4/4 rhythms, pop-rock hooks and more testosterone than you could shake your head too. Indeed, ‘Rope’ or ‘These Days’ could have been on any Foo’s record. The difference here, however, is twofold: 1) the whole album has been recorded on tape, and it consequently feels human, you get the nuances, the imperfections which come without the alienating perfection of the pro-tools age, and the subsequent warmth makes you want to explore and explore these songs; and 2), Pat Smear is back. Smear not only makes this a more of a guitar-player record, he adds little tonal parts and plays underneath the rest of the band so that the songs have a different feel and glow to them than they would have in his absence. Producer Butch Vig was clearly wise to this, and has only accepted the heavier side of Dave Grohl, presenting us with a very live feeling collection of 3 minutes burst of adrenalin. ‘White Limo’ is a demented Queen of the Stone Age bark which could peel wall-paper, ‘Walk’, with its jangling, anthemic riff, is Tom Petty on steroids, and the monstrous ‘Bridge Burning’ is what Dave Grohl does best: take the Cheap Trick formula, and saturate it in piss ‘n’ vinegar. The result is so simple and so glorious: a veritable feast of genuine fist aloft anthem moments.
In truth, however, it’s the quieter moments that kick hardest. Krist Novoselic appears on ‘I Should Have Known’, a tender tribute to Grohl’s childhood friend and later roadie, Jimmy Swanson, and is easily the most beautiful song Grohl has ever penned. ‘Miss the Misery’ evokes ‘…Color’s’ richly textured dark pop, and ‘Dear Rosemary’ (featuring Bob Mould) has a hook that just keeps coming. This is a band which has grown up without becoming a grey: a band that can write near perfect 3 minute hard rock songs which are taut, brawny and full of gristle. Given that the Foo’s are a band for the everyman, by rights this should be everyone’s album of the year.
From the vaults: Flylfeaf – Flyleaf (2007)
Flyleaf’s sound is an amalgam of emo, grunge and alt.rock processed through an acute knack for pop sensibilities. Wrapping their scuzzy guitars and atmospherics around frankly huge hooks, their debut was an assault of infectiously catchy 3 minute globules of anger and lament. What separates them for so many of the other bands existing for the teen market, however, is that. They. Fucking. Mean. It. ‘Fully Alive’, for example, sounds HUGE, an orchestra of crunchy guitars and uncomplicated lyrics which hit hard – there’s no saccharine angst here. ‘I’m So Sick’ is a blast of furious power-chords and alt.rock melody lines and – as with all of the songs here – is taken up a level or 10 by Lacey Mosley’s beautiful, vulnerable swoon of a voice. Part Celtic, part gothic, once her pipes hook you there’s no escape – it makes for an experience which is very immediate, and somehow more human. You just can’t argue with the dark dynamism in the melodies driving ‘Cassie’ or ‘I’m Sorry’, and the floating, effervescent beauty of ‘Sorrow’ is the sound of a band who have found their own sound.
As with most debut records, there are too many ideas here, and the better ones often don’t always win out (see ‘Red Sam’). But if you can convincingly reference The Cure, The Cranberries, Queen Adrena, Placebo and The Smashing Pumpkins on your first record, you’re a band to watch. I imagine that the average Flyleaf fan is a 14 year old girl whose parents don’t understand her – well, they’ve just hooked a slightly jaded twenty-something metalhead, too.
There are currently 4 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 4 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote