Album Reviews

[binnie]

Binnie’s Dirty Dozen: Skid Row – Slave To The Grind (1991)

I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard this record – the memory is vivid I can almost smell the room I was in. In 1992, I was on a family holiday in Cornwall, a chocolate box part of England full of pastoral scenery and cozy, nook-like villages. Walking into the record shop of the town where we were staying, I heard something so out-of-place in those surroundings, so gargantuan, that I HAD to have it. I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited by a sound since – the voice just owned me. A damp little shop in which a young, long haired (and I now realize, stoned) man was going crazy headbanging to this radical, almighty sound of blazing riffs and raucous vocals – ‘Psycho Love’, the punk/metal pitbull which showcased all that was great about this band. I saw the CD cover on the playlist, found a copy in the store, and promptly walked over to buy it. ‘Woaaaah, little dude’ – blondie said, in his West Country accent – ‘this is going to rip your head off’. He wasn’t wrong.

Put into its proper context, this much more metallic, aggressive sound was something of a sideways leap rather than a march forward for Skid Row, whose debut record had been a major hit several years earlier. If that record – which had multiple points of contact with the LA sound of the ‘80s – had displayed more than a healthy respect for the poppier stylings of Kiss, The Scorpions and Cheap Trick, on album number 2 Skid Row dirtied up their attire (and their hair) and turned up the Judas Priest elements in their music. The band served up a two-guitar attack that was inspired by Halford/Downing: killer riffs, serious shredding, and contrasting styles – the one (Dave Sabo) – about flash and speed, the other – Scotti Hill – about feel and poise. Like Guns ‘N’ Roses – whose heals they were now clearly chasing – the band added more than a little punk into the sound (courtesy of bassist Rachel Bolan’s record collection) to make the music about feel and grit.

As vibrant as this sounded – and still sounds – it was as much a sign of the times as their debut had been in 1988: plaid shirts were a comin’, and Guns’ much more abrasive sound of psycho rock had been de-rigueur for a couple of years. The LA moments are still present. ‘Get the Fuck Out’ was pure Motley Crue groupie destroying, and this is an album which features not 1, not 2, but 3 power ballads. But at least those ballads were not the saccharine tosh of ‘la, la, I love you’ or the cynical ‘let’s write this for radio play’ which had become some commonplace at the turn of the ‘90s – on ‘Quicksand Jesus’ (the pick of the bunch), listeners were treated to a musing on faith that was beautiful and balanced. Lyrically, ‘Slave…’ was in-step with another sound of the moment: thrash. Gone were the songs about girls and booze (for the most part), and in were lyrics about power, social ills and anger. And the production – provided once again by Michael Wagner – whilst rawer than most of the LA bands, was still HUGE.

But then again, Skid Row were fronted by a huge personality in Sebastian Bach. Dave ‘the Snake’ Sabo and Rachel Bolan may have penned tunes that were more than a cut about the average US metal band of the ‘80s, but without Bach’s ADD personality and unholy screams, Skid Row would never have been such a powerful and maniacal force. Bach is in the ascendant here in what must be one of the best metal vocal performances ever committed to record (just listen to ‘Wasting Time’, a song that whispers and roars at once). The album’s juddering 1-2 opener of ‘Monkey Business’ and the title track are songs which demand to be cranked to the point where it hurts. On the former, a bubbling rage is powered by a herculean riff that sounds like Sunset Strip turned into crack whore; on the latter, we get a punk drive pseudo-thrash for the everyman – ‘fuck the world’ may be a moronic sentiment, but sometimes it feels good to be a moron! 20+ years on, it’s the deep cuts which surprise you: the sheer power of ‘The Threat’ (with its shrieking vocal and buzz-saw riff), the crunching heaviness of ‘Livin’ On A Chain Gang’, and the G’N’R debauched punk of ‘Psycho Love’ are all metal songs which – like Skid Row – deserve to be remembered as far more than just a sign of the times. There was some serious weight to this metal, it was anger that you could internalise, enjoy and use to positive ends. It’s been one of my best friends ever since.

[Seshmeister]

The album starts brilliantly but for me there is too much filler on it to make it a classic.

My memory of this album was the week it came out and walking into a rock bar on a Friday night that had Slave to the Grind blasting out and nearly being litterally blown back as the staff opened the door - worth mentioning the excellent production which was a big part of it.

I thought Michael Wagner was the best around at that point.

[binnie]

Yeah, I'd never called it an out-and-out classic - it's the least 'classic' of the 'Dirty Dozen' I'm going to review. But it's one of my favourite albums, which is something slightly different.

It's a very good album though. There are some absolutely excellent songs on there.........

[binnie]

Binnie’s Dirty Dozen: Fear Factory – Demanufacture (1995)

I’ll put my cards straight down on the table: I think that this is one of the most important metal albums ever recorded. When we think about the ‘90s, it is usually Pantera who are given the accolade of pushing metal forward. At a time when thrash had run out of steam and nu metal became a distraction, their reinvigoration of the tradtional elements of metal into something vibrant was certainly pivotal to our genre’s evolution – when you listen to mainstream metal today, you’ll hear a singer who wants to be Phil Anselmo (and writes lyrics like him); and a band who syncopate guitar and bass drums. But Fear Factory were just as important. If anything, their double-bass drum pattern template is more vital in today’s metal – Raymond Herrara must be the most under-heralded musician in metal’s history – and Burton C Bell’s combination of both growled and sung vocals – here was a man part angel and part demon – has become the norm. Every metalcore band owes him some series respect.

‘Demanufacture’ was Fear Factory’s second album, and their finest hour. It paired down the speed and riffage of thrash into something more focused, more crunching, and powerful; and welded those metallic elements to a wider sonic spectrum, borrowing heavily from the industrial darkness of Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy and Gary Numan. The result was both atmospheric and brutally heavy. The title track displays Dino Cazares’ slabs of stabbing and slashing walls of guitar amalgamated with clinical precision into Herrara’s rhytmic assault – this was a monstrously heavy display of aggression whose rhythms own you and envelop you as you listen. The rhythmic infection of ‘Self Bias Resistor’ – which still sounds vital 20 years on – is equally captivating. But Fear Factory had more than just aggression. Here Bell’s chorus displayed a serious hook, and the use of claustrophobic samples elevated the aggression to something very powerful indeed. ‘Zero Signal’ sounds like an alternative soundtrack to Blade Runner: pummeling, frenzied rhythms – this was heavier than anything in 1995 – are offset by melodic angst, and there’s something disturbing lurking over the sound. This was the sound of thrash-based metal made vital, and inspiring, again – ‘H-K’ and ‘Pisschrist’ are so scabrous you can barely believe their a generation old. I’m not sure there’s been a US band since who can match them.

Beyond the musicianship and the innovation, what strikes you most about these songs is how perfectly the dynamics are executed. A lot of extreme metal is complex, but it can veer towards the forgetable. Fear Factory have always managed to by-pass that. On ‘Replica’, for example, the hook is gargantuan – ‘THERE. IS. NO. LURRRRVE’ – here was extreme music you sing. And at mid-paced – witness the overwhelmingly abrasive riff to ‘Body Hammer’ - they were equally captivating. By way of contrast, ‘A Theory For Pain’ is an industrial hymn, a staggering 9 minutes which sound like machines crying. Beautiful and heavy in every sense of the word.

Lyrically, Fear Factory have always created dystopian visions of machines taking over. This was more than a gimmick, and in lesser hands it could get in the way of the music. Like the best science fiction, this was art used an allegory used to reflect on the ills of the society in which it was written. The aesthetic made metal vital again at a time when plaid shirts had rendered it weakened. To a 13 year old me, ‘Demanufacture’ demonstrated that Heavy Metal could be art – a classical display of aggression not just for aggression’s sake, but which had the power to make the world a better place. The first time I heard it, it felt like a brave new world. And in 2014, I think that is the world we inhabit.

[binnie]

Binnie’s Dirty Dozen: Metallica – ‘…..And Justice For All’ (1988)

When I first heard this album in May 1993, it was the most powerful piece of art I’d ever encountered. Maybe that’s why music can mean so much to us: we experience the emotional richness of the adult world in aural form before we do so in film, art or great literature. As familiar as I was with heavy music – Sabbath, Priest, Maiden, AC/DC – this was a record which was just MORE in every department: more heavy, more powerful, more epic, more……………inspiring. But it wasn’t just the aggression, or the monumental, statuesque heaviness of the compositions which hit me: it was the rawness of this album. Metallica here sounded vulnerable, dark (this is easily their darkest record) and wounded. I didn’t know that this was a band in grief (following the death of Cliff Burton), but I felt an emotional core to this music that I’d never heard before. I’ve rarely heard its equivalent since. That wounded nature is the source of ‘….Justice’s power. But it is also the source of its imperfections. The terrible mix – over which Hetfield and Ulrich were clearly wrestling for control and handling their grief by diminishing Newsted’s bass to the point of irrelevance – mars what is a tremendous collection of music. Given how the ‘Garage Days’ EP had sounded a year early – luscious, bass heavy, and fat – it really is a travesty that the band allowed their work to see the light of day in that form. Not that it mattered to me in 1993……

In one sense, ‘…Justice’ followed the template laid down by ‘Ride The Lightning’ (1984) and ‘Master of Puppets’: fast opener, followed by epic title track, followed by mid-paced bruiser, followed by power-ballad; a sign off with an epic instrumental and an out-and-out thrasher. That template here was stretched to overkill – it was almost as if, in their grief, Hetfield/Ulrich were trying to be more metal than metal itself. The songs are spiraling, progressive, and at times an endurance test. For some ears, where ‘Master…’ was the perfect balance of everything that made Metallica great, ‘…Justice’ was the sound of too much. For others, this was metal being pushed further into new creative realms. Whichever side of the debate you fall on, it is hard to deny that ‘….Justice’ is Hetfield’s best collection of riffs, riffs which are fired off with maniacal intensity and near superhuman rhythmic attack. It is also Hammett’s best collection of solos – he was on fire here, adding tone and texture alongside the hyper, shred-heavy energy which was impressive even the most finger-fancy of metallic of decades.

‘Blackened’ (whose main riff was provided by new bass player Jason Newsted) rips out of the speakers, with Hetfield’s sun-scorched vocals sounding terrifyingly hyper-masculine; ‘Harvester Of Sorrow’ - which features an absolute monster of a riff – is a fat, beast of a song that could crush cities at a thousand paces; whilst ‘One’ proved that this was more than some bonehead thrash band, a symphonic piece of music which tackles the poignancies of the human condition in a way which is as delicate and tender as it is savage and crunching. 25 years on, it’s the deep cuts – the tunes which the band rarely plays – which really impress you. ‘Shortest Straw’ – the nightmare tale of the McCarthy persecutions – is a muscular thrash which features at least two of the very best metal riffs of the ‘80s; ‘Eye of The Beholder’ adds rhythmic sophistication to metallic rage – it sounds like a militia battery; whilst closer ‘Dyers Eve’ is the record’s simplest moment – a pure thrash overdrive which wouldn’t have sounded out of place of the band’s debut, ‘Kill ‘Em All’ (1983). Yet to these ears, it is the title track that elevates ‘…Justice’ to ‘classic’ status. Too long, you say? Not to me: it’s as good as metal can be. Nigh on 10 minutes of progressive, challenging and ambitious heaviness perfectly matched by the magnitude of its subject-matter. The combination of Ulrich’s drum tattoo and Hetfield’s riffs (what RIFFS!) combine to make something Wagnerian in scale.

Following on from ‘Master….’ ‘Justice’ was undoubtedly anti-climatic in 1988. But you could make the case that 25 years later, ‘…Justice’ has been the more influential album.
Metallica have a lot of firsts to their name – first thrash album, first extreme metal band to invade the mainstream, and so on – but in 1988 they created what is perhaps the first progressive metal album. And it’s yet to be given it’s due. Given that progression has seen the most important and stratospheric evolution of metal in the decades since, we have to see ‘…Justice’ as something of a watershed moment. Dream Theatre, Gojira, Meshuggah, Mastodon…….all of those bands’ pedigree can be traced to this record. Given that importance, a remixed and remastered version of ‘….Justice’ is long overdue. Although they’re regularly accused of being ‘sellouts’, it is worth remarking that Metallica have never fully reissued their back-catalogue in the ‘special edition’ formats which record companies love so dearly. Surely this is one record on which the makeover would be – ahem – justified? I, for one, would love to hear what could have been: one of the great metal records sounding as good as it could.

[binnie]

Binnie’s Dirty Dozen: Sepultura – Chaos AD (1993)

I received this album as a Christmas present in 1993. I’m pretty sure that my parents didn’t see me until at least New Year, emerged as I was in a headphone-induced womb of anger from the first listen. Brazil’s metal bruisers had already made a brace of thrash metal classics – ‘Beneath The Remains’ (1988) and ‘Arise’ (1990) – but on album number 5 they truly transcended the genre. Here the compositions were simplified (at a time when the move in thrash was to go larger and more complex) and metal’s abrasiveness was amplified by the direct blunt force trauma of post-punk and hardcore. You can hear Discharge, Bad Brains, and the Circle Jerks here, alongside bands with a more angular aesthetic like Killing Joke, Helmet and The Dead Kennedys. This was a dramatic departure from the sound of the Big 4 of thrash which had dominated this kind of metal to that point. But the simplicity brought with it power, and a more crunching, rugged form of heaviness. That immediacy – and political clout – only enhanced the muscular venom of Max Cavalera’s and Andreas Kisser’s Rottweiler riffs. ‘Chaos AD’ is an absolutely furious record, perfectly suited to the machine-gun to the wall take within to its lyrical matter.

Opener ‘Refuse/Resist’ is catapulted into life by drummer Iggor Cavalera’s grinding rhythms and is one of the most bombastic blasts of metallic aggression ever recorded, the sort of music that makes you think you could take on the riot squad. And win. ‘Territory’ is a fine example of what can be done with simplicity: how can something so uncomplicated sound so gargantuan? A dinosaur paced song which sounds equally bestial. A truly incendiary clout. There is also a hardcore injection into the thrashier tracks: ‘Biotech Is Godzilla’ (co-written with Jello Biafra) is a warp-speed breed of lunacy; whilst ‘Slave The New World’ is a genuine metal classic – no-one sounded like this in 1993, the march of a thousand jack boots over the face of the world’s oppressors, and the perfect example of how Max Cavalera’s voice was perfectly suited to the tone of the music. 20 years on, it’s the variety of the assault here that really stands out. ‘Propaganda’ is a crackling kerosene burn, as much early ‘80s post punk as extreme metal, and ‘We Who Are Not As Others’ is the closest thing that metal has ever produced to a hymn – a discordant, deconstructed mantra of the underdog.

The whole recorded is propelled by Iggor Cavalera’s drumming. Rarely has a musician been so distinctive, injecting tribal beats into the metallic melee – even Slioknot’s army of percussionists don’t come close. Welded to the simple but powerful riffs, the immediacy of this music is like a headbutt to the bridge of the nose. It’s a unified body of sound that forces you to react. On songs like ‘Manifest’ – which is essentially a dystopian news report about the massacre of inmates in Brazil’s Carandiru prison and the subsequent cover up – the band’s sound almost cinematic, with the music, like the topic feeling almost broken and wounded. Conversely, on ‘Kaiowas’ – a largely acoustic instrumental about an Indian tribe who committed mass suicide in protest at the government trying to take away their land – the same anger is expressed in a beautiful, rhythmically propulsive manner. Heavy in every sense of the term.

Hearing all of this at 11 years old, I took great comfort in the fact there were people out there as angry as I was. Once the blinkers of childhood pass and you begin to realise – with shock – that the world is not an inherently benign place, the shock can be terrifying. Sepultura were my CNN; and ‘Chaos AD’ remains the best Christmas present I’ve ever received.

[binnie]

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………

[binnie]

Binnie’s Dirty Dozen: Slayer – South Of Heaven (1988)

The vast majority of metalheads would vote for ‘Reign In Blood’ (1986) as Slayer’s best album. Many would even say that it’s the best Metal album ever made. It’s certainly a phenomenal, landmark album – to these ears, however, the records which sandwich it – ‘Hell Awaits’ (1985) and ‘South Of Heaven’ (1988) – display Slayer at their heaviest, and showcase the variety in their oeuvre (something which is often overlooked by those who deride them as the ‘AC/DC of thrash’). Where ‘Reign…’ was all about the warp-factor of Slayer’s maniacal speed, those records added variety to the tempo, mixing taught, mid-paced riffery and sinew rhythms to create something darker, prowling and unrelentingly heavy. Are they the heaviest band of all time? They’re up there. They really are.

I was impressed with this record even before I’d heard it. This was because when I tried to buy it – as a blond-haired, blue-eyed 11 year old in 1993 – the record store wouldn’t sell it to me because it had ‘explicit content’. So my (somewhat embarrassed) Dad had to get it for me (Satanic records being the surest sign of great parenting!) The sense of danger associated with it was enhanced further by artwork – Iron Maiden was ‘evil’, but this stuff was just unrelenting. I marvelled at it for hours on end. And then there was the fact that during one – particularly loud – playing, all of the posters dropped off my wall. Two decades on, I know it was the bass vibrating down the wall. But in 1993, I was convinced that it was the dark lord himself………..

‘South Of Heaven’ opens with perhaps the most furious one-two in metal history. The sheer terror of the title track – with its milita-like mid-paced riff and Tom Araya’s eerily aggressive vocal – is staggeringly heavy and contains some of the band’s best lyrics, and it’s segway into ‘Silent Scream’ – a warp-factor blast of jet-black, twisted thrash which deals with infant souls suffering in limbo – is unrelentingly powerful. Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman are often overlooked as guitar players, but they’re really the Tipton/Downing of thrash – two contrasting styles rolled into one unit that is far bigger and more muscular than either part. Coupled with Dave Lombardo’s drumming – which , in contrast to the hardcore influence on ‘Reign In Blood’, showcases some classic rock swing and weight here – makes for something which is heavier than anything. On the concrete battery of ‘Mandatory Suicide’ – one of the very best tunes Slayer have ever penned – it all comes perfectly together: more than comic book aggression, in the hands of this band, at this moment, the theme of war becomes something genuinely unnerving and – in contrast to the views of some critics – a powerful emotional experience.

But it’s the deep cuts which are overlooked. And that’s a damn shame. Closer ‘Spill the Blood’ showcases some serious Sabbath influence, an influence which would be equally prevalent on the more celebrated ‘Seasons In The Abyss’ (from the album of the same title) 2 years later. Here Slayer showed that they could do more than speed – it is brooding, atmospheric, and malevolent. The faster tunes – ‘Ghost Of War’ and ‘Live Undead’ – are examples of thrash which are up there with anything coming out of the Bay Area during its golden age. And on ‘Behind The Crooked Cross’ and ‘Read Between The Lines’ Slayer delivered Heavy Metal that was focussed, hooky and sounded like a 747 taking off. These are songs which metalheads need to remember.

‘South Of Heaven’ was really Jeff Hanneman’s album. He wrote the vast majority of the material here. Where Kerry King always veered towards speed and the more overtly hardcore-punk elements of Slayer’s sound, Hanneman brought out the more metallic edge, the darker melodies and – no arguments, please – the better riffs. That all combines to make an album which – although overshadowed by its predecessor – is a rich, and more varied listening experience. ‘Hell Awaits’ remains my favourite Slayer record, but it was ‘South….’ that really hooked me.

[binnie]

Binnie’s Dirty Dozen – Alice In Chains – Dirt (1992)

Alice In Chains’ second album proper stopped me in my tracks when I first heard it. It did so for two reasons: firstly, whilst it is very easy for a band to be monstrously heavy or very melodic, it is very rare indeed for a band to be both simultaneously – ‘Dirt’ managed to do so with a sickening, almost claustrophobic effect; and, secondly, I’m not sure I’d ever heard a record which was simultaneously touchingly beautiful and staggeringly ugly. Grunge may often be written off as ‘a bunch of smack heads moping’, but on ‘Dirt’ Alice In Chains made more than a stark and frank exploration of heroin addiction – they made music which, like the very best rock, taps into the human condition. It may very well be the best album of the ‘90s.

‘Grunge’ was sold to the public as the polar opposite of ‘metal’, but in reality there were many, many points of contact. Yeah, Nirvana sounded like a snotty alt.rock band. But Pearl Jam had all of the components of a ‘Classic Rock’ band bar the helium-vocal singer; and Alice In Chains shared many, many traits with the bands they were supposedly ‘killing off’, too. In particular, in guitar hero Jerry Cantrell, they had a guy who was taking his influences from the same pool as the ‘Hair’ bands from LA, and who essentially wrote a dirtied-up, muscular version of stadium rock. His riffs were the spine of these songs, and it is the reason that they hit like body blow. But what made the band’s power last was the honesty of this music – grunge may have become as contrived performance of misery as the ‘Hair’ scene was of debauchery, but at its inception bands like this really were doing something artistic with the darker side of the human condition. Vocally, the intertwined nature of Jerry Cantrell’s croon with Layne Stayley’s tortured – yet beautiful – larynx made for a textured, rich band which added hues and tones to the songs (as the previous year’s acoustic EP ‘Sap’ had demonstrated powerfully). And above the staggering assault of Cantrell’s riffs, the tribal rhythms and the assault of the Michael Starr’s bass, it is the closeness of that Cantrell/Stayley vocal which makes ‘Dirt’ such a human, fragile collection of songs.

Opener ‘Them Bones’ sounds like a tortured scream – it sets the tones for the unrelenting nature of an album whose unrelenting take on heroin was surely never intended to puncture to vein of the mainstream. Stayely’s repeated wails and the looping of Cantrell’s jagged riff makes for something very short, sharp and stark indeed. ‘Damn The River’ is a far easier pill to swallow – a viscous groove and incendiary riff make for an alternative anthem to rival the likes of ‘Man In A Box’ for the band’s debut ‘Facelift’ (1990). ‘Rain When I Die’ reeks of the ‘70s: a slow, brooding build begins around a wah-wah riff, culminating in a huge gargantuan chorus on which Stayley takes us straight into agony of addiction. It’s the energy of stadium rock channelled into a far more intimate, fragile subject matter. And then band was prepared to push the boundaries, too: ‘Angry Chair’ is practically a mantra, buzzing and swabbing around the room on Stayley’s vocal line in an effect which is truly gut-wrenching; ‘Junkhead’ is – shockingly – pro-heroin, a take from the addict’s perspective which essentially tells those who judged to get fucked; ‘Sick Man’ combines the bottom of heroin addiction with such a saccharine melody to make something which is truly bittersweet – the cry of the sinner writ large; and lead single ‘Would?’ – a tribute to late Mother Love Bone vocalist Andrew Wood – is awash with odd rhythms and is led by a pulsating, juddering bass line rather than the big fat riff which was de rigeur in the day.

But it wasn’t all sludgey, and morose. On ‘Down In A Hole’ – on which the band pretty much deconstructed the power ballad – Alice In Chains gave us a mellifluous, tender and shimmering plea for help; and ‘Rooster’ – a war veteran’s struggle to adapt to civilian life which is the album’s only non-heroin song – is pure metallic power, a ‘90s take on Metallica’s ‘Fade To Black’ which crescendos in a moment of pure serenity. Here was music made from agony that could inspire and thrill in equal measure. And here was a band which, whilst sharing so much of metal’s DNA, sounded like absolutely no-one else.

So, beautiful, yet ugly. Personal, but capable of touching everyone. Metallic, but not quite ‘Metal’. What makes ‘Dirt’ so special was its ability to thrill you and unnerve you, to pull you in so many directions at once. Few albums can do that, and the list of ones that do two decades after their release is very short indeed. ‘Heavy’ in every sense of the term, and aching human, ‘Dirt’ was an angular, torrential utterly powerful piece of music which saw the zenith of both grunge and the band which made it.

[78/84 guy]

Binnie love the take on WACF. And the word performance hits it on the head. But you could say that about all the 6 pack to a point. I had WACF & Fair Warning on a double tape in the 80's and these albums are VH in their prime ! too me that tape was a double album, and I still find it hard too not listen too them back to back.

[SunisinuS]

I had WACF & Fair Warning on a double tape in the 80's and these albums are VH in their prime ! too me that tape was a double album, and I still find it hard too not listen too them back to back.

You bet...had that same tape man...it was fucking sweet....use to start it on of course FW and then flip it to WACF to slow down the mood....lol that tape I am sure is out in the woods someplace being played with by kids in Weaverville who just keeping pulling the tape out to see how far it spools.....

[binnie]

Binnie’s Dirty Dozen – The Deftones – White Pony (2000)

The Deftones third album marks a point of departure in this trawl through the records that made me. While all of those other records were love at first listen, I absolutely loathed this one when it was first released. It was really a case of false expectations. The Deftones second album – ‘Around The Fur’ (1997) – had been a very different beast: riffy, full of bombast and sun-scorched, Californian groove-laden power. Cool, but very metallic, its power was immediate and captivating, and I wanted ‘White Pony’ to be a second instalment. What greeted my ears was something altogether different in feel: a delicate, moody and sinewy record which dialled down the overtly metallic aspect of The Deftones sound and turned up their alt.rock influences. Those sinews slowly worked their way into me, and within eighteen months this was one of my favourite records, a record that demonstrated to me in a very powerful way that heavy music could be about far, far more than rage and anger – it could be quite, quite beautiful.

The songs here are cinematic: breathy, distant at times and inhabiting a space that is very much their own (no-one sounds like The Deftones). Metallic, buzzsaw riffs are surrounded by melodies and fractures of music that owe a great deal to The Cure, Sonic Youth and The Pixies, and pulsating, laid-back beats give the record a cavernous feel which is a long, long way from the staccato drill of traditional metal. It is an album which can switch from delicate and tender to thunderous power on the spin of a dime, and produce songs which are symphonies in 4 minutes. We might even term it a more tender Nine Inch Nails. Often lumped under the mantel of ‘Nu Metal’ The Deftones – in not featuring many overtly Hip Hop influences, trite angst or string-loosening down-tuned riffs – really had little in common with Korn and their disciples. What ‘White Pony’ did was certainly not ‘Heavy Metal’ in a traditional sense (aesthetically there is little in common with Saxon here): its importance was ultimately to widen the vocabulary of heavy music, and 15 years on it should now be heralded as a game-changing record.

Opener ‘Feiticeira’ is beautiful, dark and twisted, the perfect showcase for Chino Moreno’s angry, desperate and vulnerable vocals to soar over the top with pure, liquid emotion. ‘Digital Bath’ is the perfect balance of delicate tones and lines of floating guitar with a vocal that almost drips from the speakers – has anything ever been more beautiful? And there was plenty of metallic bluster, too: ‘Elite’ is pure bruising power and features a killer riff, whilst ‘Passenger’ (featuring guest vocals from Tool’s Maynard James Keenan) has a statuesque metallic power bubbling beneath its fractured forms which anticipated much of the sound A Perfect Circle would patent so effectively. But it’s the sheer range of colour and tones which makes this album so rich, so affecting. ‘Change (In The House Of Flies)’ is a black beauty of an anthem which welds Jane’s Addiction’s effeminacy to Soundgarden’s broken euphoria; ‘Teenage’ is awash with Trip Hop influences (you can hear Portishead here) and juxtaposes them with tender, ominous lyrics to make an acoustic nasty unlike anything in metal; and ‘Knife Party’ is pure gothic majesty, an angular Sister Of Mercy – listeners are simultaneously attracted and repelled, pulled in two directions by a song which is at once unpalatable and utterly beautiful. On ‘Korea’ the hook is so powerful it has the magic of a first kiss every time you hear it.

How wrong first impressions can be. I now consider ‘White Pony’ to be amongst the very best rock albums ever released. If anyone dismisses metal to me as something which is about Dungeons and Dragons, or tells me that there has been no good rock music since 1979, I play them this, an album which is one of the very best heavy records ever made. It’s not an immediate listen: but whilst there is a lot going on in music which is layered, textured, and swirls with influences, the complexity is never over-done and the irresistible hooks pull you through the music.

[binnie]

Binnie’s Dirty Dozen – Machine Head – Burn My Eyes (1994)

When metalheads look back on the ‘90s they generally have two, widely contradictory, memories: 1) that was a wilderness decade for heavy music; or, 2) that was the decade of Korn, a decade which ultimately widened the colour-spectrum of heavy music. Both impressions, to my ears at least, are way off. Korn’s debut record was released in 1994, the same year as the debut from Oakland metallers Machine Head. Korn were undoubtedly the bigger band, but in the long run it is Machine Head who have proven more influential. ‘Burn My Eyes’ has its roots in thrash – indeed, frontman Rob Flynn played guitar in third wave Bay Area thrashers Violence – but the changes they made to the formula allowed the heavier aspects of metal to evolve into its second and third decades. Here the traditional elements and aesthetics of metal were rejuvenated through a vocabulary borrowed from hardcore and underground aspects of metal (grind, death metal).

Machine Head’s debut was as important – and impressive – as Pantera as pushing heavier forms of metal forward for the twenty first century. And in 1994, at a time when all of my friends in the UK when becoming immersed in the Brit Pop stylings of Oasis and Blur, this was as powerful as powerful could be. I never got Brit Pop – it just sounded like re-hashed Small Faces and The Beatles in my mum’s record collection – but the heavier underground style of metal resonated with this kid who grew up on a council estate. Alongside Sepultura and Pantera, Machine Head seemed to be as angry as I was at the world around me. The images which ‘Burn My Eyes’ conjured was a concrete, urban sprawl, deprivation and the hunger which comes from the knowledge that you deserve – no, that you ARE – better than this. That’s what I heard in the concrete rhythms and primal scream of ‘The Rage To Overcome’, or the claustrophic violence of thrashers like ‘Blood For Blood’. Here thrash metal was welded to the pitbull muscularity of hardcore in a way that was much more abrasive than Pantera, even as both bands channelled the sense of overcoming. ‘Burn My Eyes’ was like listening to my own rage, but rage with real power, big masculine, godlike, magisterial, paternal bangs in the heavens, the kind of thundering rage that makes the world quake, the baritone roar shaking the sky.

Opener ‘Davidian’ is a stone cold metal classic. A devastating drum roll leading into a grinding, bassball bat to the body riff. It is also the reason the Machine Head were never as big in the US as they are in the rest of the world – when MTV banned the video for this song because of its incendiary chorus line (‘Let freedom ring with a shotgun blast’) they robbed a generation of metalheads of the chance to find their new Metallica. A fractured drum assault and crunching riffage introduced Machine Head to the world as the perfect blend of precision and raw power that they’ve made their own for two decades. ‘Old’ reinvigorated the anti-religious sentiments of ‘80s metal with a new urgency and sincerity and hooked you with the kind of chorus you could bellow, and the sort of riffs any band would kill to write. ‘A Thousand Lies’ brought the new power to thrash that Exhorder had hinted at a couple of years earlier, whilst elsewhere the hardcore sounds of Discharge, The Circle Jerks and Cro-Mags were in evidence of the furious closer ‘Block’ and ‘None But My Own’. Metallica were also large in the mix, too. The spitting fury which both of this record’s power ballads (‘A Nation On Fire’ and ‘I’m Your God Now’) culminated in owed a great deal to the likes of ‘One’ and ‘Fade To Black’, but it was the sound of those structures bleeding raw through sandblasted skin. There was just no let up, no flab, no room for a riff that was anything other than blistering.

Groove, power and as scabrous as metal can be. Two decades on this still sounds vital, not like a nostalgia trip. The anger year was not contrived: you knew that Rob Flynn meant it, and the whole sounds wounded and vulnerable. And as good – as great, even – as Machine Head’s recent records have been (‘The Blackening’ and ‘Unto The Locust’ are amongst the best records of the last decade) there is a sense that Machine Head have never quite matched their debut. It is a tragedy that MTV robbed American of experiencing the electrodes to the nutsack that this record was and is. They should have had the career that Pantera had.

[binnie]

Binnie’s Dirty Dozen – Mastodon – Leviathan (2004)

Most people’s musical identity is shaped between the ages of 12-16: the records that mean the most to them are the ones that popped their cherries. For whatever reason, I’ve never subscribed to ‘Golden Age’ theories of music, and I’ve continued to be excited by new bands and sounds. In the past decade the band that has excited me – and, to be honest, the metal scene as a whole – the most is Mastodon, Atlanta’s lupine genii. When I first heard ‘Leviathan’ it was a genuine stop you in your tracks moment, the sort of record where you can not only just remember where you were when you first heard it, but can picture that moment and all of the mundane things that happened on the day in question. What struck me about Mastodon’s conceptual take on Melville’s Moby Dick was the literary power of what they had created – the power to tap into something very, very human, something which took in all of the desperation, the torment, the torrents of anger and fear which those trapped on-board that ship terrorised by a whale felt. That theme meant that this was more than a collection of songs – it was an album, a self-contained movement of music. It was so powerful it felt like I’d been listening to it for a lifetime even on the first listen.

It’s a heavy record – a planets colliding, stars imploding sort of heavy – but one which does not exercise aggression for its own sake. Indeed, Mastodon amalgamate the heavier forms of metal and post-punk with the complexity and delicacy of prog, and result is songs which sweep from part to part, lurch with an unnatural power. Opener ‘Blood and Thunder’, for example, ebbs and flows, rolls and crashes, like the colossal ocean of the waves of its subject; and ‘Megalodon’ sees wave after wave of music crashes over a sea of epic riffs. Much of that seamless and shifting power comes from drummer – and human marvel – Brann Dailor: where most modern metal drummers follow staccato double-bass patterns, his jazz fusion influences inflect the songs with rhythmic sweeps that allows them to breathe and pulsate and adds tones and nuances to the texture of the band’s sound. Equally dazzling is the synchronicity of guitarist Brent Hinds and Bill Kelliher. There are riffs here that sound like Sabbath, riffs that sound like Metallica, and riffs that sound like the finger-stretching complexity of The Dillinger Escape Plan, and they’re delivered through sudden time-changes and tonal shifts which make everything seem even more powerful. There is an awful lot going on in the guitars here - neuro-thrash, majestic gloom, a spirit of restless, liquid black melody, and Southern rock gone awry– a sonic hurricane which touches on something almost supernatural.

Those tones and hues made for something very different in metal. Whilst in 2004 the world had moved on from Nu Metal only to replace it with another myopic subgenre – metalcore – Mastodon’s progressive influences took things on a wholly new tangent. ‘Aqua Dementia’ is at once unlike anyone else in metal and immediately amongst the very best metal songs ever penned. On songs like ‘I Am Ahab’ you could hear Iron Maiden, but those influences were played through the ears of bands like the post-punk of Neurosis, who had previously been thought to be the polar opposite of metal’s traditional aesthetics. This was a sonic tapestry. Taking their cues from Metallica – another band who made their music more powerful be nuances the beast with elements of beauty – ‘Seabeast’ is delicate, shimmering and almost ethereal, before giving way to the doom-inflected quakings of Sabbath heaviness and, towards the end, one of the very best riffs these ears have ever heard. Equally, whilst there are elements of fury and sheer fear in ‘Island’, ‘Naked Burn’, by way of contrast, is a song of soaring metallic beauty. The balance of the power here is still startling – ‘Iron Tusk’, for instance, manages to be simultaneously anthemic and progressive; a song of dazzling complexity yet immediate appeal. ‘Hearts Alive’ is a luscious, blossoming piece of music – metal through the amps of Genesis, Yes and Rush – which is intimate and savage at the same time, the sound of an ancient yarn which taps into something primordial in its heaviness.

Is ‘Leviathan’ Mastodon’s best record? That’s a matter for debate. But choosing whether it, ‘Blood Mountain’ or ‘Crack The Skye’ is superior is as ridiculous of picking one supermodel over another – you’ve won the lottery with all of them. A decade on prog metal is nigh-on passé, with scores of bands emulating Mastodon and fellow Georgians Kylesa and Baronness. Many of those bands have released incredible, marvellous records. But none of those records – regardless of how good they are – have come close to touching the beauty and awe inspiring power of ‘Leviathan’. Sometimes you just have to give yourself over to genius (and, no arguments please, that is what we’re dealing with here) – and this was the ‘Master Of Puppets’ moment for generation Y.

[binnie]

Binnie’s Dirty Dozen: Pantera – The Great Southern Trendkill (1996)

Pantera’s achievements in the ‘90s were incredible: managing to both push the envelope of metal by injecting it with elements from underground and sub-genres, and to bring a much, much more extreme brand of heaviness into the mainstream of rock culture, they really were a landmark band, a band whose style and trademarks have since become part of the very basic components of metal’s DNA. In one sense, however, they remained fairly traditional to the Classic Rock template of greatness: they had a guitar wizard and a generation-leading frontman vying for attention. However, both Dimebag and Phil Anselmo were decidedly more ‘Metal’ than most frontman/lead-guitar axis – neither possessed an ounce of flab, a whisker of flamboyance, or a belief that metal was just a brand of entertainment. Both seemed at once of their audience and superhuman. That rugged genius invested Pantera’s music with an honesty that made it resonate so strongly. And no album in their canon was as honest as ‘The Great Southern Trendkill’, the last truly great album they would make.

It’s a noticeably different album from ‘Vulgar Display of Power’ (1992) or ‘Far Beyond Driven’ (1994): the bullish machismo and tar thick grooves were still present in abundance, as was the use of anger to positive ends, but there was also a vulnerability, a desperation in the music here, something which undoubtedly resulted from Anselmo’s heroin addiction. Always one of metal’s finest lyricists, here Anselmo fused the social criticism and pro-power sentiments with moments of introspection and ugliness – the effect, when coupled with the more extreme brands of metal which Pantera dabbled with here (grind, black metal, death metal), was a holocaust for the soul. Often dismissed as ‘metal for weightlfiting’ music, here was Pantera as a genuine counterculture band as important in their own way as Rage Against The Machine, Black Flag or REM: a band that was THIS extreme and THIS huge had a transformative effect on heavy music and, in Dimebag and Phil, on their respective instruments.

They were, in short, a band with something to say. The theme of the album’s title rebelled against fame and media culture at precisely the point when Pantera were experiencing it. On the title track, hardcore punk is welded to classic rock swagger in one giant scream of music – ‘If I hit bottom and everything’s gone in the great Mississippi please drown me and run’ bellows Anselmo in his caustic diatribe against the shallowness of modern life, preaching ‘If I was God you’d sell your soul’. Kill trends. Kill celebrities. Praise the pure. Closing with a slice of epic guitar licks, this is a chronically overlooked song in their catalogue. ‘War Nerve’ continues in a similar vein, rebelling against the claustrophobia of a world which tried to mould you into its own vision – Dimebag’s concrete blast of a riff perfectly accentuated by Vinnie Paul hitting the skins like a procession of Jack Dempsey body shots; and on ‘The Underground America’ the band expose the shrieking underside of the American dream with visceral power. But for all of this sonic bombast, it is the vulnerable moments on which Pantera truly dazzle here. ‘10’s’ is perhaps the most beautiful song they ever produced: the way grunge could have sounded, the song is jilted rather than tender, a quaking guitar and raw nerve vocal creating the perfect space for a powerful lyric (‘my silent time of losing’, Anselmo laments). ‘Floods’ is an equal display of sombre power: sounded like the frozen Sabbath which Crowbar do so well, a haunting vocal line gives way to one of Dimebag’s very best solos. And then, best of all, are ‘Suicide Notes Parts 1 & 2’, one song cut across two tracks: the first an acoustic lament a la Alice In Chains, explores the melancholia of the suicidal; the second, a hardcore fuelled blast of bile-black despair, bellows the desperation. Uncompromising, at once ugly and beautiful, and searing in its honest, this is Pantera at their most powerful – heavy in every sense of the term, it may be one of the most accomplished (and human) pieces of music ever produced in metal.

And there’s plenty of kills guitar, too. ‘Drag The Waters’ is broken classic rock – its fetid tale of corruption juxtaposed powerfully against the slickness of Dimebag’s epic riff; and on ‘Living Through Me (Hell’s Wrath)’ Pantera served up the southern fried Thrash they’d cut their teeth on and pushed it into levels of riffage which were frankly scabrous – you sense hear that we’d only begun to hear what this band could truly do, and that their implosion 4 years later robbed us of some truly great music. Signing off with ‘Sandblasted Skin’ – on which ‘THE TREND IS DEAD’ acts like a mantra – was the perfect way of completing the catharsis of anything contrived from the listener’s soul. Characterising this record as aural equivalent of a sandstorm is perhaps the perfect metaphor, and proof that Pantera were in perfect control of their power when they created is caustic piece of music.

‘The Great Southern Trendkill’ is not Pantera’ best record – that, surely, is ‘Vulgar Display of Power’, a record which allowed metal to survive in the grunge years and cemented their unique oeuvre. But it is their most unique and, in a way, their most powerful. More than any other record during my formative years, this was the one that I used to envelope myself – headphones on, anger up, world off. Exposing yourself to this level of fury, rage and power was an empowering way to confront the modern world and overcome it – as clichéd at it is to say that music can help you through troubled times, it really was my experience of Pantera’s positive application of aggression. The rarest of bands; the rarest of records.