Album Reviews

[binnie]

Cheers, Ford.

My knowledge of American geography is nicht so gut

The Trees were certainly not a grunge band - aside from not sounding like a Sunset Strip band, they had very little in common with the grunge sound.

Check out that record - it's well worth your time.

[binnie]

Heathen – Evolution of Chaos (2010)

A gentle, sitar led introduction and then BOOM. MOSH…MOSH…MOSH. BWAAAARGGGHHH……too….much….metal. When they take particles up to the speed of light in the Hadron Collider, it probably sounds a whole lot like this, the return of thrash pioneers Heathen. It’s an incredible – and incredibly heavy – record choked with neck wrenching anthems and prog-metal sags. But it’s the chops that kill. David White sings his ass off here, and is one of the best guys in metal at laying vocals and melodies over music this fast. Axemen Lee Altus and Kragon Lam are one of metal’s best partnerships – delivering a battalion of crunch here, they also serve up solo after dazzling solo which drive these songs into the metal heavens. Always at the more technical end of thrash, fans will be relieved to learn that Heathen have managed to maintain the balance which prevents them from slipping into indolent showmanship.

Indeed what you get here are not so much songs as beast, rampant and savage. ‘Control By Chaos’ is a serious of punchy almost Prong-like riffs at speed, 6 minutes of metallic heaven. ‘No Stone Unturned’ is a mid-paced battleaxe of a tune, an anthem which evolves into a progressive thrash-a-thon workout – shit, Metallica used to deliver stuff like this. ‘Arrows of Agony’ and ‘Fade Away’ are hook-heavy anthems, whilst the furious ‘Dying Season’ deserves to be hailed as a classic. If only more people could hear it. MOSH…..MOSH…BWWARRRRGHHHHHHH….FUCK…..MY…NECK…..HUR TS.

The flipside is that there’s almost too much metal here – these songs are very long, often overwhelming, and reward repeated and persistent listening. But it’s worth it. This record is better than some many other ‘reunion’ thrash albums. Better than anything which bigger hitters like Kreator, Forbidden or Exodus have produced, and in many ways its as good as some of Megadeth’s latter records (put a gun to my head and I might say better). Why? Because its not a throwback – Heathen have taken all the ingredients of the classic sound and updated them for the modern palate.

[binnie]

Hammers of Misfortune – 17th Street

This is something special. Channelling proto metal through the sphere of doom, Hammers of Misfortune sound a little like Down getting their prog on. It is 2 and a half minutes into opener ‘317’ before the vocals kick in – this is a band that exists purely for the music and purely for its own sake. Dinosaur metal riffs, duel melodies and organs and soooooo much bass. It’s quite a rumble. ‘17th Street’ has a guitar solo intro and gives way to sizzling riffage which is Deep Purple heavy: metal at its most classic, a behemoth face-fucking the world. It takes you back to the core, the reason why this music has been going for 4 decades and can still make you buzz – you need that inner 14 year old to still be alive and well to get tunes like ‘The Day the City Died’ or ‘Romance Fury’, which sounds like Rainbow jamming with Maiden. But what refreshes is the sheer honesty and lack of pretence – there’s next to no histrionics here. Leila Abdul Rauf’s vocals avoid the showy, and tunes like ‘Summer Tears’ evoke a Pink Floyd lament which most heavy music couldn’t come close to capturing. Colossal in every sense of the word.

Recent years have seen plenty of bands harking back to the ether. Most do so via slavish emulation or contrived pastiche. Like this band, however, the best avoid the dressing and channel the spirit.

[sadaist]

I wish I could write reviews like you guys. My depth is about as deep as I like it, it sucks, or it's kinda okay. I love reading these though! Appreciate them all. If you ever feel like a request, one of my favorite albums of all time is Death Angel - Act III. Fucking kick ass! Whenever I had to pull an all-nighter at my moms Hallmark store to steam clean the carpets, I'd play this cd over the sound system.

[binnie]

If you ever feel like a request, one of my favorite albums of all time is Death Angel - Act III. Fucking kick ass! Whenever I had to pull an all-nighter at my moms Hallmark store to steam clean the carpets, I'd play this cd over the sound system.

It's on the 'to do' list - I don't think that Death Angel have ever really received the props they deserve, and 'Act III' is argualby their finest album. I've yet to be blown away by their 'reunion' records, but those from back in the day are classics.

Oh, and thanks for the props.

[rockhead]

Binnie, have you reviewed Megadeths album "13" at all?.I bought it the other day and thought its a damn good album.Although with Junir back i think they are going back to CTE era again

[binnie]

Yes, page 9 post #357.

I also reviewed 'Endgame' (1st page, I think) and 'So Far, So Good, So What' in this thread.

I prefered United Abominations and Endgame to 13, but it's still a damn fine record.

[binnie]

Amebix – Sonic Mass (2011)

Returning from the wilderness after 25 years, Amebix (Stig, Rob and new sticksman Ray Mayorga) deliver not just an album which can rival their ‘80s works – the glorious welding together of the metallic thump of Sabbath with the anarcho punk of Crass which made up ‘Arise’ and ‘Monolith’ – but which can stand toe to toe with just about any heavy record ever released. Seriously, this is THAT good.

Sounding like something the metal gods have lovingly hewn from granite, Amebix deliver something which is classic, elemental, but devoid of cliché. 4 decades of heavy music are rolled together into one mosaic-riven soundscape which is masterfully paced and spiced with elements of drama, softness and restraint. Opening with a choral section and a Maiden-esque bassline, the world is soon ruptured by a doom passage, the crunching rumble of ‘Shield Wall’. There is something effortlessly grandiose here. Propelled by the baritone voice of The Baron – who seems to conjure the entrance of darkness into the world – Amebix deliver wave after wave of epic heaviness which washes over the listener in a manner both inspired and inspiring. ‘Here Comes the Wolf’ rips your head off, whilst ‘God The Grain’ is Sabbath arranged by Killing Joke and the title track is hushed into life as a form of My Dying Bride folk, before given way to a tribal beast of a riff tears through the ether. Indeed, Stig’s guitar is rampant. Where most metal guitar players are histrionic, his is a masterclass in restraint, and is more powerful for it, allowing his granite tone to realize its full impact.

This is the sort of album you wait for. The sort of album that you remember exactly where you were when you first heard it, and set aside special time to listen to it again – purely because it deserves your attention. Just as the ego of each player is subsumed into the band as a whole, so each song bleeds into the next in what amounts to more than an album – it’s a statement.

[binnie]

From the vaults: Crank County Daredevils – Livin’ In the Red (2006)

Opening with a bike engine is appropriate because ‘Livin’ In the Red’ offers 9 tunes of dirty, snarling, pill-popping rock ‘n’ roll with the production values of your average welder. To say this is raw or grimy would be an understatement – cheap whiskey vocals and broken glass geetar evoke a world which is twisted, debauched and soaked in sleeze, Sunset Strip at its nastiest, crack-riven best, devoid of glamour and riddled with danger. ‘That’s How We Roll’, ‘Fueled by a 5th’ and ‘Love Me Like a Suicide’ all grin like the eyes of a sex offender, and calling CCDD ‘Big’ or ‘clever’ would be an insult to the trade descriptions act – they certainly inject their songs with more dynamics and tricks than the average Johnny Thunders wannabe band, but those searching for finesse or song-craft will search in vein. They would also miss the point – it’s the vibe here that kills, and it reeks of a Saturday night which ends with a barstool in the kisser.

[binnie]

From the vaults: Dropkick Murphy’s – Blackout (2003)

The Dropkick Murphy’s formula is simple enough: marry punk rock’s grizzled assault to Irish folk’s melodic splendour. Cynics say it’s a gimmicky union, but it makes for one hell of a boozy wedding. Smashing powerchords and gang-vocals into gaelic orchestration makes for a fuck of a lot of fun. Songs about hard knocks, love, loss and mourning wedded to very, very black humour – in short, songs from the bar of life – makes for an authentic experience without being morbid, gritty without being needlessly angry.

‘Black Velvet Band’ is a bittersweet punk ditty; ‘Walk Away’ and ‘Outcast’ arrive at break-neck pace; whilst the brilliant buffoonery of ‘Kiss Me, I’m Shitfaced’ encapsulates the whole spirit of DKM’s whole spirit in 5 gloriously drunken minutes of laughing and crying in the same song. But the twisted beauty of ‘The Dark Glass’ and ‘Bastards on Parade’ (the latter used in Scorsese’s ‘The Departed’) make you understand that when you judge them as a folk band, not a punk band, that you get their genius. They find beauty in the working class life of Brockton, MA, in a way which only a group immersed in that community could – in doing so, they’ve made something very particular universal. And that’s a joy to hear.

Are these the best songs ever written? No – but they’re hook-heavy and impactful. There’s certainly filler in between the gems, but this will make the mundane reality of your life seem a little more wonderful, and we need bands like that.

[binnie]

Steak Number Eight – All is Chaos

‘I say! Your head is somewhat shaped like a banana!’ It’s a novel way of opening an album, and it gets us straight to the point – Steak Number Eight are resolutely square pegs who resist classification. Firstly, they’re a heavy band from Belgium, not a country known for its metal heartland. Secondly, they defy their years. Formed at 11, touring and entering competitions by the age of 15, they won the ‘Humo Rock Rally’, Belgium’s premiere band competition. What this all means is that there have a lot of miles on the clock for a band in their early 20s. And it shows – in a good way. Where so many new bands try to fit a scene – emo, metalcore, deathcore – SN8 sound like they march to the beat of their own drum. There’s an honesty and integrity to their sound. Heavy in a post-metal kind of way which channels Isis and Sun O))), riffs and melodies and looped to the point of infinity, and expansiveness is an end in itself.

In truth, they don’t always have the chops to pull it off. Often you wish that someone had screamed ‘EDIT’. But it’s remarkably ambitious for a debut, and I’d kill for more bands with this kind of vision. There are some gems here, however. ‘Trackintothesky’ as an aching beauty and sleeping heaviness, whilst ‘Blackfall’ and ‘Trapped’ evoke some classic ‘80s goth in their sombre power. What it all lacks, however, is charisma – perhaps that’ll come in time, for SN8 are certainly ones to watch.

[binnie]

From the vaults: Danko Jones – We Sweat Blood (2003)

Danko Jones make songs from the simplest of ingredients - 4/4 rhythms, punky riffs, powerchords, and kooky choruses. It’s all wonderfully undercooked, and there are enough holes in the song-craft to drive a truck through. But, darn it if it’s not all a lot of FUN!! These odes to rock ‘n’ roll are hard pop-rock spiced with the nuttier end of punk and driven by lust-worship of the female anatomy. ‘Baby – I wanna put some mileage on your love bike’ Mr Jones sings on ‘Love Travel’: who doesn’t love that? Put simply, if ‘Dance’, ‘Lovercall’ and ‘Forget My Name’ don’t make you bop like a pre-teen at a Justin Bieber concert then you are a little dead inside. There’s just too much charisma to stop you from smiling.

Too half-arsed to approach classic, with too many songs and too many renditions of the same joke to be anything above a novelty, Danko Jones are nonetheless the best soundtrack to a party which you can find in 21st century rock ‘n’ roll. In a world where hard rock seems to have lost its sense of abandon, it’s good to have some professional dufusses in our lives.

[binnie]

Lamb of God – Resolution

After over a decade of delivering maximum metallic mayhem, Lamb Of God have slowly and relentlessly become one of the genre’s flagship bands. Channelling elements from across the metal spectrum – a little Slayer here, some Meshuggah there, a dab of Fear Factory, and a slice of Pantera – LOG have, nonetheless, delivered a synthesis which is far, far more than the sum of its parts. Like so many ‘big’ metal bands, their talent is to take elements of innovation on the underground and make them more palletable through juicy hooks and rhythms (read: writing fucking good songs) – its extreme, for sure, but the songs never dive off the cliff because the song structures are fairly conventional.

There are a few surprises this time, too. Opener ‘Straight For The Sun’ eschews the warp-factor pace which is the band’s modus operandi in favour of a doom-laden sonic battery with maximum groove. It’s unlike anything they’ve done before, and screams ‘single’. Closer ‘King Me’ is equally a curve-ball – with clean vocals and tripped-out groove, it’s orchestrations makes for something more grandiose than we might have expected and make for an album which pushes the LOG formula into fresh territories. Elsewhere, it’s business as usual. We get the anthemic ‘Ghost Walking’ – which is this record’s ‘Redneck’ – and necksnappers like ‘Cheated’ or ‘The Undertow’, both of which make you proud to be a metalhead. Propelled as usual by Chris Adler’s frantic double-bass drum patterns, LOG deliver blast after blast of southern-tinged thrash for the new millennium. It takes real talent to be able to knock out anthems like ‘The Number Six’, and it’s the nuances of the timing and the vocal delivery – Randy Blythe is exceptional throughout – that separate LOG from the American metal pack.

You can, of course, have too much of a good thing. 14 songs make this a little over-egged, and the likes of ‘Guilty’ and ‘Inviticus’ – by no means LOG by numbers, but a notch below the rest of the offerings here – slow the album down as a whole. But it is clear that LOG have settled comfortably into the latter stage of their career – the ultra-raw frenzy of ‘New American Gospel’ feels a long way away when listening to ‘Resolution’, but the band has not simply replicated the slicker production of ‘Sacrament’ or the extremity of ‘Wrath’ either. There is a new focus, and concision, at work here which indicates a band at ease with their place in the world.

Like Pantera – whose thrown they’ve surely succeeded – LOG deliver groove, riffs a plenty, and anthems in abundance. Unlike Pantera, they’ve never quite managed to become a classic band – good, surely, brilliant in places, but great? Not yet. They’re still too derivative, too close to their own influences to cause the shift that a truly great band manages. Nevertheless, a LOG record is a big, big deal. And ‘Resolution’ once again delivers the goods to assuage the hordes. In a sense Lamb of God are the victims of their own success – they’ve been delivering albums of such high quality for such a long time now that it’s difficult for them to generate the kind of excitement they once did through surprise. ‘Resolution’ straddles the divide between giving the fans what they want and growing as a band with aplomb – with a band like this at the helm, metal is in a healthy place indeed.

[binnie]

From the vaults: Def Leppard – On Through The Night (1980)

Often hailed as one of a clutch of records which marked the inception of NWOBHM (The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) Def Leppard’s debut was really nothing of the sort. Aside from the fact that the band was a) ‘New’ and b) didn’t sound like older metal, they had little in common with Maiden, Saxon, Sweet Savage, Diamond Head et al except a low production budget. And that was a good thing because – ladies and gentlemen – even 32 years later this album ROCKS! Def Leppard are – and always have been – a hard rock band with pop sensibilities, and you can hear it hear right from the get-go: opener ‘Rock Brigade’ is dirty rock ‘n’ roll with a glam sheen, polished harmonies and eye-on-the-prize dynamics.

This would be a remarkable debut by anyone’s standards, let alone a band with an average age of just 18. What surprises is the focus here – each song is controlled, there’s little in the way of egotistical musical showmanship, and it all feels boiled down to fighting weight. In part that may have been an unconscious channelling of the punk ethos, or a reaction against the over-wrought records that many of the early metal bands were knocking out in the late ‘70s. It seems more likely, however, to be a result of their influences. Although hard and gritty, the dynamics and sheen of The Sweet and T.Rex are all over this record – that sense of the good-time resonates through anthems like ‘Wasted’ and ‘Rocks Off’ and the often forgotten ‘It Don’t Matter’, ‘It Could Be You’ and ‘Answer to the Master’ (the latter featuring plenty of ‘fuck YEAH!’ guitar). Steve Clark and Pete Willis slip licks and delicate melodies into every tune; Rick Savage – whose bass is surprising high in the mix – gives these tunes real bite. But what really stands out is Joe Elliot’s ‘from the hip’ vocal delivery – it reminds us that before someone told him he was a ‘singer’, he really gave this band a sonic boost.

There are clunker’s a plenty, of course (what Def Leppard doesn’t have them?) The New Wave leanings of the – rather (unconvincingly) pretentious – ‘When The Walls Come Tumbling Down’ is a rare moment where the band don’t sound sincere; whilst the Rush-by-numbers of ‘Overture’ is clumsily out of place amidst all the youthful bravura. But those moments aside, what we have here is a band enjoying themselves, something which was often missing from the later-era records (which often felt over thought and over cooked). ‘Hysteria’ may have been the album for the moment, and ‘Pyromania’ may have seen the zenith of the pop-rock song-writing skills, but Leppard have never sounded more exciting than they did right at the beginning. They really didn’t need any of that sugar pouring over them to over-sweeten the taste……..

[binnie]

From the vaults: Forbidden – Forbidden Evil (1987)

‘WEL-COME-TO-THE-CHURCH-OF-LIES’ blasts the chorus to ‘Chalice of Blood’, the opening cut from 2nd wave of Bay Area Thrash outfit forbidden. The booming staccato vocal in synch with the band was a clarion call to those who embraced of being heavy for its own sake and remind us – some 25 years later (!) – that metal in the mid-80s was (production values aside) as downright heavy as anything made today. It’s glorious, brazen and sonically battering stuff. NOISE, NOISE, NOISE for the sake of it!

Indeed, ‘Forbidden Evil’ marked something of a turning point for thrash which is often unheralded. Listening to this whilst keeping in mind that Megadeth had not yet recorded ‘Rust in Peace’ and Annihilator were yet to record ‘Alice In Hell’ and you begin to understand Forbidden’s importance. Here thrash was injected with some musical sophistication which saw it develop from its hardcore roots – in which each member of the band appeared to be raising each other to the end of the song – but had not yet culminated in extreme metal’s striving to make despair an art-form. As technically and sonically impressive as anything Megadeth, Anthrax or Testament had released by this point, Forbidden still evoked the nasty, gnarly and naïve aspect of metal – the raw power, if you will – which made it so much FUN. For all the benefits of the more technical end of extremity which Dave Mustaine, Jeff Waters and Chuck Schuldiner would push, that was an aspect lost in the arch of perfection.

With Forbidden, listeners were treated to the distinctive Halford-esque vocals of Russ Anderson, the demented drum onslaught of Paul Bostaph and the duel guitar onslaught of – Craig Locicero and Glen Alvelaid – which (like Testament) did much to push thrash forward. But step to the future had a foot in the past, too. The stomp of ‘Off The Edge’ evokes Maiden’s grandeur, whilst ‘Through The Eye of Glass’ – which should by all rights be a fuckin’ metal classic – is like Dio on crack, a beefed-up metallic template on full maniacal gallop. These songs really do deserve to be better known. ‘Feel No Pain’ is metal so heavy that your ancestors feel it when it hits you, and the 7 minute epic ‘Follow Me’ is a molten Priest-esque monster which delivers riff-after-riff-after-glorious-riff!

Is it perfect? Of course not – ‘As Good as Dead’ has a bumpy melody and there are vocal blow outs throughout – but ‘Forbidden Evil’ was important and impressive. It’s successor – ‘Twisted Into Form’ – may have been more accomplished musically, but it didn’t have the raw bludgeoning power in evidence here.

BANG YOUR HEAD LIKE YOU NEVER DID BEFORE!!!