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Creepy cover art? Check. Awesome soft intro? Check (”Crystal Ann”). Slayer-style pun on the album title? Check (”Alison Hell”). Ridiculous, over-the-top, mindless shredfest with a kick-ass name? Check (”Human Insecticide”). What else do you need for a totally awesome thrash album? Nuthin’.
-AR
Buy Alice in Hell
There’s a reason they call this “doom metal.” Moody, slow, and always, without fail, low-pitched – no vocal screetches or guitar squeals here – this is the aural equivalent of a giant rain cloud slowly gliding overhead on a disgusting humid day, and then unleashing a torrent of warm rain. Listening to this album is actually relaxing, which is weird, given its end-of-the-world vibe; I dunno, maybe dulcet guitar tones bring out something fatalistic in the listener. But if I was ever gonna get a massage with metal playing in the background, this is probably the album I’d choose to have on. There’s an image for you.
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Buy Dismantling Devotion
“I don’t know what happened, officer. I was angry and I told them to stop, I begged them to stop, but they wouldn’t listen to me, they wouldn’t listen… and then ‘Concubine’ started playing and I blacked out and… when I came to… they were dead. They were all dead. And I had their blood all over me…”
-AR
Buy Jane Doe
Inspired by last week’s lively debate with our friend Jason, I thought it high time we talk about one of the best bands to emerge in recent memory. Demiricous are what Slayer would sound like if Tom Araya gargled with broken glass – in fact, Araya has joked about Demiricous owing Slayer royalties, and Kerry King has declared them one of his favorite new bands. Produced by Zeuss (Shadows Fall, Hatebreed), One (Hellbound) is a bludgeoning, brutal slab of molten metal that combines the best element of thrash and death; whether it’s the near blast beats of “Cheat the Leader” or the blistering riffage of “Matador” or the anthemic chants of “To Serve is to Destroy” or just the sick-fuckness that is “Vagrant Idol” (featuring one my favorite lyrical lines of ‘06: “Daily war to find the fix to find the camp to find the will to live in hell and suffer over everyday’s necessities”… that is fucked, dude), there’s no denying that this album absolutely kills from start to finish. Plus, these guys have the, like, most totally awesome beards in metal. On this album, Demiricous succeed where so many fail (I’m talking to you, Sanctity): they pay homage to old school thrash without ever sounding dated. Expect even bigger things from them in the very near future.
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Buy One (Hellbound)
The follow-up to the classic Slave to the Grind may not be as potent a molotov cocktail as its predecessor, but that doesn’t mean it can’t blow shit up real good. Produced by Bob Rock, the swan song for the Skids’ original line-up is easily their heaviest album, proving once again that the Youth Gone Wild are the only hair metal band to ever make good on their promises of getting progressively more aggro with each release. The riff that fuels opener “My Enemy” could almost be from a Pantera song (a product of the two bands touring together, perhaps?), “Remains to be Seen” has a punky, thrashy quality to it, “Bonehead” offers everything you’d expect from a song with that title, while “Beat Yourself Blind” is perhaps the band’s most mosh-friendly track, a song actually more likely to inspire listeners to beat others than themselves. Yeah, the band indulged in a little grunginess – the layered vocals on tracks like “Firesign” and “Eileen” seem to owe a least a small debt to Alice in Chains and other bands that ruled the charts at the time – but Bon Jovi’s protégés do it with enough of a classic rock sensibility that it never feels like they were just chasing trends (unlike, say, Motley Crue or Def Leppard or Warrant). Elsewhere the band proves they still know how to write a power ballad with “Breaking Down,” a slightly more mature contribution to the cigarette-lighters-in-the-air genre (note the soothing slide solo in place of the soaring standing-on-a-moutain wail). And, of course, the inimitable Baz still has some of the best pipes in the biz. Subhuman Race felt like – still feels like – a moment of legitimate artistic growth for Skid Row, and it’s a shame that the album never really caught on. It’s a forgotten gem that all fans of the band’s previous output should own.
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Buy Subhuman Race
King’s X are one of those rare bands that actually are unclassifiable. Their mix of hard rock, soul grooves, prog-metal and Beatles harmonies are truly classifiable in only one way, and that is to say they sound like… King’s X. Surface comparisons to Living Colour because both bands have black singers are just that, surface comparisons; though interestingly enough King’s X frontman and bass player Doug Pinnick did fill in on vocals during Living Colour’s Fall 2006 European tour when Corey Glover was unavailable.
Dogman was a special album, and to this day the band members will tell you this. After a string of good albums that didn’t garner them a whole lot of attention save the minor hit “Over My Head,” Dogman announced King’s X to the world in a big way. Right off the bat, the production jumps out; this record may have singlehandedly taken production to the next level. NOTHING sounded this crisp and clear in 1993, and the production absolutely stands the test of time in 2007. The album starts out in a big way with the heavy rocker “Dogman;” Ty Tabor’s heavy blues-metal riffs drive the song and let Doug Pinnick’s soulful wails do the dirty work. “I Pretend” and “Black the Sky” showcase the band’s groovier elements, while “Flies and Blue Skies” and “Cigarettes” are two of the most beautiful, bittersweet songs ever put to record. Ty Tabor’s trademark arpeggiated guitar atmospheres dominate, while Pinnick and drummer Jerry Gaskill lay a truly solid, grooving (can I use this word anymore? It just fits so well) foundation. Aspiring drummers and bassists take note: this is the definition of “in the pocket.” The Beatles-inspired three-part harmonies are a great touch, as on the intro to “Shoes” and in “Sunshine Rain.” This was King’s X best work. Nothing since has been quite this focused.
-VN
Seeing as I slacked again yesterday, I figured I’d continue with Tuesday’s theme and do another double album for today’s Album of the Day column. After a four year hiatus, everyone’s favorite Armenian political rock group System of a Down returned in 2005 with a doozy of an album, Mezmerize, and followed it up 6 months later with its conceptual counterpart Hypnotize. Guitarist Daron Malakian finds his true voice on this set, both figuratively in the major writing role he played and literally in that he often harmonizes his striking falsetto with Serj Tankian’s rich tenor. The result is an always interesting Armenian flavor that compliments the band’s already distinctly middle-eastern influenced sound. First single “B.Y.O.B” is a fierce, political attack as is “Cigaro” and Hypnotize’s “Attack,” but even when the band slows things down they still manage to drive the point home in “Sad Statue” (”You and me / will all go down in history / with a sad statue of liberty / and a generation that didn’t agree”). Elsewhere System finds ways to comment on the state of our society as in “Radio/Video” and “Violent Pornography,” (”It’s a violent pornography / choking chicks and sodomy / the kind of shit you get on your TV”). Tankian even manages to slip in songs about celebrity baseball games and PCBs in our fish supply. In true concept album form, Mezmerize opens with the hauntingly clean-electric “Soldier Side (Intro)” and revisits the same musical theme with the last track on Hypnotize, bringing everything back home — when I first got to that last track my inner dork silently shouted “Fuck yes! They rule for doing this!” and I’m sure you will all agree.
Woah — did Vince Neilstein just write a record review that focuses mostly on lyrics? Uh oh. Daron Malakian’s guitar tone is killer, John Dolmayan is a SICK, sick drummer, and the arrangements and instrumentation are top-notch. There, that’s better. I don’t see System ever topping this set; it’s truly brilliant.
-VN
I forgot to do an Album of the Day feature yesterday, so for today’s Album of the Day I figured I’d do a double album. Few heavy metal bands are ambitious enough to even attempt a double album, and there’s no better band to start with than the one that AllMusic.com’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine calls “the definitive heavy metal band.” Led Zeppelin delivered Physical Graffiti in 1975 a full two years after their last album, an eternity between albums in those days. Physical Graffiti is a masterpiece, with each song occupying a specific role in the sprawling landscape that makes up the whole; most of the rockers are on Disc 1, and Disc 2 with its instrumentals, jams, and chilled out psychadelia to this day remains one of my favorite smoking discs of all time.
Even if you don’t know this album well, you certainly know all the songs on Disc 1; you don’t know you do, but you will surely find yourself singing along from the first note of every song. Starting out with “Custard Pie,” “The Rover,” “In My Time of Dying,” and “Houses of the Holy,”… seriously, are all these amazing songs really in sequence on the same disc?? And of course the ever-ubiquitous “Kashmir” which needs no description. Disc 2 starts out with the razor-sharp keyboards of atmospheric anthem “In the Light,” courtesy of John Paul Jones, which sets the tone for this mellowed out stoner-rock disc. “Down by the Seaside” and the beautiful “Ten Years Gone” are my personal favorites.
Really, you can’t call yourself a true metalhead if you don’t own this album. John Bonham, with the possible exception of Black Sabbath’s Bill Ward, has had the single greatest influence on modern heavy metal drumming. Even the production holds up 32 years later.
-VN
Buy Physical Graffiti
If The Cure were a metal band, I’m pretty sure they’d be H.I.M.: dark, gothy, pseudo-romantic. There’s an obvious, kinda adolescent theme here – “Funeral of Hearts,” “Buried Alive by Love,” etc. – and I’d wager that Ville Valo is just as inspired by American hair metal as he is by Type O Negative; the songs here could be played on an acoustic guitar and sound just as good. Undeniably hokey, Valo’s voice is rich and smooth – he’s like the Barry White of metal or something. Plus, there are a few awesome, epic guitar solos; the closing track, “The Path,” is the kind of ridiculously over-the-top power ballad I live for, and my personal favorite H.I.M. song of all time; by its conclusion, when Valo is belting out notes with a force that would put most American Idolers to shame, I find myself rooting for him to get whatever girl it is he’s after. And he probably does.
-AR
Buy Love Metal
Two things we firmly believe here at MetalSucks.net: 1) Joey Belladonna has a vagina, and 2) We’ve Come for You All wasn’t just the best metal album of 2003 – the album St. Anger should’ve been – but is one of the best metal albums of the 21st century so far. I was in Prague, searching through some totally awesome metal-only record store (the kind of place they only have in Europe), when I heard this album blasting over the speakers; it had been so poorly promoted here in the States that I didn’t even realize it was out – but from the opening moments of “What Doesn’t Die,” I knew I had to have it, and immediately. I remember thinking, “This is Anthrax? THIS is Anthrax!” The boys from Queens never had more crunch, never had more groove, and each member is at the top of his game – fuck, it even has a couple of guest appearances by legends like Roger Daltry and Dimebag and totally awesome cover art by comic geek guru Alex Ross. Every song here is so perfectly constructed; there’s no other way to say it – this album just ROCKS so hard. Maybe it doesn’t have the same thrash/speed sensibilities of Among the Living, but so what? Unlike almost all of their peers, Anthrax proved that their best years were still ahead of them – before they went and blew it by hiring Joey Suckadonna back. Please join me now in praying that John Bush comes back to the ‘Thrax real soon…
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Buy We’ve Come for You All
Talk about beauty in the breakdown: Canadian progcore outfit Buried Inside wrote this album as one very long piece of music, and it bears the epic weight of a symphony. The production is stripped down, the vocals owing more than a small debt to Converge, but the drums are complex, organic, ultimately mind-blowing, and the guitars are elegiac, poetic, moving. As with any good symphony, certain riffs and stanzas – only fitting, given the album’s preoccupation with the philosophy of time (see: “Time as Ideology,” “Time as Methodology,” “Time as Surrogate Religion,” etc.) fade away only to return later, growing more operatic with each appearance. Blistering, ferocious, ruminative – pulchritudinous. That’s the only word to describe this album.
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Visit Buried Inside on Myspace.
Buy Chronoclast: Selected Essays on Times Reckoning and Auto-Cannibalism
These days, “technical death metal” seems to have become a euphemism for “metal only musician geeks will care about” – an endless parade of shredding and time changes and one-upmanship that sacrifices basic melody and song-craft in favor of just showing off the band’s skills.
Glory be to Sweden’s Anata, then, who play tech-death that never gets bogged down in musical pyrotechnics. Anata’s music spirals, unravels and comes back together, seems almost multi-dimensional – like the musical equivalent of Abbott’s Flatland – but most of all, it’s just really good. Facile shifts between raw, bleeding slabs of vitriolic metal and epic, ruminative prog ensure that Anata will have cross-genre appeal. The Conductor’s Departure is expansive, almost all-encompassing – the rare tech-death album that lives up to the potential of the genre.
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Buy Conductor’s Departure
With Slave to the Grind, Skid Row’s follow up to their massively successful self-titled 1989 debut, Baz and the boys turned up their amps a bit and knocked out a series of songs that were harder, heavier, and faster than anything they’d done prior.
Both the title track and “The Threat” skimp on the pop-metal cliches often present on Skid Row’s first album, replacing them instead with ballsy, gigantic guitar riffs beneath a gruffier-than-ever sounding Bach. The bass intro and opening guitar riff of “Psycho Love” call to mind the GN’R classic “Rocket Queen,” but the chorus is pure Skid Row with Sebastian’s ever-present knack for a great hook, and the arpeggiated chorus guitar in the bridge curiously references King’s X. Meanwhile, “Get the Fuck out” let’s the band’s punk influences shine encased in an early ’90s metal shell. Even the album’s ballads “Quicksand Jesus” and “Wasted Time” are more intricately constructed and less predictable than their counterparts on the first album. Both Snake Sabo and Scotty Hill are excellent on this album as well, trading off excellent guitar solo after excellent guitar solo.
If their next album Subhuman Race was any indicator, Skid Row was on a Pantera-like trajectory to get heavier and heavier with time had Sebastian Bach not left the group. Though these days Baz may be traipsing the globe singing “My Michelle” with Axl Rose, we’ve still got these three awesome albums to get us through.
-VN
Buy Slave to the Grind
Holy balls is this album heavy. Just when you thought the saturation point of heaviness had been reached, a bunch of Frenchmen who named their band after the Japanese version of Godzilla had to come along and raise the bar. And what’s more, it’s not just heavy-for-the-sake-of-being-heavy chuggitude; this is artful heaviness, in the same way that Mastodon are artful about their metal. Gojira weave their own brand of death metal in and out of odd time signatures so well that they actually aren’t too difficult to follow, combining elements of space rock with a very technical version of slowed down death/doom that occasionally references the kings of slow metal, Crowbar. On From Mars to Sirius, Gojira aren’t afraid to introduce atmospheric sounding guitars either, and the result is an album that never gets boring. This is a band to watch; you will surely be seeing a whole lot more of them in the near future.
-VN
[Visit Gojira on MySpace]
And why wouldn’t it be the album of the day? On a day where Ozzy releases a new album, it’s only fitting to look back at what remains and always will remain Ozzy’s best work, the infallibly perfect No More Tears which captures Ozzy in his prime as a solo artist. A pre-bearded Zakk Wylde (arguably in his prime as well), all-star drummer Randy Castillo and future Alice in Chains bassman Mike Inez round out what many consider to be the “classic” Ozzy band lineup.
This album just has song, after song, after song, after song; there isn’t a single dud here. The opening glockenspiel intro and massive slide guitar riff of “Mr. Tinkertrain” are the perfect way to start a creepy song written from the perspective of a child molester, which leads right into to “I Don’t Want to Change the World,” a staple of Ozzy’s live set to this day. Zakk Wylde squeals, bends, scrapes and lightning-bolt blues-shreds his way through the guitar solo, inducing pure eargasm with every note that eminates from his bullseye Les Paul. The Prince of Darkness shows his usual eerie side with the gloomy “Hellraiser” (co-written by Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister!) and the can-he-really-be-serious shout along anthem “Zombie Stomp.” Ozzy shows his soft side too, with the hit singles “Mama, I’m Coming Home” (his first ever to crack the Top 40 in the US) and “Time After Time,” the video for which featured uber-creepy looking elderly babies. “Road to Nowhere” is another epic masterpiece with a brilliant Zakk Wylde guitar solo almost as good as what is possibly the best guitar solo ever put on record — the guitar solo from the indubitable, infallible, perfect-in-every-way “No More Tears.” The deep Zakk Wyle chugging and harmonic squeals, classic scary Ozzy vocals, the piano and gradual build into the solo… for the love of god, I’m just going to say it: this really IS the best guitar solo ever put to record. FUCK this record is awesome! 110% metal. 6 horns out of 5!
-VN
If you don’t already own this album you will be banned from MetalSucks.net unless you go buy it now. Yes, we’re talking about you, IP 215.64.138.26! Buy No More Tears
Axl and I are going to see Velvet Revolver tomorrow on the NYC stop of their 11-date small theater tour, so today on my walk to work I decided to listen to Contraband on my iPod. Contraband delivers exactly what you’d want from any group featuring these members — the sleazy rock and roll swagger of an updated sounding Appetite-era Guns N’ Roses beneath Scott Weiland’s glammed-out, expansive vocals. “Sucker Train Blues” is as good an album opener as any with its hard driving riff; every time I hear the first notes of Duff McKagan’s bass intro, I’m brought right back to the first time I saw this band on their first ever tour, before the album was out, at the State Theater in Detroit. “Spectacle” is another of my favorites with another vintage Slash riff that moves you right along the whole way. The album runs the gamut from all-out rockers to slower numbers that recall songs from Scott Weiland’s days in STP (think: the haunting “Atlanta” from No. 4), and really this is where Weiland’s voice is at its best; songs like “You Got No Right” and “Loving the Alien” are as beautiful as anything he’s ever voiced. The standout tracks, of course, are the album’s three stellar singles: the aptly named hard rocker “Slither,” the title of which perfectly describes Weiland on stage; the classic ballad “Fall to Pieces;” and “Dirty Little Things,” which along with deep cut “Superhuman” is one of the heaviest tracks Slash and Co. have ever been a part of. This is such a good album, and it always irks me when people dismiss it because it was written by a “supergroup” as if musicians haven’t been forming supergroups since the Yardbirds and Cream. If you’re a fan of early GN’R, L.A. Guns, or really anything with sleazy, rock and roll balls — this album is for you.
-VN
Buy Contraband
To console my good friend Vince Van Arseface:
“I’ll stand here defiantly
My middle finger raised!”
Amy Lee can suck a dick.
-AR
Buy Through the Ashes of Empires
Guitarist Peter Lindgren has quit Opeth. While that’s probably not cause for worry amongst fans – mainman Mikael Åkerfeldt is most likely fully capable of steering this big ship on his own – it’s sad news nonetheless. So it seems fitting today to blare this album – Lindgren’s last with the band – as loud as humanly possible. This progressive melodic death metal band is truly unique amongst the hordes, and the eight epic tracks that appear here actually seem to have movements, suggesting that these dudes have studied Mozart and Metallica in equal measures. Shifting from horror-movie soundtrack-tastic guitar-keyboard interplay to meditative acoustic beauty to full on Maiden-esque granduer – more often than not within the same song – Ghost Reveries is one of those albums that should be played for any idiot who thinks metal isn’t real music, requires no skill, isn’t art. This isn’t just a record; it’s an experience.
-AR
Buy Ghost Reveries
I mean, c’mon, dude: this album is a fucking classic. It’s fashionable to take pot shots at Bob Rock now that he’s helped to ruin Metallica, but he’s also helped create some of the best bar metal in the world: I defy you to hear this shit on the jukebox right before last call and NOT begin to sing along (I’ve seen whole bars erupt into choruses of the title track; Top Gun got it all wrong).
What’s kinda crazy is how well this album holds up in comparison to so many of the Crue’s peers: Vince, Nikki, Tommy and Mick don’t seem dangerous, exactly, but they do seem legitimately sleazy. Not only does “Kickstart My Heart” have more swing to it than those creepy old fat neighbors who keep asking you and your wife if you wanna “trade” sometime, but the chorus is literal: Nikki Sixx was, (in)famously, legally dead after a drug overdose, and needed a shot of adrenaline to the heart, Pulp Fiction-style. “S.O.S” isn’t just as anthemic as all get out, but it’s 97% guaranteed to induce sexual intercourse at any given moment while being played- the guitars are that slinky. “Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)” is, kinda surprisingly, built around a melody fit to be sung around any campfire (in between rounds of “Kumbaya” and whatever Beatles song your friend who only knows three chords just learned how to play) but also offers relationship advice that is, like, totally zen. And that riff for “Dr. Feelgood?” Heavy as FUCK, man! Duhn-duh-duh-duhn-duh-duhn-duh-duh-duhn-duh-DUHN. AND it’s like Scarface: The Song!
Of course, special attention must be paid to “Without You,” which, for my money, totally gives “Home Sweet Home” a run for it’s money in the power ballad department. I never knew what that weird thing Mick plays during the solo was (and please, commentors, don’t post the answer- I really don’t care), but not only does it sound totally kick ass, but the riff the rhythm part is playing behind it just breaks my heart every time. I wanna go back in time and dance to this song at my prom after just having punched out the jock and stolen the girl.
So, uh, ANYWAY… best hair metal album ever? It’s certainly a contender.
-AR
What? You don’t own Dr. Feelgood
It’s a good day to be a metalhead: two awesome albums released, each one worth every penny.
Read our review of Megadeth’s United Abominations here.
Read our review of Job for a Cowboy’s Genesis here.
Buy United Abominations
Buy Genesis
-AR
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