Decibel Magazine's Precious Metal

Nobody – not even Martin Popoff – likes heavy metal like the guys at Decibel magazine. America's premier metal rag, the Decibel gang brings an appropriately populist slant to their musical coverage that is missing in Terrorizer (U.K.) or Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles (Canada). Reading more like a well-written fanzine than a professional (boring) music magazine, Decibel's staff knows its stuff and they write about the music they love.

One of the Reverend's favorite features each month is the extreme music "Hall of Fame." The magazine's staff chooses (agrees on) a classic metal album, one that is at least five years old, and then they interview every band member involved in making said album for the monthly feature. Decibel's rules for induction to its honorary HOF are notoriously and unnecessarily strict – if they can't talk to all of the members that made an album, whether due to death or a refusal to speak – then the album doesn't get in the magazine. Thus, there will be no Pantera, no early Metallica or any Death albums in the Decibel HOF, regardless of their high quality, high-octane music or long-lasting influence on the genre.

Well, it's their game so they get to make the rules, and the truth is that Decibel has done an admirable job over the past half-decade in choosing a wide range and diverse batch of classic metal albums to cover. As of early 2009, as editor Albert Mudrian explains in his introduction to Precious Metal, the magazine had inducted some 50 albums into its HOF, which makes the chore of choosing just 25 albums to include in this book-length collection of interviews quite impressive.

Subtitled "Decibel presents the stories behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces," Precious Metal offers up the magazine's original HOF induction articles and much more. Mudrian has edited and expanded each interview beyond its original form, in some cases doubling the size of the discussion. As any old music journalist could tell you, any artist interview results in a lot of unused content that won't fit into a print publication, so the Decibel crew dusted off their moldy micro-cassettes and found some more quotes to include in these interviews. Fans of the magazine will find that the chapters in Precious Metal provide a lot more insight and information into each album than was originally presented in the magazine.

More impressive, however, are the album choices made by Mudrian and his metal-lovin' staff. Music fans (and far too many critics) that don't know anything about heavy metal too readily dismiss the genre as a one-trick pony, nothing more than loud guitars and violent lyrics shouted by hirsute vocalists. Yeah, to be honest, there's some of that in heavy metal, as any fan of Norwegian death metal could tell you, but there's so much more as well. Heavy metal, like any musical genre, is made up of various sounds and textures, from Black Sabbath's riff-heavy drone and Slayer's brutal thrash to the desert-honed doom-metal of Kyuss and the impossibly fluid math-metal of Meshuggah.

All of the aforementioned folks and more are represented in the pages of Precious Metal, along with seminal albums from bands like Entombed, Paradise Lost, Monster Magnet, and Opeth, among many others. I was delightfully surprised by the informative and insightful nature of these interviews, the various band members sometimes using the occasion to grind old axes with their former friends, other times criticizing the record industry biases that often marginalize metal music. All of the interviews are interesting, and many are downright enlightening, and the Decibel staff – prolific writer J. Bennett in particular – do a uniformly good job at coaxing the story behind each album out of the musicians.

I was happy to find that I already owned about 1/3 of the albums included in Precious Metal, and the chapters on several others have motivated me to buy copies of those albums as well. At its heart, that is what the staff of Decibel has attempted to accomplish with Precious Metal….share their favorite heavy metal albums with thousands of like-minded readers. The enthusiasm and knowledge shown by the writers is infectious, as important as the albums themselves because if we don't honor and champion these albums, they will drop down into the rabbit hole of obscurity. If you're a fan of any form of heavy metal, you'll like Precious Metal. The Rev says "check it out!" (Da Capo Press)

(Click on the book cover to buy Precious Metal from Amazon.com)

Precious Metal's Hall of Fame Inductees

• Black Sabbath - Heaven and Hell
  
• Diamond Head - Lightning to the Nations
  
• Celtic Frost - Morbid Tales
• Slayer - Reign in Blood
• Napalm Death - Scum
• Repulsion - Horrified
• Morbid Angel - Altars of Madness
• Obituary - Cause of Death
• Entombed - Left Hand Path
• Paradise Lost - Gothic
• Carcass - Necroticism Descanting the Insalubrious
• Cannibal Corpse - Tomb of the Mutilated
• Eyehategod - Take as Needed for Pain
• Darkthrone - Transilvanian Hunger
• Kyuss - Welcome to Sky Valley
• Meshuggah - Destroy Erase Improve
• Monster Magnet - Dopes to Infinity
• At the Gates - Slaughter of the Soul
• Opeth - Orchid
• Down - NOLA
• Emperor - In the Nightside Eclipse
• Sleep - Jerusalem
• The Dillinger Escape Plan - Calculating Infinity
• Botch - We Are the Romans
• Converge - Jane Doe

Dimebag Darrell & the Black Tooth Grin

Black Tooth Grin, subtitled "The High Life, Good Times, And Tragic End of 'Dimebag' Darrell Abbott," is Dallas, Texas area journalist Zac Crain's "unauthorized" biography of the heavy metal guitarist, and seemingly Crain's first published book. Although Crain jumps into the project with great enthusiasm and passion, the result is a somewhat flawed and superficial work that places a lot of emphasis on the "music" and not enough on the "journalism" that would make for a great biography. As such, Black Tooth Grin has elements of the good, the bad, and the ugly within its 300+ pages.

The Good

When you boil it all down, Black Tooth Grin is really Crain's attempt to make some sort of sense out of the tragic and senseless death of "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott, which both begins and ends this story. Abbott, born and raised in Arlington, Texas, was a youthful six-string prodigy that, along with his drumming brother Vinnie, formed the influential '90s-era band Pantera.

Crain gets into the nuts-and-bolts of the Abbott brothers' early family life in Arlington, focusing on the teenaged "Diamond" Darrell Lance, as he was originally known, and his love of hard rock bands like Van Halen and Kiss. The book does a fine job of presenting the genesis of Abbott's lifelong infatuation with the guitar, covering the many regional contests that he won (to the point where he was banned from competing by the age of 15), as well as the formation of his earliest bands with brother Vinnie.

It is with the Pantera years – the bulk of the Abbott brothers' lives at the time, really – that Crain really shines in his narrative. From the band's earliest incarnation as a glam-metal "hair" band like Motley Crue or Poison during the 1980s, through its evolution into a lean, mean, metal-stomping machine behind vocalist Phil Anselmo during the '90s, Crain describes the many bumps in the road and the obstacles overcome by Pantera in becoming, perhaps, the best-known metal outfit during the alt-rock years, one that influenced an entire wave of metal bands during the last part of the decade.

Crain also delves into the pressures of the moderate fame and fortune enjoyed by the band, as well as vocalist Anselmo's drug addiction and subsequent alienation from the Abbott brothers, a schism that would eventually destroy Pantera. Of particular interest is the descriptions offered of Abbott by his many friends and associates. Regardless of the level of fame that the guitarist achieved, and the many accolades that were heaped upon his brilliant guitar virtuosity, Dimebag remained relatively nonplussed and admirably humble.

In the end, the Abbott brothers and Anselmo suffered through an acrimonious divorce that destroyed the band, with Darrell and Vinnie on one side of the split, vocalist Anselmo and the band's bassist, Rex "Rocker" Brown, on the other. The Abbotts would later form the band Damageplan and begin the long, slow slog through the club circuit all over again. Unlike many club bands, however, they scored a major label deal quite rapidly on the basis of their previous success, and released their lone album, New Found Power, just months before Abbott's death.

As many who are familiar with Dimebag Darrell already know, the good-hearted guitarist met his fate on stage at a club in Columbus, Ohio while performing with Damageplan on December 8, 2004. Abbott was shot to death during the band's first song by some deranged individual, a truly fucked-up wigger who, minutes after killing Abbott and three other people, was shot to death by police. We'll never know why the gun-toting former jarhead targeted Dimebag, but this seemingly random act of violence sent shockwaves throughout the heavy metal community at the time.

The Bad

Far too much of Black Tooth Grin reads like a Pantera fanzine. Several subjects are revisited over and over again to the point of absurdity. While Abbott's infamous Halloween parties deserve mentioning, maybe even the special "bonus" chapter they get, but Black Tooth Grin offers three lengthy passages on these events, as well as numerous mentions throughout the text. Throw in all of the other party descriptions, and the book (unfairly?) paints a rather two-dimensional portrait of Abbott.

Another cavil that I have is the repeated assertions that "genetics" had something to do with Abbott's talent and fame, which I find ridiculous. Crain repeats this inanity in describing Vinnie's drumming skills as well. Although Jerry Abbott, the brothers' father, was a songwriter with a few impressive credits, and a producer on the bottom rung of the country music industry, there is no real evidence that the elder Abbott's genetic contribution had much of anything to do with the brothers' musical talents.

Far more important to the brothers' development into world-class musicians – which, thankfully, Crain goes into in depth – is the support provided by Jerry and Carolyn Abbott for Darrell and Vinnie's musical endeavors. Whereas dad provided session time at the recording studio that he ran, managed the band in its early days and, in fact, drove the fledging covers-band that was Pantera to its initial gigs, mom provided a stable home environment and the sort of loving support necessary for a prodigy like Darrell to drop out of school and sit in his room playing guitar all day.

Although Black Tooth Grin is an "unauthorized biography," Crain gained access to many of Abbott's friends and associates, and uses published interviews with the guitarist, his brother, and other musicians to fill in the blanks. Too often, however, these various people have little or nothing to say of importance beyond remembering boozy days and nights spent with the guitar great.

There are exceptions, to be sure, such as longtime-friend Buddy "Blaze" Webster, or Larry English of Washburn Guitars, who deliver insightful remembrances of the man and his talents. Far too often, though, Crain fails to challenge his interview subjects to say something really interesting about their relationships with Abbott. I'm not looking for scandal or the sordid details of what was seemingly a life lived in public, just something more than "we got drunk together once," which leads us to…

…and the Ugly

Crain spends waaayyy too many pages and a bucket of ink fretting over Abbott's drinking habits, even including an entire chapter at the end of the book about such in a futile attempt to place Dimebag's prodigious hydration in proper context. Zac, buddy, we get it…Abbott drank a hell of a lot of hooch. Yes, he may have been a functional alcoholic, and it's obvious from the war stories told by various interviewees that booze played a major part in the guitarist's life.

But Abbott's drinking had absolutely no role in his tragic fate, and its effect on his music is questionable at best. That any rock star – much less a heavy metal guitarist – drinks to excess is not really surprising, and mostly irreverent to the narrative of Abbott's life. Give us a few more pages about what Dimebag thought about his music, or the creative process, or playing the guitar, or whatever and less about him serving up trays of shots to friends and sycophants.

Weighing all these factors together, I'd still have to recommend Black Tooth Grin to both fans of Dimebag Darrell/Pantera and to anybody even mildly interested in the work of this once-in-a-generation six-string talent. Although Crain too often comes across as the same sort of star-crossed fanboy that he frequently describes Abbott to be, instead of a serious biographer, he does a decent job of capturing the highs and lows of Dimebag's life nonetheless. Crain is an engaging writer, and Black Tooth Grin a quick, entertaining read that captures the essence of Dimebag Darrell Abbot…but it also could have done so much more. (Da Capo Press)

(Click on the book or CD cover to buy from Amazon.com)

Heaven & Hell's The Devil You Know

A couple years back, I believe 'twas, the Ronnie James Dio-era incarnation of Black Sabbath (i.e. 1979-1982) got together to pimp Rhino's freshly-released The Dio Years compilation. The two-disc set included some of the best musical finery from the line-up's two early-80s sets, Heaven & Hell and Mob Rules, as well as a few things from the Dio-fronted obligatory live album (Live Evil) and their "reunion" misstep, 1992's Dehumanizer.

The Dio Years also included three honkin' new tunes recorded specifically for the set, the foursome of Dio, guitarist Toni Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, and drummer Vinny Appice using the band name Heaven & Hell (after their first album together, geddit?) because, allegedly, Sharon Osborne refused them the use of the holy, and seemingly priceless Black Sabbath name. The new tunes fell on receptive ears, Heaven & Hell went out on tour in support of The Dio Years, and they found a modicum of acceptance from hidebound Sab fans, subsequently squeezing out a well-received live album.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to The Devil You Know, the first "official" Heaven & Hell studio release and a fine collection of riff-driven doom-metal, ya know. There's no reason, at this point in the game, to believe that you're going to receive much of anything different from Dio, Iommi, and the gang, and that's just fine by me. The album opens with the plodding, seriously downtuned "Atom And Evil," the intro itself worth the price of admission. Featuring one of Iommi's best sludge-metal guitar lines and Dio's slow-as-cough-syrup vocals, the song stomps along ungracefully and lets the listener know exactly what to expect from this latest Black…er, Heaven & Hell album.

The proggish "Bible Black" opens with a piercing guitar line thrown against an acoustic guitar strum, Dio's slow-boiling vocals evolving from an initial menacing growl into his typical full-blown wail as Appice's drums explode and Iommi's fretwork grinds and howls. "Rock & Roll Angel" is the album's best bet for a radio-ready single, with a sledgehammer riff marching like an angry carnivore behind Dio's over-the-top vocals and a matching suit-and-tie of martial rhythms. The unrelenting doomishness of "The Turn Of The Screw" is gussied up with some uncharacteristic Dio vocal gymnastics that evoke memories of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in their inflection and flexibility.

Dio is know as an arcane lyricist, a fanciful songwriter whose head is filled with dreams of dragons and witches and darkness, and The Devil You Know is filled with Dio's typically oblique imagery, words that seem so much more frightening when spit at the listener with Dio's usual power and glory. The songwriter can have a little fun now and then, however, and "Eating The Cannibals" is Dio's tongue-in-cheek stab at humor. A locomotive rocker with screaming six-string and fast-paced rhythms, Dio's vocals run at a pace similar to Bruce Dickinson's, while Iommi's lightning-quick fretboard runs prove that the man can shred with the best o' them.

The stunning "Follow The Tears" strides the razor's edge between Sabbath's typical doom-and-gloom sturm-und-drang and Euro-styled Goth-metal. The song's strident, unyielding rhythms are paired with crunchy guitar riffs, predatory six-string solos, and Dio's best lyrical cynicism and dark-hued cathedral vox. The Devil You Know closes out with the same sort of retro-cool, dino-stomp tarpit rock as it opened with, "Breaking Into Heaven" allowing Dio to cut loose with his most frenetic vocals yet, which are themselves layered above Iommi's assaulting guitarplay and the Butler/Appice rhythmic cyclone.

No matter what you want to call it – Heaven & Hell, Black Sabbath, or the Archie & Jughead Good-Times Soda-Pop Quartet, the result is exactly the same – this is The Devil You Know. A wolf in sheep's clothing is still gonna eat yer Granny, and Messrs. Dio, Iommi, Butler, and Appice are always going to blow your face off. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, indeed. (Rhino Records)

Related: Sabbath's Dio Years Revisited

(Click on the CD cover to buy The Devil You Know from Amazon.com)

Samael's Dark Storm 'Above'

Listen carefully, to the song "Virtual War," from Samael's album Above…with its galloping thunderbeats, graveyard vocals, and guitars that brutally slice-and-dice your medulla oblongata into french fries ready for a bubbling hot acid bath…that, children, is the sound of the apocalypse….

Switzerland's Samael has a long and storied history of pummeling our ear cavities into submission, reducing our punch-drunk cerebellums into a greasy mush unfit to even make pet food outta. With Above, however, this dark-hued Swiss death machine has delivered an album that is so imposing, so damn physically demanding that it's certain to put some metal fans on a one-way bus to crazytown.

Every song on Above is availed of a blistering, unrelenting, and wearing blastbeat that bounces around yer skullplate like a jackhammer chopping up concrete. The sound is something like what I'd imagine a building collapsing on my noggin would feel like, kind of like drowning in a tsunami of rusted rebar, drywall dust, and shattered glass. Waves of sonic percussions run rampant through the mix, detaching your brain from logical thought while preparing it for the sweet-n-sour vinegar bath to follow.

After the explosive rhythms have knocked you down, vocalist Vorphalack climbs astride your chest, pushing all of the air from your lungs. With his guttural sandpaper vocals, he gargles some corrosive lyrics about black holes and "illumination" and darkness and dreams or something. Maybe it loses something in translation, or maybe I've gone without sleep far too long listening to this beast of an album, but I'm pretty sure that you'd have to be jacked up on some sort of hallucinogen for "Polygames" to make any damn sense, in any language. Hey, mph, indeed!

Did I mention the guitars, those unholy freakin' guitars? Some shaggy rabid golem called Makro wields his instrument like a Viking battle-axe, and what his six strings won't cut through, he just bludgeons into a mudpuddle with two-ton rhythms. Beneath the percussive wall of sound and Vorp's diabolic vocal assault, Makro's fretwork pierces the darkness with a laser-like intensity, dropping riff bombs one moment and blossoming into man-chewing leads the next, like that cannibalistic plant from Little Shop of Horrors.

In the end, Above runs just short of forty-five minutes, delivering an onslaught of uncompromising, soul-crunching, gut-wrenching cheap thrills that bulldozes just about any other death metal band beneath a thick layer of molten asphalt. Anything less would be a tease, anything more might be classified as torture under the conditions of the Geneva Convention. (Nuclear Blast Records)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Above from Amazon.com)

Electric Wizard's Occult Nightmare

It’s kind of a shame that my generation missed out on this whole stoner rock/doom metal thingie. The best that we suburban cannabis commandos could do was climb in the back of bud Charlie’s Chevy van, torch up something out of a scraggly $15 bag o’ tumbleweed and jam to the Edgar Winter Band’s “Frankenstein.” Edgar and his pals weren’t exactly Kyuss, ya know, bordering closer to the kind of new agey muzak that they’d play at yer Grandma’s nursing home these daze (which gives a whole new meaning to this rocking chair concept, eh?).

The problem with this stoner rock/doom metal nameplate (the two are joined at the hip like some kind of shiny Siamese musical genre) is that the spacier, mellow bands are like an “entry drug,” fuzzy lil’ kittens compared to the bigger, badder, more beastly critters that lie in wait in the darkness of your most-troubled id. When it comes to good, old-fashioned ear thuggery, you won’t find another band that grabs your cochlea and refuses to let go better than Electric Wizard. These purveyors of fine British sludge have been kicking the can around for almost a decade-and-a-half now, and if they haven’t been particularly, well…prolific…during that time, they’ve championed raw, muscular quality over quantity since the very beginning. Jeez, after all, EW ain’t no pop band, innit?

Witchcult Today is Electric Wizard’s latest slab o’ musical madness, and the disc’s eight longish dirges find the Dorset warlocks leaning – almost vertically – into the abyss. Whereas the album-opening title cut is a nifty lil’ piece of mesmerizing ambient childplay, the second mind-numbing track, “Dunwich,” rewrites the rulebook of horror-stoner-doom or whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it. With a detached, fuzzed-out and distorted guitar attack that sounds like carpenter bees drilling a hole at the base of yer skull, lead Wiz Justin Oborn does his best Ozzie impression, yelping out some hopeless lyrics from the bottom of an endless sonic well. As the blasting rhythms swirl around your head and virtually guarantee swelling of the brain later in your miserable life, the guitars strike, forcing their feedback-drenched, barbed stingers right into the ole medulla oblongata. Yup, the song is that damn good!

Electric Wizard, relentless bunch of bastards that they are, the rest of Witchcult Today provides no rest for wicked little sinners like you and I, cranking songs like “Satanic Rites Of Drugula” (so slow-and-methodical that it sounds like two dinosaurs making love), the blood-curdling instrumental “Raptus” (it’s black mass time, and you’re coming over for “dinner”) or the truly eerie “Torquemada 71” (the future soundtrack for a Medieval torture theme park). Witchcult Today closes with two extended, eleven-minute exercises-in-tension, the album-closing “Saturnine” kind of a free-falling, Sabbath-inspired flight of fancy, a real Dave-Brock-meets-Sun-Ra rave-down with the kind of guitarplay that takes Tony Iommi’s nightmares to their absurdist excesses while concrete-block rhythms stomp-and-trudge towards oblivion. The maddening result of this instrumental dichotomy is that “Saturnine” manages to be both a transcendent experience and the most claustrophobic song that’s possibly ever been written – the musical equivalent of solitary confinement in the eternally-gray cellblock of your own damaged cerebellum.

This is some heady stuff, to be sure, Witchcult Today providing plenty o’ riff-driven funeral finery, skull-splitting rhythms and more than enough Sturm und Drang* to satisfy any dozen chaos-lovin’ thrill-seekers. As a band, Electric Wizard has only one speed – heavy – as they subject your synapses to the dancing white heat/white light of tortured instruments and strangled vocals. There’s nothing subtle about these bounders, and to be honest, an album as brutal and self-realized as Witchcult Today isn’t everybody’s cuppa hemlock tea. As for the Reverend, I think that I’ll take another drink…. (Candlelight Records USA)

(BTW, there are exactly 666 words in this CD review. Gotcha!)

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* American Heritage Dictionary definition:
1. Turmoil; ferment: "A book's historical roots represent another barrier; so does the personal Sturm und Drang of the author" (Robert Kanigel).
2. A late-18th-century German romantic literary movement whose works typically depicted the struggles of a highly emotional individual against conventional society.

(Click on the CD cover to buy Witchcult Today from Amazon.com)

Martin Popoff's Ye Olde Metal: 1973 To 1975

Yeah, yeah, all of you cretins and hopheads that read my previous review of rock critic Martin Popoff’s funtastic book Ye Olde Metal: 1968 To 1972 should know the drill by now. Popoff is heavy metal’s most intelligent voice; he’s reviewed literally thousands of albums, blah, blah, blah. As the editor of, and a contributor to metal bible Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles, Popoff has written about just about every hard rock hero and metalhead to blow across the tumbleweed wasteland over the past two decades or so.

Popoff has also penned scores of books – closing in on two dozen by my count – including the authoritative biographical tomes on pudstompers like Judas Priest, Black Sabbath and Ronnie James Dio, among many others. It’s his latest project, however, that might well be Martin’s most ambitious yet, even more “pie-in-the-sky” loony-tune than The Collectors Guide To Heavy Metal three-volume series that exhaustively reviews 30+ years of album releases and makes for great reading on the toilet. These books are essential for any collector obsessed with guitar-driven rock, obscure metal bands and rare heavy artifacts of a recorded nature.

Popoff’s latest series is titled Ye Olde Metal, and each book is available only from the author as a private stock, limited-edition of 1,000 signed and numbered copies (www.martinpopoff.com). Each volume in the proposed multi-book series will cover a specific time period and, through interviews with the people that created them, will tell the story of a number of classic metal albums. The second book is now available, and the Reverend shouldn’t have to hit each of you over the head with his trusty claw-hammer to convince you that Ye Olde Metal: 1973 To 1975 is a mandatory addition to your concrete-block-and-scrapwood bookshelves, wedged right in between Madonna’s Sex and my own Rock Talk book.

For Ye Olde Metal: 1973 To 1975, Popoff has put together a stellar line-up of talent, even more impressive than the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates for sheer batting average and off-the-plate power. Some of the folks in this 230-page paperback collection are undeservingly obscure, bands like the Dictators, the New York Dolls and Buffalo largely discussed only in the pages of serious rock-rags like Creem, Circus or Beetle back in the day and never really moving all that many PVC party favors in their time.

Several of the British bands included in the book – classic rock combustibles like Status Quo, Budgie and Nazareth – were goodly stars in their homeland circa ’73, etc, while other “rock arteests” offered here, notably Alice Cooper, Uriah Heep and Deep Purple, were either at the top of their craft, or only slightly past their commercial peak at this particular point in time. Ye Olde Metal: 1973 To 1975 also includes crucial platters from personal faves like Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Montrose, Robin Trower, Foghat and ZZ Top – eighteen albums from fourteen bands, total, discussed in length with interesting factual tidbits and insightful anecdotes.

Interviews with Deep Purple’s David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes cover a lot of ground on two of the legendary band’s most misunderstood albums, Burn and Come Taste The Band, the conversations revealing some of the tensions that broke the early-70s Mark II version of Purple apart in the first place. Randy Bachman’s thoughts on the two BTO albums included here (II and Not Fragile) are every bit as down-to-earth and self-effacing as one might have expected from the blue-collar rocker, while Syl Sylvain’s take on the New York Dolls scorching self-titled debut album is priceless. The song-by-song recap provided every album and interview in the book illuminate each artist’s thoughts and the creative processes behind every recording.

There are only two bands carried over from the first book – Uriah Heep and Buffalo – but in the first case, any conversation with Heep’s Ken Hensley and Mick Box is always a lot of fun to read (and after spending a drunken evening with the band backstage at a Rush show in Nashville, I found that they’re also a lot of fun to talk with); and as for Australia’s underrated Buffalo, they were so obscure and off-the-American-cult-rock-radar that covering two albums from the band is probably still not enough (they rock folks, so check ‘em out!).

Others albums covered by Ye Olde Metal: 1973 To 1975, from Status Quo’s Piledriver and Nazareth’s Loud ‘N’ Proud to Montrose’s excellent self-titled debut and the Dictators’ Go Girl Crazy! are simply essential, and Popoff’s interviews with well-spoken musicians like Manny Charlton, Dan McCafferty, Andy Shernoff, Dennis Dunaway, Ronnie Montrose, Sammy Hagar and all the others help put these classic slabs in context. A lot of the stories told here you won’t find anywhere else, and I’m glad that Popoff has carved them in stone for posterity.

Popoff may be a borderline rock fanatic, but he’s also a realist, and he understands that this entire Ye Olde Metal concept will appeal only to a similar fanboy mentality…thus the limited addition nature of each volume. This is damn important music stuff being documented here; the kind of nuts-and-bolts tales-and-trivia that rock historians take to like kittens to catnip (or rockcrits to Wild Turkey). Although Popoff’s normal writing style is interesting, informative and humorous, in these pages he sits back and allows each interviewee the latitude to tell their story as they deem necessary.

If you’re crazy or just plain curious about this hardscrabble era of pre-metal rock music, Ye Olde Metal: 1973 To 1975 will provide more hours of fun-and-intellectual-frolic than almost anything that you’ll find on teevee these days. The rockers interviewed have lived life and lived to talk about it, their music-making and excesses infinitely more interesting to read about than anything members of Fall Out Boy or My Chemical Romance will ever have to say, now or in the future. Yeah, since the series is published out of Canada, the books are expensive…what with the dollar going down faster than a low-rent streetwalker at a Republican political convention…but they’re worth every penny for the dedicated follower of fashion. The Rev sez “check it out!” (Power Chord Press)

(Click on the book cover to buy Ye Olde Metal: 1973 To 1975 from Martin Popoff)

Link to review of Popoff's Ye Olde Metal: 1968 To 1972

Martin Popoff's Ye Olde Metal: 1968 To 1972

Writing about music is such a subjective thing that it often takes the perspective provided by at least a minimum of a dozen years to put a recording in its proper place. Given the ever-changing moods of the cultural zeitgeist, as well as the individual personal tastes of each reader, it’s a wonder that rock critics, the term itself an albatross of sorts – “music journalist” seems to be the preferred title these days, as if writing about music necessitated any real journalistic training – ahem, it’s a wonder that rock critics can agree on anything for much longer than lunch. Even the Reverend has listened to records that he raved about during, say, back in the ‘90s, and found them to be a shrill and bitter-tasting pill here in the new millennium.

Of course, a sort of consensus is eventually forged over much discussion, spilled blood-and-beer, and more tears than sweat, really, and thereby the coveted status of “Classic Album” is chiseled into stone for all time…or at least until some young jackass know-it-all comes around and states that so-and-so was really much better back in the day and takes a jackhammer to the whole mess. The safe bet, kiddies, is to steer clear of these rockcrit reindeer games and just listen to what you like…you know, like Dylan said, “don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters,” or something equally obtuse. Really, the lifespan of the “Classic Album” in the media-overdrive Internet age seems to spin faster than the revolving door at a celebrity rehab center, so why try pinning the critter to the mat?

Rock critic – and I use the term as an honorific rather than an insult – Martin Popoff has been around long enough to have seen and heard as much or more than the Reverend, and yet still remains in the trenches, knocking out CD reviews and even books with an alarming regularity. Well-known among heavy metal and hard rock circles, Popoff is the editor of respected metal mag Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles. Popoff is one of the undisputed masters of writing on the genre, and his interests and knowledge both range wide and far. His three book series, The Collector’s Guide To Heavy Metal, are essential reading for the fan; taken together they are an encyclopedic resource that covers thousands of album releases with ratings and critiques and no little insight.

Popoff knows his stuff, and he knows his audience, which is why his latest book project – a series titled Ye Olde Metal – is available only from the author as a private stock, limited-edition of 1,000 signed and numbered copies only. Each volume in the series will cover a specific time period, and through artist interviews, will tell the story of a number of classic metal albums. In a nifty little bit of graphic design, the books will share cover and spine graphics, the entire set representing a veritable encyclopedia of hard rock and metal albums. Popoff knows that the market for these tomes is limited to hardcore fanboys such as the Reverend, thus the limited and collectible nature of each book.

Popoff recently made the first volume, Ye Olde Metal: 1968 To 1972, available through his web site (www.martinpopoff.com) and yours truly wasted no time grabbing up a copy. It’s well worth the money, for both the dedicated follower of fashion as well as the rabid collector. This first book covers the grandfathers and godfathers of hard rock and heavy metal, the obscure-yet-essential and highly influential bands that laid the foundation for decades of musicians to build upon. Among the bands covered in this first book are Blue Cheer, the MC5, Sir Lord Baltimore, Bloodrock, Warpig, Cactus, Mountain, Uriah Heep, Nitzinger, Dust, Humble Pie, Buffalo, Captain Beyond and Trapeze.

Each chapter of the book provides an in-depth overview of one important album from each band, the story told through interviews with the folks that made the music. Upon first glance, what impressed me the most about Ye Olde Metal: 1968 To 1972 is the line-up of bands and albums chosen by Popoff, which reads like a soundtrack to my high school years. Living in a rural suburb of Nashville during the latter-half of the period covered by the book, the Reverend’s musical tastes were usually out-of-step with those of my more mainstream-oriented classmates, and heavily informed by Creem magazine and writers like Dave Marsh, Lester Bangs and, later, Rick Johnson. The proto-metal, riff-happy sounds of bands like Uriah Heep, Cactus, Mountain and Dust made themselves at home on my cheap turntable, and of the fourteen bands/albums covered by Popoff, in 1972 I owned ten of them (and I own them all now after reading the book).

Popoff’s conversations with musicians like Mountain’s Leslie West and Corky Laing, the MC5’s Wayne Kramer, Jim McCarty and Carmine Appice of Cactus or John Nitzinger of, well, Nitzinger are informative in spite of years of familiarity with the artists and their work, each chapter revealing new aspects of the album discussed. For bands like Bloodrock, Sir Lord Baltimore or Dust that were listened to regularly, but for which little or no information existed in print at the time (long before the invention of the ‘net), the book often delivers lots of minor revelations. As for those artists that I didn’t even know existed until recently, like Warpig or Buffalo, the book provides a fitting introduction to their music (and prompted this reader to dig up copies of their albums).

Throughout Ye Olde Metal: 1968 To 1972, Popoff’s writing is clear, knowledgeable and friendly, providing great insight into the importance of these artists and their work. It also takes a back seat to the artist’s own accounts, Popoff allowing these long-neglected titans of rock their say, documenting the story of each album in the musician’s own words. Even at 232 pages, the book is a quick read and as entertaining as it is informative.

If you’re a fan of any of the aforementioned bands, curious about their work and legacy, or just a curious reader with a taste for hard rock cheap thrills, I’d heartily recommend that you check out Ye Old Metal: 1968 To 1972, this humble critic anointing the book with my highest honor…the Rev sez “check it out!” (Power Chord Press)

Age Of Tyranny: The Tenth Crusade

It’s metal migraine time down on the farm again and lemme tell ya, kiddies, nobody delivers a skull-crushing good time like Pro-Pain. These NYC hardcore punters have been delivering the goods for nigh onto a decade-and-a-half, give or take a busted eardrum or two, and with Age of Tyranny, the band’s tenth studio album, Pro-Pain puts any rumors of their early retirement to bed with a blistering lyrical attack on “King” George and the entire Bush administration. Needless to say – tho’ I’ll say it anyway – the band backs up its fighting words with music as brutal as the business end of a pair o’ brass knuckles in a dark alley.

Besides being the band’s tenth album and their fifteenth anniversary, Age of Tyranny: The Tenth Crusade is also an honest-to-whatever-deity-you-fear “concept” album. No worries, though, ‘cause the guys aren’t about to go “prog” and trade in their steel-toed boots and stacks-o-amps for Earth™ shoes and synthesizers anytime soon. With this album and these songs, Pro-Pain hope to draw an analogy between President Bush’s misguided “War On Terrorism” and the historical (Christian) Crusades. As singer Gary Meskil explains, “it is believed by many that our leaders are rushing us to Armageddon via a self-fulfilling prophecy which deviously mirrors that of Biblical Prophecy, and that rapture-ready Christianity remains complicit for obvious reasons. These are terrible yet interesting times.”

That’s some lofty premise, and Age of Tyranny: The Tenth Crusade delivers in spades. Patterned after the same sort of high-voltage bile that Pro-Pain cranked out with 2005’s hard-knocks LP Prophets of Doom, songs like “The New Reality,” “Iraqnam” and “Impeach, Indict, Imprison” evince a certain heavy metal radicalism. The band enlists the efforts of Icarus Witch’s Matt Bizilia on the dark-hued “Beyond The Pale,” his arcane, ethereal vox adding an otherworldly sonic vibe to the song’s esoteric bludgeoning.

Taken altogether, these songs engage in dangerous, riot-inciting, downright seditious wordplay that nevertheless deserves to be heard, venomous vocals backed by some of the hardest, most incendiary of hardcore-tinged, thrash-loving, heavy fucking metal this side of the nightmare jams of Northern Europe. Age Of Tyranny: The Tenth Crusade may not win many converts, but it might open the eyes of some bright young metal fan ready to do their “patriotic duty” and dissuade them from enlisting in King George’s endless war-machine. With this album, Pro-Pain has come full-stride, earning their reputation as “the thinking man’s heavy metal band” with a brace of intelligent songs guaranteed to tickle your intellect while they bash your brain cells into submission. (Candlelight Records)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Age Of Tyranny from Amazon.com)

The Syndicate Of Sound

Featuring, perhaps, the coolest pen-and-ink album cover art since BOC’s debut, or maybe their Secret Treaties album, the killing machine splayed across the front of Sonic Syndicate’s Only Inhuman is no ordinary housefly. Outfitted with ‘40s-era airplane props, air-to-ground missiles, various arcane antennae and vintage Millennium Falcon-styled lasergun turrets, that’s one bad mama-jamma…and it’ll take more than your typical flyswatter to rid the house of THAT pest....

The sound of Sweden’s Sonic Syndicate is somewhat like the technologically-mutated creature portrayed on the cover of Only Inhuman. A laboratory-bred patchwork Frankenquilt sewn out of Swedish death metal roots, Cali-styled hardcore fury, European melodic rock and Goth-inspired hard-knocks atmospherics (Opeth, not Evanescence), Only Inhuman has a little of everything for the aggro-rock fan and, like that damned fly, it’s hard to get it out of your head once it starts buzzing around.

Twin vocalists Richard Sjunnesson and Roland Johansson spit lyrics like motor-mouth MC’s on “Battle Night” at some unnamed urban wasteland dive, the pair alternating between Cerberus-styled guttural growls and lofty, wistful flights of vocal fancy. The other two of Sonic Syndicate’s three – count ‘em – three Sjunnesson brothers (that would be Roger and Robin) provide the six-string pyrotechnics for Only Inhuman, kicking out large, if not groundbreaking riffs that are punctured by the occasional icepick solo. Distaff (and good looking) bassist Karin Axelsson plays well off of drummer John Bengtsson, the pair providing the band with its essential underlying sonic backbone. The bass is heavy and solid and seldom gives, standing firm like a concrete highway divider, while the skinman pounds out staggering rhythms with a minimum of blastbeats (thanks, dude!).

“So, O’ Great One!” you ask, “what about the damn songs?” While brick-brain extreme metal fanboys might well turn up their pierced-and-metal-encrusted noses at Sonic Syndicate’s…ah, shall we say, “poppier” moments…the truth is that these young Swedes rock like a San Francisco earthquake, and similarly bring down the house. Tunes like the blistering “Psychic Suicide,” the unrelenting “Denied” or the explosive “Unknown Entity” all combine radio-friendly song structure with metallic thunder, “screamo” styled vocals (think Victory Records) and accessible lyrics that appeal directly to the heart of the band’s demographic.

Like it or not, aging headbang graybeards have to accept the fact that Sonic Syndicate is the face of modern heavy metal. Melodious without ever falling into the chasm of fatal vanilla sound, electric, loud and youthfully enthusiastic, Sonic Syndicate will grow on you like a bad haircut, given half a chance.... (Nuclear Blast Records)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Only Inhuman from Amazon.com)

TMQ First Take: Iced Earth

ICED EARTH
Overture Of The Wicked
(SPV / Steamhammer Records)

Metal’s most incendiary outfit blasts right out of the gate with Overture Of The Wicked, a four-song EP that is the explosive prelude to this fall’s full-length Iced Earth LP, Framing Armageddon. Based on the storyline of 1998’s fan-favorite Something Wicked This Way Comes, the upcoming album release is the second volume of a planned trilogy that will expand and build upon songwriter/guitarist Jon Schaeffer’s original concept.

“Ten Thousand Strong” kicks off the EP with a shotgun blast of sound and fury aimed right at yer ol’ noggin, much like a raging freight train suddenly materializing in your living room. Returning IC drummer Brent Smedley hits the skins like a thugee on a three-day killing spree, solid-steel muscle and dynamic TNT-beats backing frontman Tim “Ripper” Owens’ hungry bird-of-prey vocals. The six-string chemistry of bandleader Schaeffer and (unfortunately departing) axeman Tim Mills is solid, Schaeffer carrying the load with industrial-strength riffing and Mills punctuating with lightning-strike solo shots that hit like the business end of a prizefighter’s fist.

The EP’s other three tunes are comprised of an imaginative remake of Something Wicked’s album-closing trilogy, each song re-recorded with a different slant for Overture Of The Wicked and the upcoming LP. “Prophecy” is an intricate, atmospheric song, Owens’ soaring vocals matched by martial rhythms, cheese-grater fretwork and ever-shifting signatures. Just when you think that you’ve got your thumb on the sucker, damn, here comes the buzz saw to change your mind! “Birth of the Wicked” is a galloping rocker out of the Priest/Maiden playbook – nuthin’ but blood and sweat – while “The Coming Curse” forewarns of the encroaching storm, dark clouds appearing on the horizon as Owens spits out his angriest, acid rain-drenched vocals in the middle of a veritable hellstorm of smashing blastbeats and stiletto-sharp leads.

As a taste of the feast to come, Overture Of The Wicked is a satisfying repast – chewy muscle meat served up raw and ungarnished, whetting one’s appetite for the main course of Framing Armageddon.

(Click on the CD cover to buy Overture Of The Wicked from Amazon.com)

Roadrunner Classix Revisited: Realm

From jump street, Realm’s 1988 debut album Endless War comes galloping out of your speakers like the Four Horsemen of some alternative, leather-clad Apocalypse, grabbing your ears and smacking your pointy lil’ head against the pavement until you give up your lunch money. That’s lofty praise, to be sure, but from the opening chords of the album’s title track ‘til the final musical explosion that Realm titled “Poisoned Minds,” Endless War is a high-octane kick-in-the-groin with the dreaded steel-toed work boot (size 12, I think). Part of the MVD Audio reissue series of classic Roadrunner Records titles from the golden age of heavy metal, Endless Realm kicks serious ass in every way that you could imagine (967 if you’re actually counting).

Roaring out of the unlikely environs of Massachusetts, Wisconsin Realm took the early-80s thrash-metal revolution that had already infected the West Coast seriously. More so, these jugheads took it PERSONALLY as well, figuring, I guess, that they could tear down buildings and deflower virginal young maidens as well as Hetfield, Mustaine or the assorted (sordid?) mopes from Testament, or maybe even better. Fey Cali metalheads aside, Realm was formed in 1985 by vocalist Mark Antoni, guitarists Takis Kinis and Paul Laganowski, bassist Steve Post and drummer Mike Olson. After circulating a couple of demo tapes around the growing metal tape-trading underground, and selling a few thousand copies out of their collective car trunks and by mail order (back in the pre-web daze), Realm signed to the young Roadrunner Records label in 1988.

With Endless War, the Realm guys figured that they had built a better metal mousetrap, and I’d have to agree with them (and not only ‘cause they’re currently holding my dog Mugsy hostage…you’ll be home soon boy, I promise!). In Mark Antoni, Realm had an unusually talented vocalist (for a thrash band, that is), an old-school warbler that soared rather than growled, hitting the notes high and low like Dickinson from Iron Maiden or Savatage’s Jon Oliva. Antoni struts and swaggers through the mix like some sort of spotlight-clad Greek deity while the rest of the band knocks down the riffs and rhythms with reckless glee.

Here’s the other unusual thing about Realm – even a casual listen to Endless War displays technical chops more akin to contemporary prog-metal outfits than twenty-year-old thrash-metal bands. The guys in Realm, particularly guitarists Laganowski and Kinis, bring a big dose of melodic technicality to the music, refusing to trade skills for power and vice versa. There are a lot of progressive elements in Realm’s sound, from the intricate guitar interplay to the careful rhythmic construction. Drummer Olson can blister the skins with the best of ‘em, but he can also follow Post’s rhythmic lead and deliver subtle flourishes that fill out the band’s sound nicely.

It all comes down to the songs though, don’t it, which in the case of Realm’s Endless War, are a breathless mix of traditional metal construct, futuristic flights of fancy (a la Voivod), classic thrash-and-speed-metal elements (think early Metallica or Megadeth) and an undeniable progressive undercurrent (Uriah Heep, Rush). Lyrically, with words mostly penned by guitarist Kinis, Realm follows an artistic path similar to heavy metal colleagues like Nuclear Assault, Riot or Intruder, mixing socially-conscious story-songs with fantasy-influenced wordplay.

It’s the sheer sonic power of the material on Endless War that keeps Realm in high favor among metal collectors, though, from the unrelenting search-and-destroy mission that is “All Heads Will Turn To The Hunt” to the gentle-like-a-sledgehammer Zeppisms of “Root Of Evil” or the soul-crushing, eardrum-busting, liver-shaking sturm und drang of “Poisoned Minds.” To further turn the world on its head, Realm dared to deliver a red hot cover of the Beatles “Eleanor Rigby,” reinventing the classic rock chestnut in a way that not even John Lennon’s mother would recognize.

In the long run, Realm didn’t have the spark in ‘em to carry on much further than Endless War. They released an appropriately vicious follow-up, Suiciety, in 1990, which has also been reissued by MVD Audio with the entire luxury package, and the band reportedly recorded an unreleased third album a couple of years later. As I’ve told you all before, however, the early-90s proved to be a sodden bloody killing floor for all things metal, and it wasn’t until later in the decade when boy bands suddenly ruled the earth that shaggy-headed teenaged miscreants (much like the Reverend when he was a young Neanderthal) went looking for more meaningful musical experiences, finding Realm’s fine pair of albums in the process.

Regardless of your tastes in metal (I like mine barbequed, personally), if you still get shivers at the sound of clashing guitars and are drawn to rampaging drumbeats like a fleabitten hound at the sound of a dog whistle, you owe it to yourself to dig up a copy of Realm’s Endless War. Provided a proper reissuing with scalpel-sharp 24-bit remastering, a high-quality shiny gold disc, original art, an attractive booklet with lots of words and song lyrics (and liner notes from guitarist Takis Kinis) in a limited edition of 2k, you’d better find your copy today. The Reverend doth decree it!

(Click on the CD cover to buy Endless War from Amazon.com)

Roadrunner Classix Revisited: Xentrix

Back in February, I wrote about MVD Audio, the CD end of the Music Video Distributors empire, coming to an agreement with Roadrunner Records to reissue nearly two dozen of the label’s classic ‘80s metal titles in grand new limited editions on gold discs with original cover art, liner notes, lyrics and everything – hell, you can read all about it over at our sister blog, Ryan Adams Sucks. Having received a number of these groovy reissue discs from the good folks at MVD, and after listening to them repeatedly over the past couple of months (between my stories on teevee and, well, that job thing), now it’s time to write a few words about these mutts.

UK thrashmasters Xentrix (pronounced “Zen Tricks” for you Hooked On Phonics™ types), unremarkably, began life as a garden-variety Metallica cover band known about town as Sweet Vengeance. That they chose to channel Metallic is not surprising, really – British bands struggled during the late-80s to define their own particular brand of thrash-and-speed-metal chops and many of ‘em sounded like Lars and crew. By the time of the band’s signing with the fledgling Roadrunner label in 1988, based on the strength of their four-song demo tape, the band had changed its name to Xentrix and had already begun to develop its own voice.

Released in 1989, Shattered Existence is one raucous mother of a debut disc. The band kicks the amps up to “11” before declaring “No Compromise,” and then they kept the damn tape rolling long past the point where their collective ears began to bleed. “Dark Enemy” offers up a literal human sacrifice in the form of guitarist Kristian Havard’s hands – surely he lost them after performing the song’s caustic fretboard runs, while “Bad Blood” expanded the band’s musical palette, displaying melodic elements alongside machine-gun drumming, courtesy of the bombastic Dennis Gasser. Vocalist/guitarist and band founder Chris Astley is a capable frontman, his vox sounding like the same shade of gray as James Hetfield’s, snapping and growling like a rabid pup above the razor-sharp mix. The rest of Shattered Existence mines similar thrash/speed-metal turf, alternating between Iommi-inspired heavy riffing and lightning-fast, virtually blinding lead runs.

This MVD reissue of Shattered Existence tacks on three songs from the band’s ill-fated (but energetic) 1990 Ghostbusters EP. The three-song vinyl was released as a stopgap to satisfy new Xentrix’s fans until the release of the For Whose Advantage? album later that year. The band’s inspired cover of Ray Parker Jr’s movie theme song was met with threats of a legal smackdown, however, and the label was forced to recall the EP from the stores. The episode set Xentrix back a bit, but they regrouped and released three more albums for Roadrunner with Astley at the helm, sadly experiencing diminishing returns with each one, proving that they had pretty much spent their creative allowance on Shattered Existence.

Met with commercial indifference in a fluctuating market that had begun to favor grunge bands and vacuous pop, Xentrix dropped its founding frontman and released one last album, 1996’s Scourge, with a new singer and guitarist before disappearing off the heavy metal map. Shattered Existence remains as a classic example of ‘80s-era thrash-metal, however, a solid collection of songs with performances that transcended the musician’s combined skills. With old-school thrashers like Testament and Exodus still kicking the ball around and digging up new fans from beneath the blood-soaked sod of the music industry, Xentrix deserves another day in the sun....

(Click on the CD cover to buy Shattered Existence from Amazon.com)

TMQ First Take: MITHRAS

MITHRAS
Behind The Shadows Lie Madness
(Candlelight Records USA)

Beneath the overwhelming ugliness of the basic chrome death-metal cosmetics lies a shimmering, mesmerizing fantasy world of wonder. Yup, put aside for a moment the leonine growls that sound like a wizened, toothy hunter on the prowl; ignore the earache-inducing, suicidal fretboard runs that cut like a scalpel through flesh; pay no attention to the lightning-like drumbeats that hit you in the forehead like an out-of-control Gatling gun. There…beneath all the bombast, the blurry riffing and the imploding rhythms…there’s the sweet spot that only Mithras is capable of creating. The moonlight glinting off the gossamer threads of the spider’s web before he falls upon his prey with a fierce hunger…that’s Behind The Shadows Lie Madness. And like the glimpse of a shadow of something that’s not supposed to be there in the darkness, the credits roll, the CD ends, and you’re left breathless at the sheer insanity of it all.

(Click on CD cover to buy Behind The Shadows Lie Madness from Amazon.com)

Clutch's Deal With The Devil

Legend has it that blues great Robert Johnson achieved his mastery over all things musical by journeying to the intersection of Highways 61 and 49 outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi and, standing at the crossroads one dark night, sold his soul to the devil. Now, to be honest, only Johnson and Old Scratch his own bad self really know what happened that night beneath the shrouded moon, and Johnson might have merely borrowed a good story from bluesman Tommy Johnson, who allegedly struck a similar diabolic bargain as well. Regardless, it was Robert that negotiated the better deal, ‘cause his legend continues to grow while the talented Tommy’s name has sunk into oblivion.

Rock & roll owes its existence to the deal struck that night in the Mississippi Delta; if not for the 30-something-odd songs cut by Johnson during the late-30s, and the fame afforded his efforts by his supernatural patron, there is a distinct likelihood that we never would have had Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and Cream, Led Zeppelin…hell, even the White Stripes. Robert Johnson, and by extension, the blues, has had an enormous influence on the history and evolution of rock music. These days, however, the deals are being made on the streets of Memphis, New Orleans, Miami…anywhere the mojo is right…but certainly not at some rural intersection in a small town without even decent cell reception.

It’s a wicked world, to be sure, and heavy metal, more than any genre of rock & roll, owes its soul to the Devil, and the two have enjoyed a long and surprisingly lucrative association. If the blues was the “devil’s music” of the ‘20s-and-‘30s, metal was just as firmly identified as such during the ‘80s and ‘90s. Somewhere along the line, however, heavy metal shed its blues influences in a blur of stylistic mutations – death metal, black metal, thrash, Goth, power-and-prog, speedcore, grindcore, hardcore, aggro – all carrying Robert Johnson’s original blueprint to extremes that even the fiddle-playin’ maestro of Charlie Daniels’ nightmares wouldn’t recognize. With its 10th studio album, From Beale Street To Oblivion, Clutch has embraced metal’s blues roots and kicked out an album so damn stinkin’ dirty wit’ the hue that the long-interred ghosts of Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Skip James and Son House all have to be grinnin’ from ear-to-ear.

For nigh onto sixteen years one of the metal underground’s best-kept secrets, Clutch has long traveled down the highway to the beat of the band’s own different drummer. In this days and age when metal bands are trying to out duel each other with LOUDER and more ABRASIVE sounds, trying to see who can take extreme to the EXTREME – vocalist Neil Fallon, guitarist Tim Sult and crew have stripped metal down to its blues-influenced vox-guitar-drums basics, with just a little Gospel-tinged keyboards for flavor. Clutch has always embraced a more organic, soulful sound than most of its contemporaries, and From Beale Street To Oblivion merely builds upon that flirtation to create something truly magnificent in all ways.

This ain’t yer daddy’s heavy metal, that’s for certain – From Beale Street To Oblivion has more in common with ‘60s-vintage, psychedelic-fueled, blooze-obsessed knuckle-busters like Sir Lord Baltimore, Leafhound, May Blitz…even Black Sabbath…than it does with a bunch a New-Wave-O-British-Wankery washouts or nu-metal pretenders. Sounding nothing so much as something lurking in a dark alley off of Beale Street long after the daytime touristas have fled for safer environs in Tunica, these songs leap out of the shadows to strangle your ears with an assault of guttural vocals, larger-than-life riff-mongering and rhythms so loudly funky that they’ll have yer eardrums crying “uncle” in no time.

Jumpstarting From Beale Street To Oblivion like the muzzle-blast from a .45, “You Can’t Stop Progress” is intro’d by a deceptive Glam-rock drum fill nicked from the Sweet, or maybe T-Rex, before a riff blessed-by-the-grace-of-Saint-Tony blindsides you, and Brother Neil starts sermonizing like Rob Tyner raised from the grave. Singing something clever about “felonious behavior” and “substantial compensation,” the song seems to be a call for anarchy in an unjust world…or maybe it’s just about petting bunnies in the park…either way, Fallon sounds like he’s waiting for a seat on Savoy Brown’s “Hellbound Train” and the rest of us poor souls are just shit-outta-luck while the band burns down the house.

With “The Devil & Me” we get to the meat of From Beale Street To Oblivion, a down-and-dirty feud between heavy metal and the Devil where neither side wins, and the line “he got to cross my house on the other side of the street” tells the tale. The schism is seemingly permanent, and whether it’s the music or the musician headed back down to the Bluff City to haunt “Beale Street and oblivion,” we’ll never know. But the song’s blustery vocals and blistering guitarwork, coupled with some of the funkiest rhythms you’ll hear this side of the Big Muddy, rise to the fervor of a tent revival before the straight-spiritual keyboards trail off to end the song….

The rest of From Beale Street To Oblivion is equally nasty, the songs peppered with brilliant imagery and dark vibes, crushing riffs that hit like a sledgehammer, bass guitar that will squeeze yer skull and drumbeats that hit like a drunken prizefighter. Some of this sounds like early Black Sabbath jamming on the Howlin’ Wolf songbook; other tunes leave nothing but scorched earth in their wake, like some sort of musical plague that all the black-clad death-metal bands in Finland couldn’t muster. All of the songs evince a dark humor and extreme intelligence, and even the most obtusely metaphorical of them – “Mr. Shiny Cadillackness,” a fire-and-brimstone commentary on modern life – can’t help but thrown in a bit of absurdity with the line “Tell me, why Dick Cheney underneath my bed? Hell no, that ain’t cool!”

There’s nary a bad song in this bunch – just good and great – and to dismiss the album as mere “heavy metal” is to completely misunderstand the yin-and-yang of the blues-metal dichotomy. This is frightening, nearly-supernatural shit, Clutch channeling the spirits of long-dead bluesmen with a Biblical fervor. I don’t care what indie-rock discovery Pitchfork is shilling for this week, From Beale Street To Oblivion is destined to become one of the two-or-three best albums released this year. This here be real rawk-n-roll, far out on the blues edge – scarier than your worst job, meaner than your mother-n-law and hitting between the ears like an IRS audit. Hell yeah!

(Click on the CD cover to buy From Beale Street To Oblivion from Amazon.com)

The Children's Crusade

At first blush a masturbatory exercise in retro-histrionics, consequent exposure to Bible Of The Devil’s The Diabolic Procession has led this medical professional to reclassify this hard rocking masterpiece as primo high-octane ear sludge.

Formed in the shadow days of the late-90s, Chicago’s Bible Of The Devil combine classic ‘70s hard-knock influences like Thin Lizzy and Black Sabbath with NWOBM guitar-goo, the band throwing in elements of the genus “Thrashicus Americanus” like Metallica and Megadeth alongside a little Cro-Mags or Gang Green-styled hardcore punktasia. In other words, Bible Of The Death is what Wolfmother would sound like if they’d listened to more Hanoi Rocks and less Ozzie Osbourne.

On its surface, The Diabolic Procession is a conceptual song-cycle, no different, really, than My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade except that it doesn’t suck and Bible Of The Devil is a far more malevolent gang of peach-pickers. Really, you kind of have to admire any band lunkheaded enough to squeeze out a “concept album” in this day and age, some three decades from the beast’s commercial decline, and I betcha that the guys in Bible Of The Devil don’t paste their mugs with make-up on their way to the MTV studios. Nosirree, these cretin hoppers are more likely to play “grab-n-go” with grannies on the way to the bank with their social security checks instead of sitting on camera with whatever plastic facepaint passes for a “veejay” these days.

That is, The Diabolic Procession is ostensibly the band’s take on the Children’s Crusade, that allegedly apocryphal tale of youthful Christian missionaries making their way to the Holy Lands to convert the Muslim population, only to be sold into slavery or, worst yet, to Republican congressmen. It’s an imaginative fairytale, and an unlikely source of inspiration for as anti-intellectual a bunch of moonlighters as a rock & roll band. However, Mark Hoffman’s lyrics are lean-and-mean, like a shank to the heart; every verse sparkling with passing daylight and erudite imagery.

No sharpened toothbrush can take the spotlight away from Bible Of The Devil’s riff-happy sound tho’, with the twin guitar chemistry of Hoffman and Nate Perry driving every song, lemminglike, off the cliff and into the drink in a manic frenzy. Plumbing much the same bombastic musical killing floor as Phil Lynott’s late-lamented Thin Lizzy, these bruise brothers are joined at the hip with bassist Darren Amaya and drummer Greg Spalding, a one-two rhythmic uppercut that knock outs out a deafening melodic undercurrent while the six-string bashers bob-and-weave with Goth fatalism, metallic nihilism and sleazegrinder hedonism.

If I had my druthers, I’d druther a three-way with Cindy Crawford and Haile Berry in a vat of butterscotch pudding; and if I was master of the rock & roll kingdom, I’d line up the music-buying public, strap them with their own ignorance into uncomfortable metal folding chairs, prop open their ears with toothpicks old-school Clockwork Orange-style and make ‘em all listen to The Diabolic Procession until their ears bleed. Then, and only then, might they all stop buying those damned awful My Chemical Fallout Boy Romance records and bow before the infernal greatness of Bible Of The Devil. Can I get an “amen, brother”!!??? (Cruz Del Sur Music)

Total Destruction Revisited

Mostly notable ‘round these parts for a handful of mid-80s electroshock recordings sluiced out for a variety of low-budget thrash-n-bash record labels deemed insignificant by the majors, Teutonic thrashmasters Destruction are part of an unholy Germanic metal trinity that includes Sodom and Kreator as its other points of light. Although not as well known stateside as their Kraut-guzzling teammates, Destruction began the Reagan decade with much promise and ended it by not-so-gracefully self-destructing at the dawn of grunge, a self-fulfilling promise if there ever was one....

After numerous line-up changes revolving like some odd moon of Saturn around axemaster Mike Sifringer, the band’s “creative output” during the decade of the ‘90s was mostly ignored by all but the most thick-skulled of true believers, whilst everybody else listening to music had traded in their studded leather jackets for dirty flannel and heroin. Seeing the writing on the wall (and wanting to live long enough to collect enough green stamps to ensure some sort of retirement comfort), Sifringer invited beloved original Destruction vocalist Schmier back into the fold in time to celebrate the new millennium. Like much of Russian history, those discs made without the charismatic vocalist Schmier, wretched they may be, have been demoted in status and removed from the band’s “official discography.”

Since 2000, the “new,” improved Destruction has attempted to redeem themselves for previous roadbumps and potholes with firestarter albums like 2005’s Inventor Of Evil. The task has only been partially successful, but Thrash Anthems promises to kiss and make up with the smallish legion of former fans still unconvinced of the band’s sincerity. The premise is simple, as Testament proved a couple of years back – venture barefoot into the nearest studio and re-record your classic old sides with a modern edge, etc, just to prove how ultra-groovy you were back in the day.

In the case of Thrash Anthems, the hocus-pocus works. Afforded a recording budget larger than a breadbox but smaller than a Volvo, Destruction proceeds to kick the living crap out of these thrash antiquities. The album delivers the real goods: high-decibel buzzsaw schadenfreude that wears its world-weary misanthropy on its sleeve while reveling in its suicidal worldview. That many of these tunes were originally scribbled on the back of boulders back when the mastodons died is irrelevant – shorn of their lo-fi roots, crunchy cuts like “Death Trap,” “Mad Butcher” and “Curse The Gods” flex plenty of muscle.

Never the most subtle of hog-farmers to rise up from the metal underground, Destruction nevertheless had better chops than most, guitarslinger Sifringer toasting the tones with the best of the whole stinking lot of ‘em, even throwing in a little wiry Spanish dancer classical riffing into the intro of the epic “Unconscious Ruins.” Vocalist Schmier gargles with battery acid and Lemon Pledge to better slur his Germanic approximation of the English language while drummer Marc Reign just does his best to slag out a wall-of-bombast behind his energetic bandmates.

If the idea of a dino-thrash band revisiting its back catalog doesn’t capture your imagination the same way as, say, a teenage Russian gymnast might, the fines folks of Destruction throw a bone towards modern marketing technique by starting and finishing Thrash Anthems with new recordings that sound remarkably similar to their old recordings, i.e. all balls and black leather flash. Much like an over-the-hill ballplayer mainlining chemicals that would send a lab rat into fits of manic depression, Destruction continues to peel the plaster from the studio walls with the band’s own individual blend of harder-louder-faster-thrash-metal and blustery, hard-chromed charm. Turn it up! (Candlelight Records)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Thrash Anthems from Amazon.com)

Elements Of Ken Hensley

Back when I was a wee lad, attending Franklin H.S. in lovely suburban Nashville, my friends and I were simply *ga-ga* over Uriah Heep. We all thought that they were the bee’s knees, the hot-cha-cha, the Nazz…well, you get the point. With Heep’s landmark 1972 album Demons & Wizards as our starting point, we championed the band’s excesses while reveling in their Goth-inspired, fantasy-influenced proto prog-metal trademark sound. Our love affair lasted throughout high school as albums like The Magician’s Birthday (also ’72); Sweet Freedom (1973, with the great AOR track “Stealin’” leading the way) and Wonderworld (1974) dominated our turntables.

Aside from the operatic voice of frontman David Byron, the other dominant element in Heep’s mid-70s sound was provided by guitarist/keyboardist/songwriter Ken Hensley. Byron and guitarist Mick Box originally formed the band, called Spice, changing the name to Uriah Heep when Hensley joined. Hensley came over from a British band called the Gods which, at one time, included future Rolling Stones’ guitarist Mick Taylor and future ELP member Greg Lake. Hensley’s influence can’t be found on Heep’s debut album; however, with Salisbury (1970) and Look At Yourself (1971), Hensley took over the reins as the band’s primary songwriter. Writing both punchy metal-edged cuts like the title song as well as prog-oriented tracks like the symphonic “July Morning,” Hensley provided the band a distinct identity and a future direction.

With the addition of bassist Gary Thain and drummer Lee Kerslake – a former bandmate of Hensley’s from the Gods – on Demons & Wizards, the band found the players and chemistry that would take them over the top. Kerslake proved to be a talented songwriter in his own right, penning three of the eight songs on the band’s breakthrough album, and serving as a valuable counterpoint to Hensley’s efforts. Whereas Hensley’s work tended to lean more in a poetic prog-metal direction, Kerslake’s songs tended to be darker, more Goth-oriented exercises. The work of both writers coexisted well on the album.

Gary Thain would also spread his wings as a songwriter for the band, contributing two tracks on The Magician’s Birthday. Hensley would still carry the brunt of the creative load, however, writing five songs for the album, including the incredible tracks “Sunrise” and “Rain.” By the time of Sweet Freedom and Wonderworld, the Hensley/Thain songwriting axis was well in place, the two experimenting with a more radio-friendly, harder-edged sound on songs like “Stealin’,” “Seven Stars” and “Something Or Nothing.” In a case of “did he jump or was he pushed,” Thain would leave the band in 1974, after the release of Wonderworld. Suffering from a serious drug problem, Thain would tragically die a year later. Kerslake would subsequently pick up the pen once again for 1975’s Return To Fantasy, writing six of the album’s nine songs.

I mention the Hensley/Thain/Kerslake songwriting tandem as a way to underscore the dynamic that was created by having three solid writers in one band. Although not privy to any “backstage” maneuvering by any of the songwriters, it’s clear that having a trio of such talents drove the band to new heights. It’s also telling that when Hensley recorded his first solo album, Proud Words On A Dusty Shelf, he recruited Thain and Kerslake to play on the sessions. I feel that the competition between the three was a healthy one, pushing each to achieve great things.

Hensley’s solo debut was released in 1973, Proud Words On A Dusty Shelf benefiting from Heep’s commercial success at the time. According to interviews with Hensley, the prolific songwriter would offer a slew of songs to the band and they would subsequently record some and discard others, mostly due to the 40-odd-minute time constraints imposed by the vinyl LP format. Thus songs like “Proud Words” would never be recorded by the band while “Rain” is afforded slightly different interpretations on both The Magician’s Birthday and Hensley’s solo album. Hensley has said that the solo album wasn’t an effort to try and launch a solo career, as such, but rather as a forum for sharing all the songs that he had written with his fans.

Hensley would record his second solo album, Eager To Please, in 1975 while trying to figure out exactly where Heep was going, commercially and creatively. Thain was gone, replaced by journeyman bassist John Wetton, a detour on his way towards forming Asia. Byron would leave after 1976’s High And Mighty album to pursue solo fame, replaced by former Lucifer’s Friend frontman John Lawton. Lawton would subsequently record three albums with the band, leaving after 1979’s Fallen Angel to be replaced by the generally reviled John Sloman. Kerslake would also leave at this time, working on Ozzy Osbourne’s first solo album before rejoining Heep in time for 1982’s Abominog. Along with founder Mick Box, Kerslake has been with Heep ever since, until he had to retire from the band in late-2006 due to health problems.

The tensions surrounding Lawton’s departure from Heep, and the conflicts created by the band’s internal struggles spelled the end for Hensley. The talented songwriter and musician would leave the band after 1980’s ill-conceived Conquest album to pursue a full-time solo career. Hensley would release his third solo effort, Free Spirit, the following year. Representing somewhat of a departure from both his previous solo work and his legacy with Heep, Free Spirit includes synth-pop songs and new wave flourishes that were decidedly un-metal like in their execution. Hensley himself seems to have expressed reservations about the album’s material, and it stands alone as an anomaly in the artist’s catalog.

The party was pretty well over by the time that I got to see Uriah Heep live, in May 1978, probably touring in support of their twin 1977 releases, Firefly and Innocent Victim. In a rare show of largesse, Rush had asked the band to open for them on their 1978 tour, paying back Heep for dragging Rush along on one of their previous tours. I had just scored my first ever backstage passes through Thom King’s Take One Magazine to interview Rush and figured out that the passes could also be used to get backstage and meet my idols, Uriah Heep. Although Hensley was reserved but friendly, Mick Box and Lee Kerslake were both chatty and accommodating. Box got the entire band to pose for pictures holding a copy of Take One and he invited my friend Wayne and myself backstage after Rush’s set to talk some more. We ended up drinking champagne and talking about music and motorcycles until early in the morning with Box and Kerslake.

Ken Hensley’s influence on a generation of musicians is often understated. From his 1981 solo album, Hensley would go on to hang out for a while with southern rock band Blackfoot, performing on two of the band’s albums and touring with them for several years. Although it seemed as if Hensley had retired from music by mid-decade, a number of bands called upon his talents to contribute to their songs in the studio. Well into the late-90s, when Hensley became “born again” and rebooted his career with 1999’s A Glimpse Of Glory, recorded with the band Visible Faith, Hensley lent his unique keyboard signature to recordings by Cinderella, Metalium, Ayreon and W.A.S.P.

Elements, released late last year in the U.K. by Castle Music, attempts to place Hensley’s contributions to rock music in context. The two-CD set features a handful of tracks by Hensley’s early bands the Gods and Toe Fat, with the Gods’ “Looking Glass” standing out as a strong cut from one of the ‘60s lesser-known outfits. There are fifteen Heep songs on Elements, ranging from “The Park” and fan-favorite “Lady In Black” from Salisbury, to “Falling In Love” from Fallen Angel. These aren’t necessarily Heep’s best-known songs, or even the hits, but from “Look At Yourself” and “The Wizard” to “Sunrise” and “The Easy Road,” they represent some of Heep’s best.

Disc two of Elements jumps right into Hensley’s solo career, offering up six songs from Proud Words On A Dusty Shelf and five songs from Eager To Please, including the album’s lone single, “In The Morning.” The anthology also includes three songs from Free Spirit, including a standout track in “The System.” A lone Blackfoot track, “Send Me An Angel” is included here, as is “The Return” from A Glimpse Of Glory. A rare recording of “I Close My Eyes,” originally from Running Blind, features the first reunion of Hensley and former Heep frontman John Lawton since ’79. Elements closes with a fine recording of the previously-unreleased “Romance,” part of the 2005 album Cold Autumn Morning where Hensley re-recorded some of his classic songs.

Elements is a fine representation of Hensley’s career, presenting his work in a strong light and successfully balancing his band and solo efforts accordingly. The anthology serves as an excellent bookend to Hensley’s 1994’s rarities collection, From Time To Time, and is a great place for the neophyte to experience Hensley’s musical talents.

The time is ripe for a critical rediscovery of Ken Hensley. A new Hensley album, titled Blood On The Highway, is scheduled for release in 2007, featuring vocal contributions from prog and melodic rock heavyweights like Glenn Hughes, Jorn Lande and John Lawton. To the delight of his many fans, Hensley’s biographical book When Too Many Dreams Come True will also be reissued in 2007. Some forty years after his first recordings, Ken Hensley is still going strong.

(Click on the Hensley CD cover to buy the disc at Amazon.com)