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Top 15 Metal Albums, November 2011

2011-11-29T17:07:14Z

"It's intriguing that so many of the best metal albums this year were the ones with no metal in them, by which I mean no guitars." I wrote that eight years ago, at the end of 2003, apparently impressed by certain gothic and/or ambient and/or keyboard-obsessed bands (whom I can no longer identify offhand) who'd taken their heaviness in a rather unexpected direction, to say the least. What I wrote then is certainly not true of metal albums now: my three favorite albums below are absolutely committed to overweight guitar riffs, as metal has been since the very dawn of time. Further down the list, though, there's still plenty of evidence of bands moving their music way beyond the genre's high-volume constrictions and into a territory that — on entire albums in some cases and just a few tracks in others — might make sense as relaxing background music on certain underworld elevators. So: a new age or an old one? Your choice.

Listen now: Metal Roundup, November 2011

1. The Gates of Slumber
The Wretch
This is the sort of Brobdingnagian power-plod you never imagined could come from Indianapolis: super-sized melodies set to wobbling walrus-blubber doom riffs straight out of Saint Vitus, with downcast vocal howls sometimes stumbling into La Brea Tar Pits of reverb or making way for strange Moog-y electronic breaks. Gates of Slumber have no problem going the hard-charging NWOBHM route ("Coven of Cain"), but more often prefer to keep things depressive and nocturnal, as in the 10-ton suicide note "Day of Farewell" and "Iron & Fire," an even heftier album closer that lasts almost 13 minutes. [Chuck Eddy]

]]> 2. Elder
Dead Roots Stirring
Monster drum grooves (reportedly slammed out on an enormous John Bonham-style kit) and verdant, searching soloing is what sets this power trio apart from most Sabbath-doom types. In some ways they're more a heavy hippie band, stretching out every one of their second album's five elongated songs (about 9 to 12 minutes apiece) with blues-based jam interplay that mimics the album art's drug-dream vistas and occasionally blasts into a deep-space black hole. In parts of the title track they even sound like the mid-'80s, Dead-and-Neil-Young-infused Meat Puppets — perhaps absorbed via J Mascis. [C.E.]

3. Black Tusk
Set the Dial
Playing heavily rhythmic, butcher shop-riffed metal, but yelling like punks (low voice sorta early Black Flag and high voice sorta Dropkick Murphys, usually with An! Exclamation! Point! On! Every! Word!), this Savannah band keeps things concise by metal if not hardcore standards: ten songs, almost all around three or four minutes. The tracks assume creative stop-and-start structures, grind speedily here and sludgily there and oily always, and boom like old Swans toward the end of "Carved in Stone." But does "Bring Me Darkness" go "Six! Six! Six!" or "Sick! Sick! Sick!"? Or both? [C.E.]

4. Giant Squid
Cenotes
Though each of these five mostly long songs gets its own Latin scientific-name subtitle, you'll be hard-pressed to decipher the paleontological specifics of the undulating mullah-like boy-and-girl vocals. But that detracts little from Giant Squid's congruent Middle Eastern drones, which somehow link goth, psych and Krautrock into modern metal. One track, "Snakehead (Channidae erectus)," turns cello parts and an Eastern European gypsy two-step into swirling chamber metal that somehow channels such obscure old art-bohos as Certain General and Azalia Snail. [C.E.]

5. Wolves in the Throne Room
Celestial Lineage
Though the fungus-caked and grumble-grunted background-metal gunk of the Northwest forest-yurt underworld is consistently enveloping, not to mention morose, these Olympia, Wash., farm-dwellers fare best on their fourth studio album whenever Aaron Weaver's synths step in. They clang like lonely wind chimes, gnaw like hungry meat-grinders, abrade like knives under canine-howled New Age mantras. The two shorter tracks are the most avant-garde, though the medievally plain-chanted "Woodland Cathedral" comes close. The final 21 minutes — that's just two songs — are a bit of a slog, however. [C.E.]

6. Moonsorrow
Varjoina Kuljemme Kuolleiden Maassa
These paganistic Finns' 2011 album comprises four stately über-extended troll-metal rituals (all well over 11 minutes) broken up by three brief interludes in which a heavy-burdened man tromps across endless frigid terrain, coughing for breath as snow crunches beneath his feet and a baby cries; eventually, he succumbs to primal screams. The longer tracks feel by turns hopeful and funereal, sometimes involve cadence-shouting soldiers, and tend to be built atop almost jig-sprightly sub-Arctic folk progressions. Closer "Kuolleiden Maa" climaxes in multiple semi-symphonic false-ending crescendos. [C.E.]

7. Megadeth
Th1rt3een
Several of these 13 songs were once bonus tracks, downloads or videogame placements. Yet the hodgepodge hangs together okay, partly thanks to lots of aging Alice Cooper shtick, notably in the multi-rhymed bad-guy tune "Public Enemy No. 1," teen-angst tantrum "Whose Life (Is It Anyways?)" and schlock horror story "Deadly Nightshade." We get current events, too: global illuminati conspiracy theories in "We the People" and "New World Order"; Mexican cartels in "Guns, Drugs, & Money." Plus some hot guitar — curiously Van Halen-like in spots; occasionally steamrolling, shredding or psychedelic. [C.E.]

8. White Wizzard
Flying Tigers
Barely recognizable, personnel-wise, from just two years before, these '80s-obsessed Pasadenans go the D&D route on their second full-length — in this case, Dio and Dokken, or "Demons and Diamonds," though a few dragons do take flight. There's also Atlantis, pyramids, sci-fi and, in the title cut, WWII air squadrons. That song soars OK, as do ones about L.A. nights, Tokyo night trains and night stalkers. But older lineups had more fun, and despite some sweet solos, these guys don't quite manage the dynamics, hooks or grooves to support their overly ambitious mythic ideas. [C.E.]

9. In Flames
Sounds of a Playground Fading
Given the seeming breakup-song bent of several lyrics (inspirational verse: "You never understand me! And I don't care what you think! Or maybe I do!"), the "playground" in these once-death-metallic Swedes' 10th album title doesn't seem to signify abandoned jungle gyms so much as a loss Glen Campbell once lamented in "Where's the Playground Susie." Decorated in minor-key-melodic intros and on-and-off electronic body beats, In Flames sound pretty sad all through — also pretty same-y, though it's sort of special when they enter extreme hermit mode in "The Attic" and the spoken "Jester's Door." [C.E.]

10. Today Is the Day
Pain Is a Warning
As you might expect, the 2011 release from these Nashville experimental-metal veterans (their first in four years) is a nonstop tidal wave of straight-rockin' noise metal (whatever that is) and horrendous volumes. Informing the machine-gun spray of sonic viciousness with a personal nature in the lyrics department, Today Is the Day have always worked somewhere left of center, and Pain Is a Warning, despite bedrock riffs, is just as far out as their Amphetamine Reptile material. It is certainly anything but the product of a band with nothing left to say. [Michael McGuirk]

11. Cynic
Carbon Based Anatomy
Three years after their second album and 18 after their first, Florida's prototype prog-death crew delivers six songs in under 25 minutes that suggest they've mostly purged the metal from their systems, give or take brief heavy embellishments in, say, "Elves Beam Out." But there's plenty of fusion intricacy and ethno-beat airiness, nodding to the Middle East ("Bija!") and the Far East ("Amidst the Coals") and the Amazon rainforest. Vocals are relaxed throughout, rhythms occasionally electronic. And in closer "Hieroglyph," guest vocalist Amy Correia recites a few "shamanic" New Age thoughts. [C.E.]

12. Russian Circles
Empros
On its fourth album, you can totally tell this instrumental trio comes from Chicago, home to Tortoise and The Sea and Cake. Russian Circles' metal machine Muzak basically rushes in circles like a louder, distorted version of the New Agey so-called "post-rock" that those bands concocted back in the '90s. There's plenty of bloodily Valentined oceanic shoegaze, too, which aligns them with combos like Isis, Pelican, Cult of Luna and Red Sparowes. In "Atackla," they even manage some bombastic Glen Branca overtones. And in closer "Praise Be Man," they finally murmur a few words. [C.E.]

13. All Pigs Must Die
God Is War
Ferocious hardcore with elements of black, death, grind and doom metal, All Pigs Must Die's debut for Southern Lord is a bottomless pit of aggression delivered with high-speed musical brutality. A throwback to the intense-negativity heyday of death metal, this fresh (if sweaty) burst of ticked-off air is sure to soothe folks annoyed by the hipsterization of the genre. With only a self-titled EP and this first full-length under their belts, A.P.M.D. are rippling with potential, proving that the ancient rites of extreme metal are as vital as ever. [M.M.]

14. Vale of Pnath
The Prodigal Empire
These melodic Denver ninjas have been turning heads since their self-titled EP surfaced in 2008. Their schizoid combination of highly technical death metal with gurgling vocals that at times veer into serious melodies makes Vale of Pnath's debut full-length distinctive, to say the least. Not quite as slide-ruler-demanding as Gorguts or as far out as Nile — but certainly cut from a similarly nerdy cloth — the band really comes together on "Mental Crucifixion," an orgy of metalcore ribboning, insistently catchy Cookie Monsterisms and brutal tempo shifts. [M.M.]

15. Machine Head
Unto the Locust
One of the first (and best) bands to be labeled as part of the New Wave of American Heavy Metal movement, Machine Head follow up their critically acclaimed 2007 album The Blackening with this equally legitimate, and loud as all hell, mixture of black and death metal. While it may not be so advisable to open the record with a piece subtitled "Sonata in C#," singer Robb Flynn and guitarist Phil Demmel make up for it with wriggling riffs galore and decidedly hairy vocals. Don't miss "Locust" — it's like Pantera with pop moves at the chorus, no lie. [M.M.]

Friday Mixtape: Metal That Fell Through the Cracks

2011-11-25T12:05:20Z

Metal has been around for more than 40 years (or at the very least, since Black Sabbath's original lineup got together the first time), and by now it's hauling around its own canon of what are generally assumed to be classic, world-shaking albums—some of which are every bit as great as people claim, others of which (as with any other genre) aren't.

But this mixtape isn't about those. Nope—these are bands you probably never even heard about, or (if you did) forgot about, or maybe you heard their names and wondered about them but most likely never got around to checking them out, or (in the case of the more familiar names) maybe they started out way more metal than you ever figured. Or at least more "heavy rock"—once upon a time, the two genres were synonyms. That would've been back in the '70s, which takes up a healthy chunk of this playlist. Thought there's plenty from the '80s, too—especially the first third or so of that decade, when thrash and hair metal hadn't quite fully gelled yet, and lots of bands were somehow unknowingly predating both at the same time, all while the New Wave of British (though also often Non-British) Metal was somewhere between a rumor, a mystery and a myth.

To keep things current, this playlist does eventually wind its way into the '90s and '00s, but that stuff's kept to a minimum, since it really hasn't been around long enough to get lost in the dustbin of history quite yet. Whatever. These 50 songs rock your socks off at the school of hard knocks, as Black N Blue used to say. A few are even about eating the rich—or about anarchy, the police, war heroes and stuff. (Occupying Metal, if you will!) Two are shrieked in sexy romance languages; another (by Krokus) concerns a long stick going boom. Plus, five artists —Vandenberg, Heavy Metal Kids, Wild Dogs, Axe and Pat Travers—chronicle what's happening out on the street, or at least claim to in their song titles. And what is happening out there? A knock-down, drag-out rock 'n' roll party, of course! So what are you waiting for?

Click here to hear my Friday Mixtape: Metal That Fell Through the Cracks playlist.

Ultimate Holiday Party Playlist

2011-11-23T14:00:00Z

You provide the eggnog and mistletoe (or dreidel and menorah); we'll provide the tunes. That's how holidaze work around here. Of course we've got all the eternal carols and trusty standbys about winter wonderlands, sleigh rides, jingle bells, frosty snowmen, drummer boys, feliz navidads, Santa Claus coming to town and/or Mommy kissing him, God resting merry gentlemen, and chestnuts roasting on open fires — many of them harmonized by legendary girl groups or Motowners or recent rock/pop/R&B stars. And we've got all your favorite ubiquitous seasonal standards of less antiquated vintage, too — from John & Yoko and The Beach Boys and The Waitresses and Mariah Carey and Run-D.M.C. Heck, we even have Neil Diamond deadpanning Adam Sandler's timeless Chanukah hymn.

But we've also stuffed your playlist stocking full of yuletide cooltides you definitely don't hear every year: forgotten goodies from folks like Kurtis Blow, Spinal Tap, Slade, SHeDAISY, August Darnell and Ying Yang Twins; holiday hipster bait from The Raveonettes, Vandals, Smashing Pumpkins, James Chance and Sarge (covering Wham!); and vintage historical performances from Clarence Carter, The Moonglows, Solomon Burke, Dean Martin, Mel Torme and two jovial and jumpable guys named Louis (Jordan and Prima.) Not to mention — last but far from least, given an economy that, once again, may not be conducive to heavy gift-giving — plenty of empathetic examples of income-inequity-and/or-dysfunctional-family-spurred seasonal affective disorder, both sociological (Was [Not Was], David Banner, The Fall, Merle Haggard, Ry Cooder, Montgomery Gentry) and psychological (Sparks, Alan Vega, Cristina, a few bleak midwinter goth bands, Aly & AJ). Which might seem kinda depressing, but those are all perfect party songs too, honest!

Scrooges and Grinches who could totally live without December deserve to celebrate too, right? Bah humbug? No, that's too strong. So deck those halls, trim those trees, raise up cups of Christmas cheer, surprise your secret Santa, gobble fruitcake and get down. Just don't spend so much time around the office-party wassail bowl that you wind up doing that sitting-on-the-Xerox-machine thing, OK? Ho ho ho.

Listen now: Ultimate Holiday Party Playlist

Source Material: Bon Jovi, Slippery When Wet

2011-11-08T18:09:28Z

A quarter-century after its release (feel old now?), it is somewhat amusing, amazing and perplexing to remember that, way back then, Bon Jovi's 1986 album Slippery When Wet was actually considered a metal album — if not necessarily by metalheads themselves, then definitely by the rest of the rock world. Even in the realm of hair metal — certainly compared to bands like Guns N' Roses and Mötley Crüe — Bon Jovi just seem so doggone wholesome, at least in retrospect. Still, the power chords were there, and so, to some extent, were the visual trappings: on the backside of the cover, Bon Jovi the band may not look like they'd drowned in a vat of pink mascara and eyeliner, but their hair is pretty teased. Jon Bon himself has the obligatory-for-the-epoch scarf around his neck, and drummer Tico Torres is even wearing tight leopard-skin trousers.

Really, what a few fellas in the band almost look like — given their rhinestone cowboy boots and pants — is a modern regional Mexican group: all they need is fancy cowboy hats! On a steel horse they ride, don'cha know. And they still look Western-ish enough to have inspired Nashville country music since then; seriously, listen to Brantley Gilbert sometime. Heck, Chris Cagle and Montgomery Gentry have even covered "Wanted Dead or Alive" in the past decade. And of course there was also Bon Jovi's own 2006 No. 1 country duet with Jennifer Nettles, "Who Says You Can't Go Home." It all adds up now, right?

Anyway, back to metal. The cover of Slippery When Wet, as all fans know, was originally going to be a buxom lady with her topside stuffed into a drenched T-shirt with the album's title on it. Japan got that one, apparently, but in the U.S. the cover was much less brazen and more modest (and less metal): just the words on what is said to be a rain-soaked Hefty bag. Still, the inner sleeve did show the mostly shirtless band having a charity car wash with lots of skimpily clad models. Warrant were taking notes, no doubt.

]]> Billboard 200 for 94 weeks (which, curiously, is 10 fewer than its 1985 predecessor, 7800º Fahrenheit), and was the U.S. top seller for eight of those weeks. It spawned four Top 30 singles, including the chart-toppers "You Give Love a Bad Name" and "Livin' on a Prayer" — the latter of which, especially, has been warbled several trillion times in karaoke bars since. Slippery When Wet went on to sell 12 million copies in the U.S. and 28 million worldwide. And over time, Bon Jovi — once a band not taken very seriously — managed to not only stick around for a long career that still spawns No. 1 albums, but to accumulate a certain degree of respectability as dependable, even influential legacy artists, which few would have predicted at the time. So it seems only fair, at this 25-year juncture, to chart some of the earlier music that inspired Slippery to be so, well, slippery in the first place.

Click here to listen to an accompanying playlist: Source Material: Bon Jovi, Slippery When Wet

Elton John
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
The history of rock cowboy songs is a tale that has yet to be fully written (though I tried once, in a book paragraph). What's clear is that glam-metal campfire singalongs like Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive," Poison's "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" ("and every cowboy sings a sad sad song"), and Tesla's "Modern Day Cowboy" were picking up on a theme that classic rockers had relied on at least since the James Gang: Styx's "Renegade," for instance. And Bad Company's "Bad Company." Etc. Anyway, even fewer cowboys live in England than in New Jersey, but this 1973 masterpiece not only features a cowboy number ("Roy Rogers"); it also has a cut called "Social Disease" — just like Slippery When Wet!

Bruce Springsteen
Born to Run
Okay, Bruce is B.J.'s blueprint, obviously, though OK, maybe we could pick a later album by him instead; what with Tommy toiling on the docks and his union on strike so he's down on his luck and Gina working the diner all day, Born in the U.S.A. might arguably make more sense. But '75's Born to Run has its bombast going for it, plus it's clearly an album about Jersey. (Um, except when it's about Harlem, but you know what I mean.) And you can totally imagine Bon Jovi sleeping in an old abandoned beach house and sweating it out on the streets in a runaway American dream. Or at least pretending to.

Thin Lizzy
Jailbreak
The argument can and should be made that Phil Lynott got there before Bruce (they were both channeling Van Morrison and Catholicism, after all.) But that said, this 1976 album — and particularly "The Boys Are Back in Town," bizarrely Lizzy's only American hit single — was almost undeniably the first time that Bruceness and metalness were allowed to co-exist in the same place at the same time. And the follow-up single (which got to No. 77 stateside) was "Cowboy Song"! How comes no Nashville cats have covered that one?

Peter Frampton
Frampton Comes Alive!
Slippery When Wet is not a live album, double or otherwise. But, marketing-wise at least, it does seem to have learned lessons from this bicentennial septuple-platinum breakthrough (the best-selling long-player in 1976, just like Slippery was the best-selling long-player in 1987), which taught the music industry that a moderately "rock" album can stay at the top of the charts for 10 weeks if the pinup boy on vocals has lots of flowing, layered, sun-bronzed hair that girls can wish was theirs in more ways than one. Plus, there's the talkbox Richie Sambora used on "Livin' on a Prayer" — shades of "Do You Feel Like We Do"!

Meat Loaf
Bat Out of Hell
This 1977 blockbuster has one of the most heavy metal LP covers of all time, so you could maybe say Mr. Loaf (as the New York Times might call him) was metallicizing Springsteen himself — even if the music doesn't sound particularly metal. What it does sound is operatic to the point of camp-Wagnerian ridiculousness, a ploy you can certainly imagine Bon Jovi taking at face value, whether they were Rocky Horror fans or not. Also, "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" has to be considered a prototype power ballad.

Loverboy
Loverboy
As the '70s made way for the '80s (as depicted, on this album, in the ode to a thoroughly modern Millie called "Lady of the '80s"), bands on the western Canadian prairie, of all places, were seemingly trying to figure out ways to be glam rock, metal, New Wave (in the Cars/Police sense), and maybe even a wee bit disco, all at the same time — but simultaneously also none of the above. Streetheart, from Saskatchewan, evolved into the Calgary combo Loverboy, who moved to Vancouver, where they hooked up with a producer named Bruce Fairbairn, who helped them shape this 1981 debut, which is a lot weirder than you think it is, especially the parts seemingly inspired by Philip Glass and the Vancouver hardcore gang D.O.A. Across the board, it shows Loverboy's early ability, as critic Ken Tucker once put it, "to kick and kiss ass with equal skill." Fairbairn was later instrumental in helping Bon Jovi do much the same thing.

Bryan Adams
Cuts Like a Knife
And then — speaking of Vancouver — there was this guy. He'd started out (as Bryan "Guy" Adams!) in a late-period glam troupe called Sweeney Todd with the blatantly Marc Bolan-inspired Nick Gilder (of 1978 "Hot Child in the City" fame). He charted solo in Canada with a disco hit called "Let Me Take You Dancing" in 1979. And then he made a few early '80s albums that popped as good as they rocked, and they rocked harder than you remember. "First-class, professional, middle-of-the-road rock," as Dick Clark once said about earlier Northwesterners Paul Revere and the Raiders: hackwork, but often fantastic hackwork, and proud of it. If this 1983 LP didn't put ideas into Bon Jovi's heads, probably nothing did.

Night Ranger
Midnight Madness
Further exploring the riddle "how can you be metal and not-metal at the same time?", there were these California boys, who definitely had long pretty hair and made pretty rock 'n' roll to boot, but also had one member who dressed up as a doctor, just like Prince's band on Dirty Mind — what the heck was that about? Later on, they developed a taste for flak jackets, perhaps since that's what actual night rangers wear. Anyway, these days (or a few years ago), they're probably best known for the inclusion of their Top 5 smash "Sister Christian" in the movie Boogie Nights. But when this album came out in late 1983, they were just happy you could "still rock in America." So they did. Obviously a crucial Bon Jovi template.

Van Halen
1984
Van Halen invented pop metal, if anybody did. Even on their early albums, and even between Eddie's hammer-on virtuoso stuff and Diamond Dave's Borscht Belt shtick (both larger-than-life enough to make this accomplishment even more incredible), their hits figured out a way to make post-Deep Purple metal both sleek and super-Top 40-accessible — i.e., something that you could boogie down to at the high school hop, in the suburbs no less, without getting your polyester particularly dirty. And there was still boogie in the music, but it was immaculate boogie. As clean as the Beach Boys. And they were never slicker, in their first incarnation anyway, than on this, their final album with a frontman who doesn't usually suck. That "Jump" was basically keyboard-pumped techno-pop at heart was also not lost on Bon Jovi, one assumes.

John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band
Tough All Over
Not to accuse Bon Jovi of "dumbing down" Springsteen rock — dumbness is in the eye of the beholder, after all. But certainly one thing they did to The Boss' aesthetic was to make it less self-consciously authentic and artsy. And they were neither alone nor original in doing this. It's sort of what Bryan Adams did, not to mention early John Cougar, before he added his actual last name. And then there were these forgotten dudes, from Rhode Island, who were so fake that on their debut LP (1983's Top 10 Eddie and the Cruisers soundtrack) they pretended to be an entirely different band. This 1985 follow-up (which only peaked at No. 40) was actually a better record, though. "I work the late night shift at my daddy's shop"; "Me and my buddies rule the corner down on South Beach Avenue"; "Billy said when he was 17 there ain't nothing left here for me now" — you get the idea. Take my hand, and we'll make it, I swear.

Another Loud 15: Metal Roundup, Late October 2011

2011-10-26T16:30:44Z

A few notable trends in this latest Metal Roundup: (1) More loud rock you might actually hear on the radio than usual, including a couple albums with songs you might even be able to dance to, other than moshing and banging your noggin even, if you were so inclined. (2) A few bands dead-set on reviving the speed-thrash of the '80s — and they all come from the U.S.A., of all places. (3) A few instances of screamo masquerading as anything but. (4) Two albums (by Saviours and Danava) that end with songs about walking into death's tunnel of light. And finally, and perhaps most intriguingly: (5) Releases from three-count-'em-three bands with the word "Earth" in their names. Talk about your global movements! Are heavy metal bands ecologically minded or what? Or maybe they just like that "Earth" was Black Sabbath's original name.

After reading up on the albums below, be sure to check out my Metal Roundup, Late October 2011 playlist.

1. Saviours
Death's Procession
Though they claim to be inspired by speed metal's early giants and flaunt the negative production values to prove it, these Oakland, Calif., throwbacks rarely keep their tempos fast for long — not even in the drumrolled "God's End," which enters whiplashing like 1983 Metallica. But they can stomp. "The Eye Obscene" and the instrumental "Earth's Possession & Death's Procession" are seven-minute wonders of moon-cave ooze; "To the Grave Possessed" tops hearty '70s rock riffs with a manly chorus. Then "Walk to the Light" finishes it all by scaling Power Metal Mountain. [Chuck Eddy]

]]> 2. Nachtblut
Antik
What makes this creepy-crawly Kraut crew stand above the black-metal pack are Teutonic symphonics and electronics — straight out of Rammstein, in many cases, with robotic beats jackbooting in their lederhosen ("Kreuzigung"), Gregorian chants and steeple bells that'd make Enigma cry ("Kreuzritter"), and all manner of stained-glass, high-mass, stations-of-the-crass production touches ("Gedenket Der Toten"). Opening and closing cuts are quite catchy too. But the further the music stays from metal, the better it is — though the hush-and-grumble vocals that suggest Gollum rapping are rather neat. [C.E.]

--> 2. Earth
Angels of Darkness Demons of Light I
Still dirging to the moon and back but not distorting half as much as in the old daze, these drone-doom titans open slowly and then get slower. But the first few cuts here feel, well, down to earth, regardless, mainly because their gradually shifting minor-key metal-gaze seems constructed out of rustic reverberations and dusky twang that hark back to spaghetti westerns, maybe even Link Wray, with enough quiet space to hear the cymbals chiming. As the tracks draw out longer, though (ultimately peaking above 20 minutes), be prepared for your eyelids to get heavy, though not necessarily in a bad way. [C.E.]

3. Rwake
Rest
Subtract the placid minute-and-a-half intro with drifting female vocals and the under-a-minute stoned-in-freshman-dorm monologue about how there's enough stars up there for each of us to have our own world, and that leaves just four songs on these Arkansas avant-sludgers' 2011 platter. All of those are extremely long and intermittently psychedelic, with hysterical yowling and yapping that suggest a chupacabra caught in a bear trap, alternating with occasional Middle Eastern melodies, backward masking, nifty guitar solos and drawn-out sad parts. At the end, somebody informs us that it was all a dream. [C.E.]

4. Iced Earth
Dystopia
Florida's most famous Viking rockers deliver a concept album — and maybe surprisingly, it involves single moms, homeless folks and interplanetary aliens who get off on "filling our heads with false identities" and leaving us "imprisoned in celestial space." The plot's hard to follow, of course, and its weight is even harder to bear. But at the end, some microchips get removed and the resistance prevails over the dystopia after all. The music, naturally, is power metal that marches and flexes muscles throughout, breaking ranks with one crooned power ballad and a couple of speedy, concise slammers. [C.E.]

5. Queensryche
Dedicated to Chaos
Opening with a long-term relationship song that might be the closest thing to a Stones rip they've ever done, and seemingly inspired from there by Extreme, INXS, early '80s Queen and — no joke — Justin Timberlake, these prog metal vets make a funk rock record. And they don't hide it: "Wot We Do" has Geoff Tate begging you to "put your hands in the air" on the dancefloor. He also pants a lot (in "Got It Bad," "Higher," "Drive") about wanting to turn on hot women. Things get more subtle, protest-y and slightly heavier toward the end. But mostly these old guys just wanna get down tonight. [C.E.]

6. Danava
Hemisphere of Shadows
Keeping most songs right around the five-minute mark, this paradiddle-loving Portland math-metal bunch makes its third full-length an onslaught of sections within sections, little riffs hidden inside big ones. Gregory Meleney's vocals float airy and nasal like those of an aging Ozzy, and his and Andrew Forgash's guitars certainly have their heavy stoner moments — notably in the title track. A couple of mid-album tracks also add some extended Heep/Purple cathedral organ, out of a dusky sort of Western prairie feel in "The Last Goodbye." But hooks you'll remember aren't what you'd call Danava's priority. [C.E.]

7. Skeletonwitch
Forever Abomination
Skeletonwitch plunder Ohio graveyards, but in a blindfold test you might guess their beast-grunted devil metal comes from someplace bitter and Scandinavian. While the drummer is usually not super-distinctive, now and then he forgoes blastbeats for a near-power-rock bottom. But the real saving grace is the two guitarists, who open the album almost placidly folk-strumming, then solo in commendably exploratory ways in cuts like "Reduced to the Failure of Prayer." The most magnificent climax comes in "Cleaver of Souls," which is also the most harmonized and Celtic Frost-like track. [C.E.]

8. Five Finger Death Punch
American Capitalist
These rock-radio successes split their third album between pleading sensitivity about mean girlfriends and klutzy but not humorless rap-metal bullying. The former occasionally recalls System of a Down; the latter occasionally recalls Anthrax circa "I'm the Man," though "The Pride" (which namedrops NASCAR, PBR, Bill Gates, MySpace, JFK and the NFL) sounds like the only rapcore ever inspired by Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire." "Back for More" is some passingly melodic jock-rock trash talk; "American Capitalist" could possibly be a protest song. Much of the rest is directed at people they hate. [C.E.]

9. Warbringer
Worlds Torn Asunder
This Cali neo-thrash quintet finds some tasty dynamics amid the machine-gun playing, exclamation-point yelling, and gallows humor of their third album. The opening of "Wake Up ... Destroy" swings from the drums on up, and then "Future Ages Gone" zooms in real fuzzy-wuzzy-like. But even if they're now shooting for social protest about Soviet gulags and out-of-control technology, Warbringer still haven't quite figured out where to take their high velocity, once it starts charging. Worth noting: the most compelling thing here, "Behind the Veils of Night," is a rather dainty gothic instrumental. [C.E.]

10. Toxic Holocaust
Conjure and Command
Toxic Holocaust are now reportedly now an actual Portland trio, even if onetime one-man thrash-revival band Joel Grind doesn't always employ the same rhythm section live. Here they get all down and dirty about flesh-eating zombies destroying your mind, bitches burned at the stake, nightmare killers behind your back, personal hells you can't escape, and the Book of Revelations. There's something half-cooked and generic about it, but that doesn't stop "The Liars Are Burning" from turning low-budget riffs into chubby hooks or "Sound the Charge" from getting a decent bullyboy-hardcore battlefield gallop going. [C.E.]

11. Cradle of Filth
Evermore Darkly
From these corpse-painted Hot Topic ghoulies comes an eight-cut, 40-minute-plus stack of rarities and remixes. It opens with a staticky late-night-radio call about Siberian oil drillers encountering "sounds from Hell," then gets kitschier from there, tempering all its demon and witch fighting with plenty of Brit-accented Masterpiece Theatre declamation. Notable moments include medieval moans and AOR crunch riffs opening "The Persecution Song," an electro-trance-dance reboot of the confession-boothed "Forgive Me Father," and some concluding haunted house program music, "Summer Dying Fast." [C.E.]

12. Earth Crisis
Neutralize the Threat
On their second album back in action after an eight-year '00s hiatus, Syracuse's straight-edgers sound typically ticked off — or at least Karl Buechner does, given his PETA-inspired praying-to-porcelain-god horror-thuggy tirades about capitalism, biological weapon attacks, parasites and vileness, and self-preservation. For a vegan, he sure does have a low-fiber throat. Still, the stars here are guitarists Scott Crouse and Erick Edwards, who temper the band's thick-necked heavycore with all manner of surprising surf, psych, soundtrack and wah-wah licks. [C.E.]

13. Maylene & the Sons of Disaster
IV
Claims of Southern swamp-boogie in these Alabama boys' genes were always overstated, but on their fourth album, they dive headfirst into contemporary radio-rock anonymity. A few cuts do open with some smoky semblance of barbecue-pit riffing, and the intro of "Taking on Water" even cops rustic Skynyrd licks. But as soon as Dallas Taylor starts busting his gut and baring his aching heart, any scorch inevitably dissolves into an aggregate of post-grunge, pop-punk, Christian rock and screamo. Tentative echoes of '80s Aerosmith in "Killing Me Slow" and "Cat's Walk" are as grooving as this gets. [C.E.]

14. Black Tide
Post Mortem
Contrary to published hype — and despite the anomalously over-the-top opener "Shockwave" on their teenaged 2008 debut — these Miami whippersnappers are neither a thrash nor a power metal band. On their 2011 follow-up, Post Mortem, they stick to contemporary commercial loud rock, in "so damn numb" screamo mode. Matt Tuck of Bullet for My Valentine bares his sensitive soul in "Ashes," the first song; the album closes with a blatantly radio-friendly ballad, "Into the Sky," preceded by the metalcore bark of "Walking Dead Man." If this is a throwback to Metallica, it's '90s Metallica. [C.E.]

15. Fantomas
The Director’s Cut Live: A New Year’s Revolution
Mike Patton and his fellow tricksters ring out the old and bring in the new onstage, drawing the first 15 of 18 selections from 2001's Director's Cut, which was all reverent-to-mangled remakes of mostly instrumental themes from scary, suspenseful, and/or supernatural movies from the '20s (Der Golem) to the '90s (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me). So: plenty of blips, blurps, oinks, grunts, whispering, screeching, fritzing, flatulence and door-creaking, with olde-world tuneage tossed in. To close, they follow a punchline-less riddle with noisy joke covers of Al Green and T. Rex songs. [C.E.]

Cheat Sheet: Hipster Metal

2011-10-18T16:47:58Z

"Hipster metal" is not so much a style of music as a state of mind. And we're not necessarily talking about the minds of the musicians themselves, who in most cases will deny the classification entirely. The phrase has probably been around for only a few years, and like similar accusations in other genres ("hipster rap," for instance), it's at least partially a pejorative — implying, as it does, that these aren't Real Metal Bands Listened to by Genuine Honest-to-Satan Metalheads, but rather acts marketed to (and, in some cases, at least tentatively embraced by) theoretically gullible indie rock twerps. Who'll fall for anything, after all, right? And even if they don't, taking an end-run shortcut around metal's troo fan base seems rather unseemly. Or at least, that's what some metal magazines would say — though, to be honest, if those mags weren't at least a wee bit hip themselves, they might not know of such bands at all.

So how do you figure out which bands qualify as hipster metal, anyway? Well, there's an awful lot of guesswork involved, but some reliable telltale signs might include: (1) putting out albums on Matador or Jagjaguwar; (2) having parody song titles; (3) regularly getting booked as the token metal band at festivals conspicuously lacking in metal; (4) sporting ironic-seeming '70s-porn mustaches; (5) having no members who aren't underweight; (6) having members who used to be in Dinosaur Jr.; (7) coming from Brooklyn or Austin; (8) stringing riffs reminiscent of classic metal bands end to end but opting not to have a singer; (9) regularly getting hyped as "psychedelic" or "eclectic"; and/or (10) getting called "metal" by people who don't know any better, despite sounding more like the White Stripes or the Flaming Lips.

Not all of the 25 bands below score high points on that checklist — in fact, a couple might even be considered hipster metal just because they're too rock 'n' roll not to be (plus, there's definite overlap with "stoner rock" and "doom" in certain cases). In fact, a few might even stretch the definition outright. But which ones? You tell us.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Cheat Sheet: Hipster Metal

]]> Bad Wizard
Free and Easy
Imagine MC5's Rob Tyner singing for AC/DC, or AC's Bon Scott singing for MC5. Even better, imagine a screaming, leering half-Scott/half-Tyner rock 'n' roll beast fronting a band where Fred "Sonic" Smith, Wayne Kramer and Angus Young all write riffs as a single brain. Bad Wizard is that band. This is unholy. [Mike McGuirk]

Bigelf
Cheat the Gallows
Once circus music welcomes you to the show, this ornate and late-Beatles-obsessed L.A. art-metal band plunder Easy Action-era Alice Cooper ("Gravest Show on Earth"), Enuff Z'Nuff, King's X, the straighter end of glam rock, Pink Floyd with bigger guitars ("Race with Time") and early Sabbath, if they pranced in fancy pants ("Hydra"). Then an outlandishly interminable multiclimaxing closing extravaganza ("Counting Sheep"/"Demon Queen of Spiders") adds lots of Queen and maybe some Sparks and Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Plus, the singer wears a top hat. And Linda Perry sings backup. Twice. [Chuck Eddy]

Black Mountain
Black Mountain
Once you get past the sensible pop opener, the rest of Black Mountain's debut album takes you on a heavy rock journey with mammoth guitars, ham-fisted rhythms and smoky male/female vocals. Fans of Wolfmother and Black Sabbath will feel right at home here, as will anyone who digs good songs cloaked in fuzzy space rock. [Eric Shea]

Boris
Heavy Rocks (2011)
Not to be confused with either Boris' 2002 album with the same title or their Attention Please album released on the same 2011 day, this slab o' sludge opens with a lowdown monster-riffed downer-pounder called "Riot Sugar," then oozes from there. Sabbath chords are wed to hardcore hoots and hollers, mournful funeral croons explode rocketship-like into the stratosphere, modernized drag-race rock slows to a standstill under kitschy "doo doo doo"s, maddeningly sluggish plod-metal disintegrates into the Radiohead ozone. To close, "Czechoslovakia" accelerates from classic doom to murderous thrash. [C.E.]

Comets on Fire
Comets on Fire
There are countless garage bands emulating the psychedelic sunshine of yesteryear. Comets on Fire's debut diametrically dishes out brown lysergic bad trips in waves of sonic brutality. Armed with dirty punk energy and the crazy sounds of vintage tape delay, songs like "One Foot" throw a pipe bomb into Little Steven's Underground Garage before urinating on the ashes. [E.S.]

Danava
Danava
Stoner-rock pioneers Sleep conceptualized longhairs colonizing outer space, but Portland's Danava actually sound like the mission was accomplished. This self-titled release combines influences like Black Sabbath's more experimental Technical Ecstasy with the proggy space-rock freakout of Hawkwind's Hall of the Mountain Grill and the intergalactic '70s glam of Zolar X. "By the Mark" lets loose with duel lead guitars à la Thin Lizzy before the band's rocket engine ignites, launching the song into a heated frenzy of pummeling, algorithmic, math-rocking changes and humanoid vocal wailing. [E.S.]

The Darkness
Permission to Land
The Darkness have successfully combined the guitar punch of AC/DC with the orgasmic majesty of the best Queen tracks, with a thread of modern sarcasm running through it all. The result? A hilarious, butt-kicking joke on you that must be listened to at full volume. All the songs are great, so just start with the first. [M.M.]

Dead Meadow
Howls from the Hills
Dead Meadow's sophomore effort begins with a mellow, psychedelic jam of layered drones that sound like war sirens off in the distance, before sporadic drumbeats fall like chunks of hail over distorted wah-wah guitar and heavy-lidded vocals. Aptly titled "Dusty Nothing" ushers in the rock with slow and sludgy rhythms holding up Jason Simon's reedy, weedy crooning, and is reminiscent of Marky Ramone's stint in the hard '70s rock band Dust. "One and Old" is a stormy, 10-minute epic laden with an opiated heaviness not heard since Black Sabbath's "Planet Caravan." [E.S.]

Drunk Horse
Adult Situations
The opening of Adult Situations sums it up: if you want riffs and you want them loud, plus you understand why Steve Miller, ZZ Top and Thin Lizzy are the same (awesome) thing, Drunk Horse get it. What follows are nine songs that are as hip as Fu Manchu seemed at first. The difference is these songs are good, and the guitar playing is really, really good. [M.M.]

Dungen
Ta Det Lugnt
Dungen play heavy psychedelic rock. Ta Det Lugnt doesn't lurk in the shadows with the candles and incense — this album is the real thing, lunging out of the speakers with the fierceness of all the great power trios. And it's all the work of just one man — a gorilla of a man with the rock 'n' roll strength of 10 monkeys. [Jon Pruett]

Early Man
Closing In
If Sabbath wrote the book on metal, Early Man are the reason it's currently missing from the New York Public Library. Combining clean, high-range vocals with complex yet doom-tinged riffs in the name of the First Wave of British Heavy Metal, it's almost as if this twosome were Ozzy, Tony, Geezer and Bill in thrash-metal disguise. But by adding the speed/thrash element, Early Man have made this throwback their own with tremendously charged energy on their Matador debut. [Jen Guyre]

Elks
Destined for the Sun
Seemingly named in honor of hunting-lodge-decorated hipster bars, these metal lords of Flatbush wisely limit their debut to six songs, ranging from 2:22 opener "White Fang Learns to Hate" to 4:52 closer "Weedwolf." Their dense, chunky, coagulated clatter-and-rush now and then slips into a semblance of cave-painted Sabbath sludge, nimble Thin Lizzy lines and solar Hawkwind soaring (plus at least one drum break), with lumberjack grumbling mixed low à la '90s alt crews of the Helmet/Prong ilk. Alleged sci-fi themes aren't really audible, but the singer does seem to say "Peabo Bryson" once. [C.E.]

Harvey Milk
Life … The Best Game in Town
Harvey Milk's first release since 1998, Life ... The Best Game in Town features the singular combination of seemingly unrelated styles and face-melting volumes that has marked the work of this incalculably influential band from its beginnings back in 1992. Trudging doom metal with Billy Gibbons guitars, indie-mellow interludes, in-the-red bashes and Khanate-worthy vocal despair (minus the screeching), these guys are still inventing extreme music. There are no bad songs here, but "Death Goes to the Winner" is the best "Waiting for My Man"/"A Day in the Life" cover ever. [M.M.]

Iwrestledabearonce
Ruining It for Everybody
Slipping constantly and conspicuously into techno glitches, turntable skips, off-balance piano runs, faux-jazz 'n' disco breaks and cartoon tunelets, these Shreveport hipsters try hard to subvert their grindcore garbage disposal. So most tracks feel more like montages than songs; single "Karate Nipples" is probably the pump-up-the-volume pinnacle of those. Krysta Cameron's frequent Bjork-to-Kate Bush-to-Evanescence emoting parts arise more naturally from the moshing noise-spew — even when electronically manipulated into hazy lounge-torch trip-hop in "This Head Music Makes My Eyes Rain." [C.E.]

Made Out of Babies
The Ruiner
Brooklyn's female-fronted post-sludge metal outfit Made Out of Babies return with a complex third album. Impassioned vocals shift from placid to brutal, offering melodic verses, shrill bridges, brooding layers and soft, ethereal passages alongside heavy instrumental distortion reminiscent of grunge's early flirtations with metal. The deep riffing of slow-burning tracks like "Cooker" and the ruggedness of frantic tracks like "Bunny Boots" mark the dark, playful unpredictability this quartet promises. [J.G.]

Melvins
Houdini
An unbelievably loud combination of Sabbath riffs and sideways nods to punk nihilism from the Seattle grunge avatars. Featuring a super-heavy, ZZ Top-style opener ("Hooch") and the best Nirvana riff ever written ("Lizzy"), this is an excellent record to listen to so loud that it makes your eyes bleed. [M.M.]

Oneida
Rated O
Oneida, one of the best Brooklyn bands of the '00s, have favored drone over rock for years, and they have finally gotten the twee out of their system. Never scared to overdo things, here they go all out, spreading nearly two hours of difficult music (including four 10-minute-plus tracks) over three discs. Songs range from burnt-throat doom-metal sludge to obsessive Kraut drone to Middle Eastern psych to space trance to shoegaze. The best cut is the opener, a masterpiece of deep, barefoot Nyabinghi dub called "Brownout in Lagos." But once that sucks you in, you might as well stick around for the ride. [C.E.]

Parchman Farm
Parchman Farm
These S.F.-based heavy rockers deliver a freak-flag-flying debut highlighted by the loping riff that powers "Say Yeah" and an obsession with putting killer guitars on top of ham-hock drumming. At their best, Parchman Farm bring back the days of twin wah-wah solos and bad brown acid, while keeping an eye toward breaking new ground. [M.M.]

Pelican
The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw
The unfortunate "metalcore" classification that's often applied to Pelican is far more foreboding than the band's actual sound. The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw, especially, swells with monumental beauty — songs stretch past the 10-minute mark, building intently and delivering cathartic crescendos, like a storm gathering in the distance and eventually drenching you to the bone. This is easily one of the best and most underrated albums of 2005. There's little metal and even less core to Fire; instead, layered guitars, masterful volume dynamics and dramatic progressions make for a truly powerful instrumental epic. [Jonathan Zwickel]

Saviours
Death's Procession
Though they claim to be inspired by speed metal's early giants and flaunt the negative production values to prove it, these Oakland, Calif., throwbacks rarely keep their tempos fast for long — not even in the drum-rolled "God's End," which enters whiplashing like 1983 Metallica. But they can stomp. "The Eye Obscene" and the instrumental "Earth's Possession and Death's Procession" are seven-minute wonders of moon-cave ooze; "To the Grave Possessed" tops hearty '70s rock riffs with a manly chorus. Then "Walk to the Light" finishes it all by scaling Power Metal Mountain. [C.E.]

Sun O)))
Flight of the Behemoth
While Sunn O)))'s brilliance can really only be understood when the mountainous waves of guitar drone that make up their turgid pieces are permanently damaging your hearing in a live setting, Flight of the Behemoth marks the highly influential band's taffy-pulling finest moment on wax. They collaborate with Japanese electronic noise overlord Merzbow on tracks 3 and 4, and reconfigure Metallica's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (the scarifying closer "FWTBT"). The glacial moan of feedback, while heavy and loud as all hell, serves to transfix the listener far more than it disturbs. [M.M.]

The Sword
Warp Riders
The third record from Austin stoner-metal band The Sword manages to shut up any naysayers whispering about indie-rock roots with its fluttering riffs and suitably spaced-out tough-guy vocals. The band's love for Zeppelin may be the most interesting thing about them (check the awesome drumming on "Lawless Lands"), but when they manage to channel Captain Beyond's "Dancing Madly Backwards" (again on "Lawless Lands"), they become more than just hipster metal; down-tuned guitars always sound good. [M.M.]

Witch
Paralyzed
This sophomore release from stoned doom masters Witch consists of catchy, evil anthem after catchy, evil anthem. Heavily distorted killer riffs; ominous high-pitched vocals channeling a young Alice Cooper; and faster, shorter, tighter songs conformed to fit J Mascis' punk-grown drumming style make this transient quartet's cauldron-cooked brand of tarnished metal broodingly heavy. Smoldering tracks "Eye" and "Sweet Sue" foreshadow Armageddon as they coalesce in fuzzy walls of sound, while the devastating "Psychotic Rock" encapsulates all you need to know about the psychotic rock of Witch. [J.G.]

Wolfmother
Wolfmother
This Aussie power trio has only been onstage since 2004, but they sound (and look) like they stepped out of the Wayback Machine, the dial set to the stoner '70s. This album is chock full of classic guitar chords recycled anew, bumping into pyramids, unicorns and other hazy mystical visions. Think Jet meets Sabbath. [Michele Flannery]

Year Long Disaster
Black Magic: All Mysteries Revealed
On its second full-length, this Cali trio makes a convincing claim to be a modern Soundgarden, consistently locating both deep pockets and trippy cloud patterns for their blooze-howled sludge. Following a brief but doomful instrumental title intro, "Show Me Your Teeth" kicks things off by celebrating the carrying of firearms in the city. Six-minute centerpiece "Sparrow Hill" locks into the set's most Sabbath-like swing; "Seven of Swords" and "Foggy Bottom" pastorally search for black holes in the winter sun. They save their fastest riffing for the aptly named "Cyclone," at album's end. [C.E.]

Top 15 Metal Albums of October 2011

2011-10-04T17:03:16Z

With Halloween fast approaching, it's hugely appropriate that Rocktober opens with a veritable harvest of scary new metal releases — by big names (Opeth, Mastodon, Alice Cooper, Anthrax) alongside bands you've probably never heard of; by veterans like Anvil taking stock of their hard-luck careers and coagulated upstarts like Elks trying to chart heavy new directions; by proggers and doom goths and boogie dogs and death worshippers and Satanic sailors and ironic cutters-and-pasters; by Swedes and Norwegians and Greeks and Italians and Poles and Canadians and Americans and even some old dudes from Ohio who were their own kind of alt-metal way back in the mid-'70s, when punk was still glam. If you can't find an album to pump your fist to among this high-decibel 15, you might just need a new fist.

After reading-up on the albums below, be sure to check out my Metal Roundup, October 2011 playlist.

1. Opeth
Heritage
The Swedish progressive metal band's first album since 2008 — and the last to feature keyboard player Per Wiberg — opens with a plaintive solo piano piece courtesy of Wiberg before launching into "The Devil's Orchard," which may as well have been written by Yes at the very height of their powers. That's a good thing. The similarities with classic Yes continue through "I Feel the Dark." In an era when all rock music essentially is run through Pro Tools and made soulless, these highly intelligent beings have put out a record as alive as anything released in the '70s — another good thing. — Michael McGuirk

]]> 2. Anvil
Monument of Metal: The Very Best of Anvil
Get all the hits the once-obscure metal band never had in one easy place. From their signature "Metal on Metal" to the unintentionally hilarious song title "Thumbhang," it's tough to decide if Anvil are good or if it's just nice to know there is an actual real-life incarnation of Spinal Tap. Uncannily, the drummer's name is Robb Reiner! Despite the unshakeable sense of ironic appreciation, one cannot ignore the fact that Anvil have played by their own rules for decades. — M.M.

3. Woods of Ypres
Woods IV: The Green Album
These Ontario metal goths sink to such hilariously lonely depths of self-sorrow that it must be a put-on. The suicide note "By the Time You Read This (I Will Already Be Dead)" precedes post-mortem maxi-single "I Was Buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery," where Maple Leaf-proud basso profondo David Gold visits Glenn Gould's grave before expiring. "Life is just pain and piss," he moans in "Wet Leather"; "Retrosleep in the Morning Calm" unconvincingly explains why he spends nights alone. And the band's dank, ringing Sisters-of-Mercy-on-steroids turbulence makes up for 16 songs being a few too many. — Chuck Eddy

4. Left Lane Cruiser
Junkyard Speed Ball
Indiana's Delta duo get more Southern-rock bittersweet on their fourth album, notably in "Cracker Barrel," the dusky-organed "Giving Tree," and "Pig Farm," which sets a hunt for an old cornfield house off I-94 in Michigan to sodden Crazy Horse guitars. The Memphis metal-funk "24 Hr" praises all-night greasy spoons; the boogie-rap of "Hip-Hop" has a Big Mac attack in its Cadillac. But from back-porch harmonica shuffles to spittle-voiced geezer stomps, there's as much drinking as eating: "Weed Vodka," for example, and a song detailing preferred beverages at sundry Southwestern tour stops. — C.E.

5. Rocket from the Tombs
Barfly
Pushing 60 age-wise, these prototype Cleveland punks manage a perfectly playable album. They do cheat a pinch: secret weapon Richard Lloyd, the ex-Television guitarist who still melds fuzzed-up surf/folk/jazz/psych into something exploratory, ain't from Ohio. And two songs sneakily repeat in alternate versions, under different titles. "Birth Day" seems to mention Britney Spears, and yelping David Thomas has women on his groggy mind throughout — even the ominous "Maelstrom" revolves around the line "I got a phone call, it was a girl call." — C.E.

6. Elks
Destined for the Sun
Seemingly named in honor of hunting-lodge-decorated hipster bars, these metal lords of Flatbush wisely limit their debut to six songs, ranging from 2:22 opener "White Fang Learns to Hate" to 4:52 closer "Weedwolf." Their dense, chunky, coagulated clatter-and-rush now and then slips into a semblance of cave-painted Sabbath sludge, nimble Thin Lizzy lines and solar Hawkwind soaring (plus at least one drum break), with lumberjack grumbling mixed low á la '90s alt crews of the Helmet/Prong ilk. Alleged sci-fi themes aren't really audible, but the singer does seem to say "Peabo Bryson" once. — C.E.

7. Mastodon
The Hunter
Dedicated to (and named in honor of) guitarist Brent Hinds' brother, who died of a heart attack while on a hunting trip in December 2010, The Hunter is the Atlanta-based prog metal band's fifth record, and their first since 2002's Remission that is not a concept album. Featuring stolid, mid-tempo riffs and the careening seaworthy rhythms that made Leviathan an all-encompassing experience, The Hunter finds Mastodon returning to the simpler structures and all-out heaviness of their beginnings. — M.M.

8. The F*ck*ing Wrath
Valley of the Serpent's Soul
These Southern Californians don't have much room for finesse where their barrel-chested bellowing and barking are concerned — think Lemmy having a bad throat day, or Henry Rollins recruiting for the WWE. Yet on their third album, The Wrath consistently deliver the pile-driving pleasure of an imaginative heavy rock unit expert in multiple modes of metal, from rampaging war-march to hardcore forward-charge to wobbling grind-plod to astronomical blast-offs (see: "Grandelusion"). Stretching out while shifting tempos and gears, they keep the structures intriguing. Their brains match their brawn. — C.E.

9. ICS Vortex
Storm Seeker
Taking a break from all the Norwegian black metal bands he's done time in, the tall bearded man born Simon Hestnæs goes solo, albeit with four black metal Norwegians helping out. This music, though, is more cordial than that; it's steeped in steely '70s chug of the Deep Purple/BÖC school but is more low-budget grimy, and it abounds in mysterious prog and folk referents. There's humor, too: "The Blackmobile" is about a car; "Skoal!" likely involves drinking. "Storm Seeker" is a maritime chantey, and stormy indeed. And closer "The Sub Mariner" is an odd electronic instrumental, lost at sea in need of GPS. — C.E.

10. Alice Cooper
Welcome 2 My Nightmare
While there's no escaping the fact that the most hardcore drug referenced on this sequel to the 1975 album is, uh, caffeine (track 2), at least former members of the Alice Cooper Band are playing the music. And even though there are both Auto-Tune vocals and rapping, there are moments when the group's '70s ferocity is recaptured, sort of. Their proclivities for cabaret music and Broadway dramatics are also touched on. To be fair, that rapping ("Disco Bloodbath Boogie Fever") is done as a joke, and Cooper's trademark sly humor is everywhere here. — M.M.

11. Ravencult
Morbid Blood
This second full-length from the Greek black metal band is a throwback to the heydays of the Norwegian scene, with purely infernal lyrics, choked vocals and a fluttering wall of guitar. It even sounds tinny as hell, just the way black metal is supposed to sound. While the songs may all run into each other, the idea here is to blast through with a nonstop sonic assault. That said, the title cut tosses in some tempo changes, even veering into thrash metal territory at the bridge. Ravencult prove there's a place for true black metal years after the original scene disintegrated. — M.M.

12. Rhapsody of Fire
From Chaos to Eternity
Their guitar solos pack too many notes into too little space; their keyboard breaks prance about daintily enough for ballet class; their multipart harmonies seem to have studied Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, Anglican church hymns and the great Mediterranean tenors. But these regal Italians still lift heavy weight; "Aeons of Raging Darkness" and "Tornado" shift between muscle-Viking and melodic death metal territory. Then there's closer "Heroes of the Waterfall's Kingdom," a 19-minute playlet where, as a narrator portentously declaims, blood of thine enemies is spilled across Northern snow. — C.E.

13. Decapitated
Carnival is Forever
The first record the band put out following the tragic death of drummer Vitek Kieltyka in a car wreck, Carnival Is Forever picks up where Decapitated left off in 2007, featuring the vectoring technical death metal the Polish band has been associated with since forming in 1996. The album features a new singer and rhythm section; its overall quality (check the one-two punch of "United" and the title cut for starters) is a testament to founding member Vogg Kieltyka's strength in facing the adversity that befell him when he lost his brother. — M.M.

14. Anthrax
Worship Music
Anthrax wrap Worship Music — their first studio album in eight years, and their first featuring Joey Belladonna in 21 — in a church concept that belies Scott Ian's Jewish upbringing. They open with a pipe-organ intro, do two brief "Hymn" interludes (one classical, one martial), start "I'm Alive" with gothic chanting, and frame "In the End" with midnight mass bells. They also quote Biggie once, but mostly stick to the mosh pit and occasionally get almost melodic there: "Judas Priest," presumably a tribute, is followed by "Crawl," a thrash/late-Beatles pastiche ending with ping-ponging disco videogame plinks. — C.E.

15. Iwrestledabearonce
Ruining It for Everybody
Slipping constantly and conspicuously into techno glitches, turntable skips, off-balance piano runs, faux-jazz 'n' disco breaks and cartoon tunelets, these Shreveport hipsters try hard to subvert their grindcore garbage disposal. So most tracks feel more like montages than songs; single "Karate Nipples" is probably the pump-up-the-volume pinnacle of those. Krysta Cameron's frequent Bjork-to-Kate Bush-to-Evanescence emoting parts arise more naturally from the moshing noise-spew — even when electronically manipulated into hazy lounge-torch trip-hop in "This Head Music Makes My Eyes Rain." — C.E.

Senior Year, 1983: Fast Times at Hesher High

2011-09-27T17:07:26Z

It's 1983. MTV's still all foofy fake New Wave pop crap from England, and you're stuck in the middle of nowhere in your acid-washed jeans and Quiet Riot-patched denim jacket and greasy zits and hockey hair, bored out of your teenaged mind behind a locked door in your mom's house, and you just wanna rock \m/!! These are lonely times to be a hesher — decent AC/DC and Alice Cooper and Van Halen albums are already seeming like a distant memory (Diver Down?? Who the heck were they fooling with that one?), and speed metal and hair metal have barely even started to stir, much less split the world in two. So if you want good metal, you'll have to hunt for it — and maybe even settle for the occasional Journey or Night Ranger (or Pat Benatar or Joan Jett, for that matter) song. Which is cool, 'cause they kinda rock too, right? At this point, Survivor's not that far from Dokken! But what you really crave is the real stuff, and you're gonna find it even if you have to spend paper-route money on a Kerrang subscription to learn what "NWOBHM" spells. Today's your lucky day, 'cause we're here to help. This playlist piles on 50 — count 'em, 50 — tunes from the era: couple AOR ringers, maybe, but mainly heavy Chevy Novas to boost your metal health. Metal on metal, as Anvil put it. Because dudester, your mullet deserves to bang.

Click here to listen to our entire playlist: Senior Year, 1983: Fast Times at Hesher High.

Cheat Sheet: Death Metal

2011-09-20T17:20:13Z

More or less invented and/or exhumed (by a band called Death, naturally) in the sweltering swamps of Florida in the mid-'80s — though perhaps anticipated by any number of violently thrashing ensembles in Switzerland, Germany, the north of England and the San Francisco Bay before then — death metal takes ugliness to an extreme. Since its inception, it has occasionally got a smidgen more melodic, technical or grindcorelicious, yet it is still primarily comprised of bands named for autopsies, carcasses, obituaries and deicides. They growl like scary monsters (and not so you can make out many lyrics) about toxic garbage, bloody gore, internal bleeding, broken hands, dehydration and all manner of great green gobs of regurgitated monkey guts. And oh yeah: suffocation! Lots and lots of suffocation. Death-metal bands love that! Here are some to know.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Cheat Sheet: Death Metal

]]> At the Gates
Slaughter of the Soul
Generally considered the apex of melodic death metal — and the Gothenburg sound itself — At the Gates' final record, released in 1995, remains a de facto influence on the American emo-metal scene, most notably among such mainstream leading lights as Darkest Hour, Bullet for My Valentine, Unearth, etc. The thrumming groove of "World of Lies" somehow manages to make Pantera sound watered down, while the dramatic riffage of opening cut "Blinded by Fear" and the loud-as-hell, near-math coda of "Under a Serpent Sun" laid the foundation for the metalcore of the '00s. — Mike McGuirk

Autopsy
Mental Funeral
The trudging doom metal elements Autopsy had flirted with since their beginning came to full fruition on Mental Funeral, with tunes marked by levels of slo-mo near those of Saint Vitus. "In the Grip of Winter," for one, almost goes backward at one point. Directly descended from the lo-fi half-tempos of once-obscure doom godfathers Trouble, Autopsy's second full-length is frequently identified as having a major effect on death metal itself, and with the doom explosion of the '00s, it remains relevant, if not downright seminal. "Dead" and "Robbing the Grave" are two more highlights. — M.M.

Bolt Thrower
Realm of Chaos
Originally released in 1989, Realm of Chaos is the British death metal band's second record and their first for Earache. Featuring solid guitar riffs, classic blastbeats, putridly guttural vocals (courtesy of one Karl Willetts) and high-flying, Slayer-like solos, the album is forever tied to the early days of death metal. That's not necessarily a bad thing; it simply points to Bolt Thrower's importance in the formation of the genre. "Through the Eye of Terror" and "World-Eater" are pure heavy groove, and "All That Remains" thuds with the power of early doom metal. — M.M.

Cannibal Corpse
Butchered at Birth
"Rancid Amputation," "Covered With Sores," "Vomit the Soul," "Living Dissection," "Gutted," "Under the Rotted Flesh" and, of course, the best one, "Meat Hook Sodomy" — the song titles say it all. This is not New Age music. The vocals are outrageous, the riffs bludgeoning, the drumming mentally deficient. Cannibal Corpse rule. — M.M.

Carcass
Heartwork
Carcass made the leap from a garden-variety death metal band with Heartwork in 1993, breaking from the gore-obsessed lyrics and Cookie Monster vocals that had marked their previous work (and that of pretty much every other death metal band of the time). Incorporating clear, Maiden-worthy guitar leads and unobtrusive but distinct melodies, Carcass changed the way death metal was perceived. As heavy and challenging as any of their earlier albums, if not more so, Heartwork's influence is seminal in the melodic death metal movement that followed. "Embodiment" says it all. — M.M.

Death
Scream Bloody Gore
Death metal's very first befoulment of the human soul, this landmark album emerged from Orlando in 1987. Essentially pointing the way for countless bands that came after them, Death took the already extreme thrash and speed metal of Slayer and somehow made it even uglier, more brutal and, presumably for any parents whose kids were cranking this with the door shut, more terrifying. And even though Scream Bloody Gore is often cited as the first of its kind, the album remains as vital as what followed it. — M.M.

Decapitated
Carnival Is Forever
The first record the band put out since the tragic death of drummer Vitek Kieltyka in a car wreck, Carnival Is Forever picks up where Decapitated left off in 2007, featuring the vectoring technical death metal the Polish band has been associated with since forming in 1996. The album features a new singer and rhythm section; its overall quality (check the one-two punch of "United" and the title cut for starters) is a testament to founding member Vogg Kieltyka's strength in facing the adversity that befell him when he lost his brother. — M.M.

Deicide
Deicide
Heavily influenced by Slayer, Deicide rank high on the list of important death metal bands, and their 1990 debut remains one of the most dedicated-to-evil albums of all time. Singer Glen Benton (the guy with an upside-down cross burnt into his forehead) alternately growls and shrieks, sending the high pitches sailing over roiling guitars and the requisite thrubbing of blastbeat percussion. "Lunatic of God's Creation" is one of their signature songs, but don't miss "Dead by Dawn," or any of the guitar solos. — M.M.

Gojira
The Way of All Flesh
French quintet Gojira expand their death/doom combination on this fourth full-length. Pushing metal's blackened boundaries with odd time signatures, reserved double bass, sawing guitars and slow-burning, overcast tracks like "All the Tears," "The Art of Dying" and the 17-minute crusher "The Way of All Flesh," the group reveals a thought-provoking progression while vocalist Joe Duplantier growls about the inevitably of death. — Jen Guyre

Lamb of God
Wrath
Consistently boasting an angry brew of confrontational lyrics venomously gurgled over urgent, brooding guitars and technically precise, groove-oriented drums, LoG have become an easy-to-recognize brand. Without entirely abandoning those schematics, Wrath sees some song structure experimentation ("Broken Hands"), moving away from the verse-hook-verse standard ("Set to Fail"), while tightening the overall chops and incorporating outside influences ("Choke Sermon"). The whole package shows off why these guys are America's death metal darlings. — J.G.

Morbid Angel
Altars of Madness
A major milestone in the creation of death metal, Morbid Angel are one of the first Floridian bands to attempt the style. This 1989 debut still tops critics' polls; the jaw-dropping complexity of the guitars and spastic drum patterns (even beyond those of fellow Florida metal OGs Death and Obituary) point to the band's effect on the as-yet-to-be-invented subgenre of technical death metal. Guitarist Trey Azagthoth's playing absolutely steals the show, dive-bombing and breaking into a spray of sparks at breakneck speeds. For starters, check "Maze of Torment" and "Suffocation." This guy's good. — M.M.

Napalm Death
Scum
This revolutionary, face-melting 28-track statement defined a genre (grindcore) and spread the almighty blastbeat like wildfire across the globe. Scum was created for the tape-trading underground, and its rough, muddy production and raw, unbridled aggression features both viscerally structured tunes like "Instinct of Survival" and "Siege of Power," and insane less-than-40-second clips of uber-fast beats like "Point of No Return," "Negative Approach" and, of course, the two-second-long brilliance of "You Suffer." If you want to hear history in the making, turn this record up loud! — J.G.

Nile
Black Seeds of Vengeance
While it's kind of a bummer to learn Nile gleaned their knowledge of ancient Egypt from the History Channel and not while plundering tombs with Indiana Jones, the attraction of a band that name checks Nephran-Ka and Aat-Ankh-Es-En-Amenti is undeniable. Also, any band offering a song called "Chapter for Transforming into a Snake" clearly deserves special consideration. More importantly, Black Seeds of Vengeance is marked by truly weird chanting and undeniably exotic instrumentations (see "The Black Flame" for one) perfectly woven into traditional, but high-quality, death metal moves. — M.M.

Obituary
Slowly We Rot
Released in 1989, Slowly We Rot brought the rapidly growing Florida death metal scene to new extremes in totally extreme heavy metal extremeness. Singer John Tardy's sublanguage howl-gurgle is a big draw here, but the real payoff is the Sabbath-slow, super-phased freak-outs of "Til Death" and the title cut. — M.M.

Pestilence
Consuming Impulse
With their second album, Dutch outfit Pestilence transmogrified into a straight death metal unit. Whereas their debut had shown the trappings of the thrash they started out with, this 1989 seizure was marked by stolid riffage, a serious drop-off in complexity, and alternating gurgly-guttural and harried-nutjob vocals. Years after its release, Consuming Impulse is a perfect artifact of the early death metal era, with both Obituary and Sepultura informing the sound, not to mention cover art that positively screams 1989. Things get fun with "The Trauma." — M.M.

Revocation
Chaos of Forms
These Boston deathcore bullies start out their third album jumping up and down, breaking things, marching in circles with fists flailing, flapping their gums in an unseemly and unfeminist manner at a "Harlot," and even doing a geekily nasal nyah-nyah chant in "Cradle Robber." But beginning with the fourth cut, "Dissolution Ritual," they give David Davidson more guitar-solo room, and against all odds he frequently winds up sounding intricate and tranquil, mining jazz fusion and blues in ways both wanky and wacky — and, in the brief, chaotic instrumental "Fractal Entity," darn near futuristic. — Chuck Eddy

Friday Mixtape: Songs to Recover From Acute Appendicitis and Tennis Elbow With

2011-09-09T17:00:39Z

So anyway: the extremely sore arm came first. Was initially scared it might be carpal tunnel. Googling suggested otherwise. Was relieved to learn that it being on my right side was good news. (Left can be a sign of heart failure!) Doctor prescribed exercises and ointments and ice packs. Very weird, since I don't play tennis, but so be it.

Then, just as that was starting to heal, my stomach started hurting. A lot. After a couple days — longer than heartburn's ever lasted before — it got unbearable, so I got concerned. CAT Scan said acute appendicitis (which, hey, beats kidney stones or an ulcer), so I went to the emergency room and they took it out and I slept at the hospital for a night. And the thing about your appendix is, once it's gone, it's gone — didn't need the thing in the first place! Tummy's fine now; arm's still sore, just not as much.

All of that happened in the past couple months, so naturally I constructed a playlist of music that helped me through. Most of the songs don't relate directly to said medical conditions, though at least two prominently feature pills (and one a hospital bed), and several concern trying to pay bills when there are more than enough of them to go around. But usually they're not too depressing about it. (Well, maybe once or twice.) There are two consecutive, highly boisterous songs about the economic difficulties of being an all-woman band on the road, which may well have nothing to do with the topic at hand, but you never know. There is also a song about assembly lines followed by a song about grocery lines followed by a song about unemployment lines — which happened entirely by accident, I swear! Genres include vocal jazz, country, arena prog, funk, New Wave, didgeridoo soul-rock, gospel, Italo disco, and plenty of hard rock and metal, not necessarily in that order. Hey, whatever works, right? Can't vouch for you, but these worked for me.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Songs to Recover from Acute Appendicitis and Tennis Elbow With

September 11, 2001 Scrapbook

2011-09-07T17:04:36Z

We all reacted to the horrible events of September 11, 2001, in our own ways — wherever we were, whatever we were doing, whichever CD or radio station or fizzy pop single we first reached for to help us cope. Here, Rhapsody's editors offer their own musical perspectives, from saber-rattling country to hopeful worship music, from pop-punk bromides to plaintive protest songs, from the momentary tentativeness of comedy to the fieriness of hip-hop to the transcendence of jazz. As Sonny Rollins put it, "Maybe music can help. I don't know, but we have to try something." Here's what we tried.

Sifting Through the Ashes in New York City

I was in Park Slope, Brooklyn, that morning, about to board the subway for work in Lower Manhattan, when my roommate told me I should turn the TV on. After the second plane hit, I went up to the roof of our apartment building and watched the smoke. Cars were dusted with ashes as far south as where I lived. I spent the day switching between staring at TV news and trying to drown out the hell in my head (and the fear that the Army might call me back up) with desolate ambient doomsday metal: Neurosis, My Dying Bride, Amorphis droning about mushroom clouds.

]]> Village Voice, where I worked as music editor and within days would put together a special section devoted to the attacks. Lower Manhattan looked like a ghost town.

Over the next few months, I sorted through more than a thousand submissions of 9/11-inspired songs and chose 18 to appear on a Voice album I curated to benefit World Trade Center victims. Artists participating: Moby ("Memory Gospel"), Cornershop, The Mekons, Joseph Arthur, future Tea Partier Moe Tucker ("Fired Up"), Andrew W.K. ("I Love NYC"), Afrikaa Bambaataa, ex-Slit Ari Upp, Sheila Chandra, Hakim, Gogol Bordello ("Baro Foro"), Uri Caine, Loudon Wainwright III, Peter Stampfel's Du-Tels, Atmosphere, Baaba Maal, Matthew Shipp, and Lenny Dee (with his noise-techno DJ Skinhead collaboration "Extreme Terror"). The range of that music — crossing styles and continents, with particular attention paid to the Middle East — was intentional. But it did not make the coming decade any less divisive. — Chuck Eddy

Alan Jackson and the Ultimate Post-9/11 Anthem

On November 7, 2001 — less than two months after the September 11 attacks — Alan Jackson performed a brand-new song at the CMA Awards. He quickly moved the audience to tears, and "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning") soon became the quintessential post-9/11 song for many.

Jackson later explained that he wanted to write a song that wasn't vengeful or patriotic, but simply encapsulated how he felt on that day. He obviously hit the emotional nail on the head, as "Where Were You" went on to top both the country and pop charts. Many artists wrote post-9/11 songs immediately after the attacks, but very few bothered after Jackson weighed in. As Lon Helton, country editor of the now-defunct trade publication Radio & Records, put it, "Alan Jackson's song stopped about 150 guys in their tracks. They heard it and just put down their pens."

Traditionally, country music goes hand-in-hand with conservative patriotism and tales of war. Perhaps that's because, as Josh Thompson writes of his country brethren in the song "Way Out Here," "We got a fightin' side a mile wide but we pray for peace/ 'Cause it's mostly us that end up serving overseas." In any case, Jackson's wasn't the only song to reverberate. Check out our playlist of post-9/11 country songs, and patriotic songs that took on new significance in a post-9/11 world. — Linda Ryan

Playlist: Country's Best Post 9/11 and Patriotic Songs

Retail Therapy: Jay-Z, Nickelback and 9/11's Other New Releases

Slayer put out an album called God Hates Us All on September 11, 2001. You couldn't make this stuff up. But the album that ends with the triptych of "War Zone," "Here Comes the Pain" and "Payback" was hardly that day's most notable release.

For excellence, head straight for Jay-Z's The Blueprint, arguably his crowning achievement and a critical/commercial juggernaut so massive he's made two (inferior) sequels. For notoriety, it's gotta be Mariah Carey's Glitter soundtrack, a titanic debacle that once threatened to ruin her career. And then there's Bob Dylan, who loosed the critically adored Love and Theft upon the world that morning, full of apocalyptic imagery that made him look eerily prophetic: "What did Dylan know and when did he know it?" wondered Greg Tate in the Village Voice.

Elsewhere, you had au courant nu-metalheads P.O.D. offering Satellite, and the major-label debut from a modest little Canadian dude-rock outfit called Nickelback: Silver Side Up is home to "How You Remind Me," maybe the No. 1 song to blare at the gym while newly patriotic bros upped their bench-press reps and imagined taking on the Taliban themselves. If you found all that a little ridiculous, so did Ben Folds, whose wry solo debut, Rockin' the Suburbs, lampooned the mooks incessantly.

Of course the single most famous record affected by the events of 9/11 was actually The Coup's Party Music, a politically incendiary party-rap classic that wasn't due out for a month but caused a stir in the aftermath anyway: the (quickly changed) cover image depicted members Boots Riley and Pam the Funkstress blowing up the World Trade Center. Prog-metal giants Dream Theater encountered a similar problem: their Live Scenes from New York was out that day, with a cover featuring a flaming apple topped by the Twin Towers. (That version is now a collector's item.)

Personally, diving back into all of this, the September 11, 2001, record that strikes me as most poignant now is probably the least ominous-feeling: They Might Be Giants' Mink Car, a minor entry in the relentlessly clever Brooklyn duo's catalog, but listening now to the simultaneously goofy and melancholy dance pop anthem "Man, It's So Loud in Here" is oddly affecting. A few months later, I went to a T.M.B.G. show in Columbus, Ohio, that was interrupted by a full power outage; in the hour-long wait until a backup generator arrived, they did a few songs unplugged, after cofounder John Flansburgh shushed the restless crowd by noting, "We come from a place that's dealing with far worse problems than this one." — Rob Harvilla

Top of the Charts: The Biggest Songs That Week

It's a somewhat macabre business, musically re-creating 9/11 with a playlist of the top songs on the charts that week. After all, none of us wants to relive that tragedy — or, worse, to pickle and preserve it into some kind of musical commemorative plate that's cut off from the real-life pain and loss that our country experienced that day. But in another sense, looking back at the music of the week of September 11 is more like creating and then unearthing a time capsule, an aural document not only of a formative moment in American history, but also of American culture at that time. So what can we learn about ourselves from the top songs the week of September 11, 2001? Well, even as the United States went through one of the most traumatic experiences in its history, we still found inspiration to think about love; to dance to the diverse sounds (from hip-hop to country) that make up the palette of American pop; and to be joyful, with a little help from fellow Americans like Jennifer Lopez, Alicia Keys, Usher, Missy Elliott, Sugar Ray and more. — Rachel Devitt

Playlist: A Musical Snapshot of September 11, 2001: The Songs on the Charts

The Statue of Liberty Shakes Her Fist, and a Country Goes to War

From the day Al-Qaeda hit its targets, I imagined Brooks & Dunn's hard-rocking patriotic country hit from that summer, "Only in America" — out three months at that point, and one of my favorite 2001 singles — becoming an exceptionalist anthem; in the next half-decade, it would be used by both Republicans and Democrats in presidential campaigns, and by Oliver Stone in his World Trade Center movie. But it's still not the country song that people most associate with 9/11.

That would, of course, be Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red White and Blue (The Angry American)," which would come out in May 2002 and go on to top the country charts. It was impossibly rousing (I've sung it, badly, in karaoke myself); impossibly ridiculous in its violent imagery ("the Statue of Liberty started shaking her fist," then "we put a boot in your ass, it's the American way"); and impossibly offensive in its jingoist propagandizing if you wanted it to be But it was — like it or not — a song that had to be sung, because all wars of magnitude need war songs of similar magnitude, and who better to sing it than probably the greatest male singer of the 21st century's first decade?

Keith — a self-proclaimed conservative Democrat who has claimed he never supported our preemptive adventure in Iraq — initially played it only for troops, the story goes, but eventually put it out after a Marine Corps Commandant told him it was his duty to inspire the men and women in uniform. In some ways, it was undoubtedly pure opportunism: though he later named a 2003 album Shock'n Y'all, and though he has recorded a handful of red-state editorials since, they really aren't Keith's main stock in trade, or even what he's best at.

As warmongering country goes, "Courtesy" wasn't alone: Darryl Worley's 2003 No. 1 hit "Have You Forgotten?" deceitfully pretended Iraq was responsible for September 11; Hank Williams Jr.'s 2002 "America Will Survive" updated his three-decade-old urbanite-baiting anthem "A Country Boy Can Survive" for current-event consumption; and Montgomery Gentry and Trace Adkins both fought their own good fights. But "Courtesy of the Red White and Blue" is the one that defined its time, for all time — and, ultimately, defined its artist. Toby Keith will never live it down. But there's a lot the rest of us will never live down, too. — C.E.

The Dixie Chicks and the Perils of Post-9/11 Political Controversy

Not since Chicago's infamous 1979 Disco Demolition Night has there been such a vociferous backlash to a body of music. Back then, it was an entire genre. In 2003, the target was more precise: the Dixie Chicks.

There are numerous examples of entertainers suffering the consequences of their outspoken opposition to America's post-September 11 actions and policies, but none compare to what happened here. While the Texas-based country trio was on tour in England, singer Natalie Maines famously declared that the band was "ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas," setting off a firestorm of controversy that still resonates more than eight years later. In fact, the band's saga so thoroughly saturated pop culture that it resulted in a famous Entertainment Weekly cover, a full-length documentary (Shut Up and Sing), and the phrases "Dixie Chicking" and "Dixie Chicked" permanently joining the vernacular.

The trio, once music's top-grossing "girl group" thanks to No. 1 albums like 1999's Fly and 2002's Home, was subsequently blacklisted from most country radio playlists. More conservative — or patriotic, depending on your politics — pundits actively encouraged Dixie Chicks CD-burning parties. Ticket sales in many concert markets plummeted, and the group received death threats.

In 2007, the Chicks swept the Grammy Awards with their album Taking the Long Way, taking home statues for Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Record of the Year and, oddly, Country Album of the Year. Despite this, they haven't made a new album since, and neither Natalie Maine's solo single (a cover of The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows") nor Emily Robison and Martie Maguire's offshoot band Court Yard Hounds has gained any real traction. No band's trajectory was more drastically affected by the cultural climate after September 11. — L.R.

Playlist: The Dixie Chicks Best Of

Rap Struggles to Respond

It may be unfair to single out rap artists for their response to the tragic events of September 11. Artists in every discipline, from music to movies to literature and visual art, have struggled to express themselves in this defining moment. But in a genre that prizes topicality and ghetto realism, whether it's a carefully edited documentary or an exaggerated form of musical verité, the halting way rappers chose to address the World Trade Center attacks is particularly glaring. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, there was mostly silence. The rapid-reaction MP3 infrastructure that swirls around any major event today didn't truly exist yet, so most of the late-2001 release slate didn't mention it, including Jay-Z's The Blueprint (famously released on September 11) and Dilated Peoples' Expansion Team. However, contemporaneous work took on new significance, including Cannibal Ox's diary of New York squalor The Cold Vein, Trick Daddy's condemnatory "Amerika," and DMX's street-revolutionary anthem "Who We Be." Advance artwork for The Coup's Party Music featured Boots Riley and Pam the Funkstress blowing up the Twin Towers with a radio tuner, but it was quickly replaced after the attacks and before the album's November 6 release.

The lone exception to this disquiet was Sage Francis' "Makeshift Patriot." Recorded and released several weeks after the attacks as a free MP3, it has a reportorial perspective as he compares the terrorist-manned planes to Trojan horses and recounts how "the fallout was far beyond the toxic clouds where people were like debris."

By the end of the year, stray references to September 11 began to appear. "Who the f*ck knocked our buildings down?/ Who behind the World Trade massacre? Step up now," rapped a newly patriotic Ghostface Killah on Wu-Tang Clan's "Rules." On his anti-war song "Rule," Nas took a more expansive view, rapping, "Lost lives in the towers and Pentagon, why then/ Must it go on/ We must stop the killing."

This approach prevailed during the next few years, as September 11 became a throwaway metaphor for urban blight and American resilience. "This that 9/11 music right here, man," bragged Jim Jones on "Ground Zero" from The Diplomats' Diplomatic Immunity. (Ironically, The Diplomats also called themselves The Taliban.) On "A Ballad for the Fallen Soldier," Jay-Z compared a street hustler's life to someone serving in the armed forces. "They're both at war," he observed. "Off to boot camp, they're both facing terror/ Bin Laden been happenin' in Manhattan."

While music about September 11 has mostly disappointed, the subsequent War on Terror — along with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — inspired a wave of memorable critiques against President Bush. "Bin Laden didn't blow up the projects/ It was you, n*gga/ Tell the truth, n*gga," chants Mos Def on Immortal Technique's "Bin Laden," which — along with Jadakiss' "Why" and Mr. Lif's "Home of the Brave" — advanced the conspiracy theory that the Bush administration orchestrated the September 11 attacks as a Faustian global power grab.

Meanwhile, September 11 as an event unto itself has largely gone unanalyzed. Perhaps hip-hop artists are more comfortable with using the U.S. government as a stock villain for all the hardship that has befallen us since that day, from never-ending wars to economic catastrophe, than imagining the complex forces that irrevocably changed 21st-century American life. — Mosi Reeves

Playlist: Hip-Hop Artists Respond To 9-11

American Idiots: Punks Find Politics

In 1994, Billie Joe Armstrong slashed at a thrift-store sofa and sang about masturbation's fabled affect on one's retinas. It may have seemed dim and silly to some, but it gave the older folks, worried they were raising a generation of slackers, a reason to fear punk again. Green Day went on to release a handful of semi-successful albums, but it seemed Dookie would forever be their creative crest. Then September 11 happened. And a decade following their breakout album, Green Day rediscovered their role as a punk band — because a new generation needed it. A rock opera that resulted in both Grammy love and a Broadway musical, American Idiot may not have sounded like the stoned-out anarchist thrash the Berkeley band started with, but it was every bit as punk in its intent.

The album, Green Day's seventh, came out three years and 10 days after September 11, and one month and 12 days before the 2004 presidential election. The timing was not arbitrary. Told through the Average Joe "Jesus of Suburbia," American Idiot didn't speak directly to the events of September 11, but instead embodied America's sociopolitical climate and overall malaise in the tragedy's aftermath. Its emotions hit every stage of grief — from denial to anger to depression — all while a love story unfolds. It's not a commentary on terrorists, President Bush or weapons of mass destruction. It's about the trickle-down effect of all of that — what the majority of us battle with and question daily. Love, in our seemingly insignificant lives, is hard enough to define and find in peacetime, so how does the "information nation of hysteria" deal with it in a time of war and an "age of paranoia"? — Stephanie Benson

A New Era of Protest Songs

In the days after September 11, 2001, Americans did what they do best: rallied together to support our fellow citizens and started the hard work necessary to pick up the pieces after the tragic events of that day. But in the weeks and months that followed, as the government unveiled its own response, people also began tapping into another important American legacy: dissent. Musicians were no different. As President Bush engaged the country in a multinational war that many felt was wrongheaded, artists from Nas to the Dixie Chicks, Pink to Pearl Jam began penning songs criticizing the government.

The history of American popular music is also, in many ways, a history of protest song and musical resistance. Sometimes that resistance has been to cultural mores, like the sexual taboos challenged by classic blues artists and early rock 'n' rollers. In other eras, music has served as a critical voice of protest against social inequality, like the songs of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement that helped to dismantle racist policies and attitudes. And at other times, music has helped to shape a movement that rises up to critique the government and affect change, like the anti-war repertoire of the 1960s and '70s. The post-September 11 protest-song movement didn't ever reach the cohesive magnitude of the Vietnam era, in part because the country was so divided about which direction we should take. But the songs in this playlist nonetheless helped to remind pop music of its activist roots and keep alive the politics of dissent. — R.D.

Playlist: A New Era of Protest Songs

Gilbert Gottfried Helps Us Laugh Again

Comedians the world over are trained to find the humor in humanity's darkest moments, but after September 11, even the raunchiest, raciest and most irascible of them found themselves at a loss for words. "Too soon!" became a meme all its own, with jokers across the country being scolded for even attempting to take up the subject. Perhaps most notably, there was Gilbert Gottfried, who performed in New York City at a Friar's Club Roast of Hugh Hefner just three weeks after the tragedy.

After nearly getting booed off the stage for a joke mentioning air travel and the Empire State Building, Gottfried launched into his own improvised version of the now-famous bit "The Aristocrats," immortalized in the movie of the same name. Gottfried's version of the joke achieves new heights of vulgarity, which is saying something. In the apoplectic procession of foulness that spews forth (we're not even going to try to quote it), not to mention the uproarious laughs that follow it, one hears a definite catharsis. Comedians are never considered heroes — it goes against their very nature — but on this one particular night, for an audience that hadn't laughed in weeks, Gottfried saved the day. — Garrett Kamps

Christian Music Stars Soothe, and Grieve

The reverberations of September 11 were felt throughout Christian music, with shows canceled, artists stranded out on the road and everyone left asking each other, "What now?"

Even on a day when every detail seemed momentous, a few stories stood out. First was the fact that Michael W. Smith's Worship album came out that very day, a coincidence that would seem God-ordained in retrospect. The music would prove to be a spiritual balm for an emotionally raw nation: while it certainly would've been a hit regardless, the grim circumstances surely helped the record go double-platinum.

Then there's the horrifying tale of singer Tammy Trent. The terrorist attacks and subsequent grounding of all flights left her stuck in Jamaica, where her husband, Trent Lenderink, an experienced diver, had drowned on September 10 — authorities were still searching the water for him that morning. Trent's family had made arrangements to join her in Jamaica, but of course their flights were cancelled. The experience of being alone and grieving in a foreign country as her home was under attack continues to color the music she makes today. Even her name harkens back to her late husband: when the high school sweethearts married, they agreed that her new last name of Lenderink didn't roll off the tongue, so she took her husband's first name as her stage surname, never realizing it would one day serve as a reminder of him and his continuing role in her career. — Wendy Lee Nentwig

Sonny Rollins, Helping the Show Go On

Try to imagine what he looked like, 71 years old at the time, grey-haired and disheveled, likely taken away from coffee or oatmeal or whatever a saxophone colossus has for breakfast. You gotta think that Sonny Rollins, whose Tribeca apartment was a few blocks away from the World Trade Center, was probably just as scared as everyone else. But here's the thing: when the television cameras caught him that morning, it wasn't startling to see his surgical mask or his slouching posture as he boarded the evacuation bus; it was the fact that he had the presence of mind to grab his horn.

Five days later in Boston, in one of those examples of how the clichéd "show-must-go-on" gene lives in the DNA of all performers of his longevity, Rollins recorded his first live record in 18 years, Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert. Released years later, it won a Grammy for Best Instrumental Solo in 2006.

Which solo? A tune whose title seemed particularly poignant considering the circumstances: "Why Was I Born?" Rollins wails out an intro by himself in skittish, fragmented bits and pieces, halting and too muscular to be comfortable, in the million-things-at-once gale on which he's built a career. It's the kind of moment that Stanley Crouch speaks of in Rollins' New Yorker profile, saying, "If jazz improvisation is a kind of democratic expression, then Rollins may well be our greatest purveyor of utopian feeling."

Is Without a Song utopian? Hardly. It has a few familiar pitfalls of late-career Rollins — some banal Calypso grooves, an ensemble that includes some downright lame conga solos — but the circumstances of the record make it a document of a great musician wrestling to exist under baffling circumstances. "Maybe music can help," he grumbles after introducing the band halfway through the set. "I don't know, but we have to try something." And by trying, he achieved something colossal. — Nate Cavalieri

Top 15 Metal Albums of Late Summer 2011

2011-08-30T17:05:49Z

It's been one hell of a summer — tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, nonstop rain or nonstop drought, temperatures at or above the global warming range. Plus riots on several continents, wars that won't quit, and governments and media succumbing to scandal and ineptness and inertia. Really does feel like end times, sometimes.

Looks like a job for … heavy metal! Which of course has been warning us of such dire conditions for decades. Maybe that conversation is not carried on by all these key doom metal, death metal, thrash metal, black metal, power metal, pirate metal, folk metal, ambient metal, stoner rock, noise rock and plain old hard rock albums from recent months. But they're deadly even when they don't.

While reading, check out my companion playlist: Metal Roundup: Dog Days Of Summer 2011

1. Gentlemans Pistols
At Her Majesty's Pleasure
James Atkinson is an efficiently howling he-man, but what makes these Brits exciting is their playing — especially when drum breaks get funky like metal hasn't in eons, in hard-swingers like "The Ravisher." They open at a Sabbath/Free midnight-crawler midtempo, structuring concentric riffs into tough stomps. But before long they're racing into Thin Lizzy tromp-and-roll overdrive in "Your Majesty," tripping out like '71 Alice Cooper in "Into the Haze" and conjuring Dust's scorched prehistoric street-boogie in "Sherman Tank." "Lethal Woman," finally, ends it all with a jam taking flight. — Chuck Eddy

]]> 2. Argus
Boldly Stride the Doomed
Five burly blue-collar Pennsylvanians recording for an Italian label, Argus split their time between Sabbath despair and Maiden conquest, and rule at both. They open serene, with a minute-long instrumental, but soon they're thundering across mountain ranges with swords drawn, the belting of aptly nicknamed Brian "Butch" Balich leading the charge. "Durendal" is gargantuan glory-metal with a whiff of Thin Lizzy, and 11-minute romantic downer "Pieces of Your Smile" sounds suicidal to a Joy Division degree. But they can speed-race, too; interstitial pianos, bells and horns add emotional weight. — C.E.

3. Blood Ceremony
Living with the Ancients
Retrieving Ouija boards for a second seance, this co-ed Canadian coven pick up where their 2008 debut left off — with a burnt offering to "The Great God Pan." Their pagan credentials thus asserted above Uriah Heep organ doom, they break out flutes while sludging out Sabbath riffs in a rainstorm. "Morning of the Magicians" gets funky like Jethro Tull having a jungle-bungling bad trip; "Night of Augury" darkens Procol Harum's cathedral. Then, after a 40-second renaissance-folk "Witch's Dance," they end with "Daughter of the Sun," a gorgeously grimy 10 minutes of Altamont acid metal. — C.E.

4. Premonition 13
13
Wino Weinrich's umpteenth outfit sets itself above the stoner metal pack both via its employment of open space (two guitars allow for lush beauty to balance out the brawny hairy Yeti doom), and via a butt-boogie groove harking back to Mountain or early Grand Funk Railroad as much as Sabbath. The prevailing mood, highlighted by titles about peyote roads and (in Spanish) syringe sorcery, conjures endless brain-burned wandering across sun-baked equatorial expanses. But riff behemoths like "Modern Man" and the Motörhead-style "Deranged Rock N' Roller" stay meaty, beaty, big and bouncy regardless. — C.E.

5. Dennis Coffey
Dennis Coffey
On half of this Detroit guitar hero's comeback-at-age-70 album, he teams up with mostly Motor City-rooted garage-hipster soul fans (Mayer Hawthorne, for instance, and select Dirtbombs, Detroit Cobras and Bellrays) to redo songs he cut decades ago with groups like Parliament. Surprisingly, the strongest rock vocal comes from U.K. pop star Paolo Nutini, in an update of 1970 Rodriguez obscurity "Only Good for Conversation" that stoner-stomps like heavy Cream. The rest is more instrumental breakbeat jams — sometimes metallic, always funky, and often earning space-age titles like "Plutonius." — C.E.

6. Korpiklaani
Ukon Wacka
Korpiklaani's seventh album stays mostly concise and festive: staccato vocals chanted in double-time rhythm, sometimes with drunken, oi!-like gang-chorus accompaniment, over thrash-chorded forest jigs. "Tequila" exhibits both an anomalous Mexican influence and an extended drum break; the title track is sung with quivering gruffness by Finnish rock songster Tuomari Nurmio and showcases a ghostly minor-key melody oddly similar to John Anderson's "Seminole Wind." At the end, the set's second fast polka leads into the six-minute "Surma," alternately solemn and triumphant, until woodwinds take over. — C.E.

7. Iceage
New Brigade
From four Danish teens tripping over each other and speeding up when their trigger fingers get itchy, here are 12 songs totaling about 24 minutes. But this isn't hardcore. Concision or no, the closest "punk" precedent might be Killing Joke — for the somber moods, staggering march-steps, repetitive structures and metallic chord progressions. Exasperated Euro-accents are buried in barely produced blur, monotoned through congested adenoids and indecipherable save for pessimistic titles ("Rotting Heights," "Total Drench," "Collapse") that serve as hooks of a sort — as do occasional coughs. — C.E.

8. Revocation
Chaos of Forms
These Boston deathcore bullies start out their third album jumping up and down, breaking things, marching in circles with fists flailing, flapping their gums in an unseemly and unfeminist manner at a "Harlot," and even doing a geekily nasal nyah-nyah chant in "Cradle Robber." But beginning with the fourth cut, "Dissolution Ritual," they give David Davidson more guitar-solo room. Against all odds, he frequently winds up sounding intricate and tranquil, mining jazz fusion and blues in ways both wanky and wacky — and, in the brief, chaotic instrumental "Fractal Entity," darn near futuristic. — C.E.

9. Red Fang
Murder the Mountains
Though fond of both stoner plod and thrash rush, this Oregon four-piece doesn't shy away from radio-friendly choruses. Spans of their second album could almost pass for Stone Temple Pilots (the fuzzy opening of "Dirt Wizard") or even The Offspring ("Painted Parade"). A closer analogue, though, might be Queens of the Stone Age, in songs like "Number Thirteen" and "Wires" that locate distanced, yawping-lumberjack melodies in a riff-repeating morass. Add occasional exotic sonic additives (notably in "The Undertow") and you've got a reasonably varied alt metal album that goes down easier than most. — C.E.

10. Turisas
Stand Up and Fight
Sailing the seven seas and doing "just as we please," these funny Finns max out on pirate-plunder fanfare on their third album, favoring kitsch brass and arch strings (and accented "aaaargh!"s) over power chords. In terms of guitars, Stand Up and Fight barely sounds metal at all until its martial sixth song, "The Great Escape." From there they head into some almost Survivor/Europe-style stadium-synthed AOR called "Fear the Fear" ("bravery, as we've all seen on TV," ha ha); closer "The Bosphorus Freezes Over" waltzes you off the plank. — C.E.

11. The Jim Jones Revue
Burning Your House Down
Ex-Thee Hypnotic Jim and his four London mates want their blood to stain the ivories of your daddy's baby grand and prove they ain't seen the sun since they started this band. So they toss plenty of Jerry Lee piano into their greasy-spooned psycho-rock cowpunk, and threaten arson and murder a lot. Their slop-bucket approach doesn't leave much room for tunes, and their rhythm section could afford to move more. Still, they open and close by approximating '70s Aerosmith ("Dishonest John") and Rose Tattoo's boogie-woogie Faces side ("Stop the People") with more funk than most bands could. So drink up. — C.E.

12. Svartsot
Maledictus Eris
Throughout their third album, these Danes temper their dense, troll-grumbled black-metal rumble with what sound like centuries-old folk melodies from the North European forest -- often played on fancy flutes right out of Jethro Tull, and often supplemented by a flotilla of drunken sailors getting a rowdy shout on. "Staden ..." opens the record with babies crying deep in its mix; "Kunsten at Dø" starts with a Velvet Underground-like, almost Middle Eastern drone; "Spigrene" partakes in the acoustic anguish of a medieval Christmas carol. Marching feet and coughing fits also figure into the equation. — C.E.

13. Vreid
V
For alleged black-metal beasts, these Norwegians sure sneak a generous ration of winding psychedelic axework and '70s-rock colors into their midnight church-pillaging gunk — plus ringing licks to lure you in, sad and pretty choruses, incidental static effects, maybe even hooks. Apparent Entombed tribute "Wolverine Bastards" gets a healthy gallop going, "The Sound of the River" turns into Celtic Led Zep, "Fire on the Mountain" starts out thrashing mid-'80s-style, and "The Other and the Look" draws out its guitar lines for 10 minutes. And after all that, "Then We Die" aptly ends it all. — C.E.

14. Ancestors
Invisible White
Three long songs, stretched to the edges of dolor, hope and/or relaxation by low-tempo keyboards, low-crawling guitar buzzes, low-flying bird chirps and intermittently emitted low-pitch, low-resolution sighs about traveling long distances. The effect hints at instrumental shoegaze metal. But when organs turn processional — briefly in the seven-minutes-each title cut and "Dust," then rather majestically in the increasingly hefty 14-minute "Epilogue" — you can detect traces of bygone Procol Harum or Iron Butterfly, or maybe some obscure band on SST in the mid-'80s or Man's Ruin in the early '00s. — C.E.

15. Trivium
In Waves
These Florida thrashers' fifth set works best when they forgo bellowing and focus more on their finesse with the majestic mathematical structures that Metallica set aside eons ago. "Capsizing the Sea" opens things with an impressive dramatic build, and its oceanic motif carries over into "In Waves"; before long, Trivium are using curt, mechanical riff phrases to force a recognizable rhythm. Intermittent drum-rolls, stutter-steps, near-NWOBHM melodic parts, and the morose ballad "Of All These Yesterdays" follow. The Special Edition adds five bonus cuts, a couple bordering on psychedelic. — C.E.

Senior Year, 1990: Dial MTV After School

2011-08-16T20:07:06Z

So first off, welcome to the '90s! Even if it still kind of feels more like the last gasp of the '80s: hair metal is almost over but doesn't know it yet, so it's still all over MTV, with songs about cherry pie (RIP Jani Lane) and unskinny bopping and staying up all night and sleeping all day and living in a house of pain, about girls named Michelle and Janie and Jayne. Then there's Jane's Addiction and Faith No More (with their exploding piano and flopping fish) and that new band King's X, whose singer is black and Christian and 40 years old — if you think about it, loud rock's starting to get a little odd and arty again. Maybe everyone's just weirded out that Nelson have the best hair.

Unless Vanilla Ice does, that is, with his rag-top down so his hair can blow. (Except not really — that pompadour's at a standstill!) But take heed, 'cause he's a lyrical poet, killing your brain like a poisonous mushroom and neck-and-neck with MC Hammer in the contest for America's Favorite Rapper. (Hammer's definitely the better dancer, though.) Worst Hair honors may actually go to Sinéad O'Connor, who doesn't have any, and dances sorta clumsy, to boot. As for who has the better smash ballad named "Hold On," Wilson Phillips or En Vogue — it's a toss-up.

But either way, the decision's in your hands. Every weekday, just call your votes in to 1-800-DIAL-MTV toll-free on your parents' landline, then sit down with a New Coke and watch the Top 10 requests. Who's it gonna be? Bell Biv Devoe? Jane Child? Roxette? Snap? Enuf Z'Nuff? You gotta tune in to find out. Most songs in the playlist below probably placed sometime during the year, for better or worse. It's in your face but you can't grab it. U can't touch this, but nothing compares 2 U.

Click here to listen to our entire playlist: Senior Year, 1990: Dial MTV After School.

Jani Lane, 1964-2011: A Rubber City Rebel in Heaven

2011-08-12T21:49:07Z

Obits for Warrant's Jani Lane, who was found dead in an L.A. Comfort Inn the evening of Thursday, August 11, will tell you he fronted a band that defined rock's Sunset Strip hair-metal era and the hedonistic "excesses" thereof, with silly sex songs like "Cherry Pie" and power ballads like "Heaven." Lots of them will mention the alcohol and drug abuse and drunken driving he'd fallen into, and most will say something about his hair, which in his prime was as pretty as pretty-boy hair comes. But there's lots more to know.

So some cannier obituaries might go even further, and cite a surprisingly impressive and formative autobiographical essay Lane wrote for his own website, sometime in the last few years. In it, he talked about being born in Akron in 1964 to two mourning JFK fans who originally named him John Kennedy Oswald ("no joke") but got harassed for it, and how his 13-year-older and one-time Joe Walsh sideman brother turned him on to Rubber Soul and the drums. About how Jani was a Pop Warner quarterback whose long-hair-hating ex-Marine high school coach moved him to strong safety, how he fell "deep in love with musical theater" in high school and played the lead in everything from Oklahoma to Arsenic and Old Lace, how by his teens he was already drumming in college bars near Kent State that featured seasoned members of Devo and The Pretenders and The Raspberries. About how high SAT scores placed him in the top-three percentile, how he grew up loving Bowie and disco and funk (and especially "THE BEATLES") as much as '70s hard rock, how after a cover-band stint in Florida, he and a couple pals were inspired by the MTV success of Ratt and Motley Crüe to move to Hollywood and try their hand at the '80s glam-metal thing. About how he had a physical falling-out with his dad, but wound up writing "Heaven" ("I don't need to be a superman as long as you will always be my biggest fan") for him years later, after the tire-making German-American Democrat, Buckeyes/Browns fan and published spirit-writing author who'd fathered Jani was on life support. About how (as everybody knows) Warrant came together and boomed during the hair-metal era, only to bust when the masses turned to grunge, how "Cherry Pie" was a last minute late-Aerosmith imitation written overnight at the urging of a Columbia exec, how two marriages and the band broke up, and Jani was subsequently responsible for two daughters and two solo albums -- only one of which has ever seen the light of the day, at least so far.]]>
But probably fewer obituaries will tell you what really matters: that Warrant were one of the great rock bands, period, from the late '80s through the mid-'90s (yes, mid ), and that there's no way they would have been if not for Jani Lane's sadly unheralded knack for muscular but clean-cut suburban-American singing (strongly in the tradition of The Beach Boys and Boston to my ears), and a melodic sense and talent for vernacular songwriting that seemed to owe nearly as much to Creedence (listen to the cricket-chirping "In the Sticks" on Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich), Bad Company, The Beatles (starting with the "Penny Lane" "blue suburban sky" line in "Heaven"), and post-Beatles hard-pop bands like Badfinger and The Raspberries as to anything typically "metal." There was also plenty of Southern rock in there -- the backwoods murder mystery "Uncle Tom's Cabin" on Cherry Pie was basically an update of Charlie Daniels' "The Legend of Wooley Swamp," and Warrant masterfully covered Blackfoot's "Train Train" on the same album. Also from that album: "I Saw Red," as heartbroken a ballad of betrayal as the '90s produced.

And here's what I wrote about the band's very first (and, as far as I'm concerned, best) hit, several years later: "Warrant's funkish and pretty 'Down Boys' is proto-bohemian -- Dion's lonely teen sits at home, whining 'I wanna go where the down boys go,' so he's obviously not a down boy himself, at least not yet; he just worships the wild street kids who head out at a million miles an hour. The synth lines come from The Police via 'The Spirit of Radio,' a Rush song that mimics the Velvet Underground's 'Sweet Jane.' And Warrant's guitarist plays 'Sweet Jane' chords." Jani Lane, like so many Midwestern boys, went to L.A. because that's where the down boys were. For a few years he got to be one, on TV.

And when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (which Lane loved) happened and the rug was pulled from under their feet, Warrant switched their gears to a grunge sound and wound up making two more excellent albums. From 1989 to 1995, they had as great a rock streak as anybody. Seriously -- listen to "The Hole in My Wall" or "Andy Warhol Was Right," off 1992's Dog Eat Dog, and tell me they weren't on to some deep and weird stuff, even beyond that album's talkbox solos, Nashville tuning, 30-piece orchestra, and opera parts. Or even more so, consider "April 2031" (me, a few years later, again: "A fusion of David Bowie and Iron Maiden where people hug aluminum pillows and gaze at the manmade ring around the moon until an arms race annihilates mountains and the sea. We're not even allowed to blame God for it.") Three years later, there was Ultraphobic, once again with a sense of tune and rhythm most Seattle bands never half managed. And if 1996's Belly to Belly showed notable slippage, it was still highlighted by the sarcastic "A.Y.M." (for "Angry Young Man"), which swiped riffing and groaning from Collective Soul and Pearl Jam at their rare best while battling '90s alt-rock head-on: "Gennnnn-eration X/Weeeee are complex…."

Warrant and Jani eventually went their separate ways; Jani had a few movie roles, sang on a bunch of tribute albums, and by all accounts (including his own) had some happy times and some troubled times. I don't really want to talk about that, because that's not what I'll remember him for. It's kind of a shame that, unlike some fellow hair-metallers, he never pulled off a Nashville crossover -- country audiences might have kept him a star, even kept him out of seedy hotel rooms. Hell, for all we know, his music has inspired Rodney Atkins or Jason Aldean regardless. But now it's too late to think about that. Jani went to Catholic school, and he sang about heaven like a guy who believed in it, so let's hope he's there, with his mom and dad before him. And if he is, perhaps he's still thinking about baseball, and swinging all night.

Click here to listen to our Warrant Playlist: Jani Lane In Heaven (1964-2011)

Metal Roundup: Recent Metal Reissues and Live Albums

2011-07-26T17:05:55Z

Old heavy metal doesn't go away; it just bubbles back to the surface several years later. Well, OK, actually, some chemistry PhDs out there might well argue otherwise. But the recent releases below could certainly be used as supporting evidence for the hypothesis. All of these albums came out (or came out again) in 2011, but were almost entirely recorded anywhere from a few years to a few decades ago — onstage in about half the cases, in the studio in the other half. In the cases of both Ozzy Osbourne albums, all three Queen ones, and the Death one, original versions have been augmented with all sorts of bonus tracks and alternate renditions sure to induce further cranium-banging.

Between the Buried and Me
The Best Of
This North Carolina crew has been active since 2000; at the time of this collection, they had six studio albums under their belts, with the 15 songs here making the case that Between the Buried and Me are the Mars Volta of metalcore. From opener "Mordecai" (off 2003's The Silent Circus) to the stylistic curveball of acoustic love song "Shevanal Take 2," they prove themselves true experimentalists with a proclivity for prog rock. — Mike McGuirk

]]> Death
Human
First released in 1991, Human is heralded as a transitional landmark in death metal's evolution. After Death imploded on a European tour, Chuck Schuldiner — now applying his projectile retching to theoretically less gory lyrics — most significantly hired two members of the Florida death-prog outfit Cynic. As a result, several song midsections pass through unfathomable twists and turns. Perhaps to emphasize complex musicianship, the 2011 expanded 20th-anniversary version of the album adds two discs of not only demo and rehearsal versions, but also "basic instrumental" and "drum and bass" tracks. — Chuck Eddy

Def Leppard
Mirrorball: Live and More
In three decades, this is the closest Def Lep have come to a live album, though it ends with three new studio tracks (Diddley-beat "Undefeated," Queen-choraled "Kings of the World," love-schmaltz "It's All About Believin'"), any of which might double as soccer-match inspiration. Otherwise, Lep do the smash hits and then some. They shorten "Rocket," lengthen most everything else, prove "Make Love Like a Man" was a Shania Twain template, cover Sweet exuberantly and David Essex experimentally, overemphasize their post-Hysteria middle age, and underemphasize their NWOBHM early days. — C.E.

Fear Before
Odd How People Shake
Fear Before's debut, first issued in 2003, shows an emotionally pained-and-proud screamo unit given to tongue-in-cheek titles like "Sarah Goldfarb, Where Are Your Manners" and "On The Brightside, She Could Choke," reportedly inspired by Hollywood movies (although the plots aren't necessarily reflected in the song lyrics). Across the board, good-cop/bad-cop vocals trade off angry groaning with anxious shrieking; guitar parts pack in notes here and there, springing to life most notably on "The Lisbon Girls, Oh the Lisbon Girls." At album's end, we get an eight-minute piano recital. — C.E.

Iced Earth
Festivals of the Wicked
The second live set from Tampa's most Euro-gothic power-metal platoon culls 12 performances from a concurrent triple DVD: four recorded in Germany in 2007 with onetime Rob Halford stand-in Tim "Ripper" Owens roaring oratory; and eight from Slovenia and another German festival in 2008, all fronted by Biloxi, Miss.-born policeman Matt Barlow. Eight selections, including Owens' stirring antichrist prophecy trilogy, date back to late-'90s albums. The Slovenia cuts end rather abruptly. But these manly myth-makers end the CD smoothly with their 1990 theme song, "Iced Earth." — C.E.

Mastodon
Live at the Aragon
Onstage in Chicago in late 2009, these prog-metal pachyderms start out cranking their then-current Crack the Skye — easily their most algebraically intricate album — from beginning to end. That record's precision plod comes off a bit muddled live. But by the 15-minute-plus climax, "The Last Baron," they've found their footing on the time-signature tightrope, and they're making room for exploratory solos. When they delve into more compact and fast-chugging material from their three earlier albums, they really pick up steam; when they finally close, it's with an off-kilter Melvins cover. — C.E.

Ozzy Osbourne
Blizzard of Ozz (Expanded Edition)
Paired with omnipotent Randy Rhoads on guitar, Ozzy stepped out on his first solo effort in 1980 with the easily recognizable "Crazy Train," and the wildly controversial "Mr. Crowley" and "Suicide Solution." Aside from making headlines, these nine timeless tracks demonstrated Ozzy's influence on metal's masses: decades later, bands still follow in the Prince of Darkness's footsteps, echoing his clean, melodic vocals and storytelling lyrics. This expanded edition, released in 2011, revives the original rhythm tracks while adding an old B-side, a remixed "Goodbye to Romance" and a lost Rhoads solo. — Jen Guyre

Ozzy Osbourne
Diary of a Madman (Legacy Edition)
Ozzy's second solo album (and last to feature Randy Rhoads), Diary of a Madman further cemented the singer's metal-icon status. "Flying High Again," "You Can't Kill Rock and Roll," "Over the Mountain" — these are among Ozzy's best and most recognized post-Sabbath songs. With this and Blizzard of Ozz, he and his band were essentially pointing the way for metal in 1981. This legacy edition restores the original bass and drum tracks (they were re-recorded for a 2002 re-issue), and includes an entire disc of live material from the Blizzard of Ozz tour. — M.M.

Queen
Queen
Queen's first album is just that — Queen's first album. All the elements that render their music eternally identifiable are here: the angelic backing vocals, Brian May's awesome guitars, and their trademark cross of metal, hard rock and majesty. They just aren't as completely realized as in the monumental benchmarks to come. Still, "Great King Rat" has enough of those ideas smashed up into one song to make any Queen fan happy, "My Fairy King" may be their best song title ever, and you just can never get sick of hearing the phase shifter-mad guitars of "Keep Yourself Alive" on headphones. — M.M.

Queen
Queen II
Queen's second record may not have the immediately identifiable hits their later albums drip with, but that does nothing to diminish its overall power and importance to their catalog. Staking out some no-man's land between prog rock, glam and heavy metal, Queen II is as different from what people were doing in 1974 as anything else the band did in the '70s. The guitars, of course, always sound amazing, but two minutes into "Father to Son," Brian May's supercharged Fender positively roars, with a brutal majesty no one can even imitate. "Ogre Battle" is another highlight. — M.M.

Queen
Sheer Heart Attack
"Killer Queen" was the band's first U.S. hit and remains one of their biggest songs, well summing up the Queen credo: impossibly catchy songwriting and an impeccable recording, with Freddie Mercury's flawless vocals on top and Brian May's celestially harmonized guitars adding punctuation. Sheer Heart Attack marks the emergence of Mercury's thousand-angel chorus (check "Stone Cold Crazy"); coupled with the jaw-dropping opener, "Brighton Rock," and Roger Taylor's taut Bowie-metal contribution "Tenement Funster," it makes Queen's third album required listening for any rock fan. — M.M.

Rough Cutt
Rough Cutt
On this California hair band's debut, first released in 1985, they're looking for a niche. Ronnie James Dio co-wrote the opening cut, and the band appears fond of Twisted Sister-style self-actualization shouts ("Never Gonna Die") and David Lee Roth shtick, but they're also not too cool to cover a tune Janis Joplin made famous. "Cutt Your Heart Out" makes for energetic speed-rock; there's a bombast ballad or two; and by album's end, the focus is on dangerous ladies — a "Black Widow" with "lips of venom," a heartbreaker with the "desire of a witch," and a thrill-giver who's "Dressed to Kill." — C.E.

Rough Cutt
Rough Cutt Wants You
It still didn't chart, but producer Jack Douglas at least helped Rough Cutt sound more concise, punchy and optimistic on their sophomore album. "Rock the USA" kicks things off fast and patriotic for top-gun 1986; "Don't Settle for Less" and "Take a Chance" sneak in bright, summery synths; "Hot 'n' Heavy" and "Double Trouble" are funk-rock of the Foreigner/Loverboy school. Paul Shortino's manly bellow manages more Paul Rodgers meat and potatoes, and "Let 'Em Talk" could have made a nice Van Halen B-side. The gut-busting attempt at a five-minute Journey ballad, thankfully, is saved for the end. — C.E.

Rwake
Hell Is a Door to the Sun
Originally released on a tiny label in 2002 and containing only one track under six minutes, this Little Rock, Ark., swamp-sludge outfit's dense-grinding second album already showed them hollering out of some cave way out in metal's acid-noise-drone left field. Several songs hinge on demonic spoken incantations or sampled film dialogue; 10-minute closer "The River/Traskwood" opens with what sounds like a radio preacher cataloging societal ills and ends with an inter-band argument. But the pinnacle is psychedelic death-rocker "Stoner Tree" — partly about how, even in Hell, one can still get high. — C.E.

Voivod
Warriors of Ice
Recorded in late 2009 in Montreal, with fellow Quebec tech-thrasher Dan "Chewy" Mongrain filling in for late guitar genius Piggy, this live set focuses on Voivod's first five albums: all but two songs date from 1991 or earlier. Voivod have as much fun bashing out old Neanderthal nuke 'n' roll as traversing space-metal wormholes. The robot drums beneath the African-like chanting of "Tribal Convictions" and alternate-universe pop hooks of "Panorama" are side dishes, as are Snake's between-song French patter and the Pink Floyd sci-fi they encore with. — C.E.

Whitesnake
Live at Donington 1990
Playing the Monsters of Rock fest just as their hit-single career had begun to wane, David Coverdale and his hard-lovin' men pick two songs from 1984's Slide It In, and five each from 1987's Whitesnake and 1989's Slip of the Tongue. Adrian Vandenberg and Steve Vai add two consecutive extended guitar showcases apiece, and the gig ends with an 8:26 crowd-participation Bobby Bland cover followed by a 7:59 take on "Still of the Night," these guys' greatest Zep pastiche. Earlier, to close the first disc, an interminable Tommy Aldridge drum solo pushes "Crying in the Rain" way past 13 minutes. — C.E.

Source Material: Napalm Death, Scum

2011-07-20T17:37:57Z

There aren't too many genres where you can pinpoint one particular album as the precise starting point, but with the extreme-metal sub-style long known as "grindcore," there's not much room for argument. Napalm Death's debut album, Scum, was 28 songs recorded nine months apart by two almost entirely different lineups of the British band (only common denominator: inhumanly rapid-fire blastbeat-popularizing drummer Mick Harris, who is said to have given grindcore its name). The album was then released in 1987 to punters who couldn't quite tell if this was a novelty act pulling their leg. On the first side — which followed on the heels of six N.D. demos dating back to 1982 and which was originally slated to be half of a split LP with another band — one of the 12 tracks lasts almost four minutes, but the last one, "You Suffer," checks in at a mere 1.316 seconds, making the Guinness Book of World Records for its brevity. The 16 cuts on Side 2 range in length from 16 seconds ("Common Enemy") to a comparatively almost symphonic 1:34, for "M.A.D."

]]> Godflesh, Jesu and sundry techno-dub projects; Harris and first-side vocalist-bassist Nick Bullen made experimental electronica in Scorn; second-side singer Lee Dorrian managed a decent doom-metal career in Cathedral; second-side guitarist Bill Steer got nasty in Carcass, then more straightforwardly rock in Firebird and Gentleman's Pistols. So it's not like Scum is the best music any of them ever made. It's definitely not the most listenable. But, at least for the hordes who care about grindcore, it's probably the most historically significant.

It also got to No. 7 on the U.K. indie chart, if you're keeping score. But given all that, the album still wasn't without precedent, at least as far as squeezing death-thrash horrificness into compact crusty-slamdance snippets. So while it's probably true that grindcore turned the punk/metal hybrid into something even faster and shorter, it's not like Napalm Death were the first people to have the idea — in a sense, they just took electro-shock innovations that had been setting mohawks on fire for several years and codified them into a genre requirement. In fact, on the 2004 album Leaders Not Followers, Pt. 2 (preceded five years earlier by a similar EP), N.D. covered a truckload of songs, many of them by bands who had somehow anticipated grindcore before it had a name. Hence, here's some probable Scum source material, acknowledged and/or not.

Amebix
No Sanctuary: The Spiderleg Recordings
On the long-lost 1982-to-'84 early releases compiled here, Crass-associated Devon, England, anarchists Amebix got some real nuclear-winter mulch-and-howl going. "Sunshine Ward," five-plus minutes of weeping bleakness turning the corner into an abandoned asylum of proto-Voivod cyber-grunt constructed around a slowed Stooges progression that materializes after the floor drops out, is darn-near epochal; "Progress?" is a grindcore ogre echoing out of the abyss years early. This could be either the sound of living in a drug-induced hole or on the Thatcher-reduced dole, but it's definitely something. Liner notes suggest Amebix learned their heavier riffs from biker-metal records, but this is no born-to-be-wild celebration — more like last-ditch survival in the face of despair. And it's also notable how the band's allegedly "political" lyrics dealt with such important current events as getting drunk and the axemen coming to slaughter your kids.

Die Kreuzen
October File
Like a few collections on this list, this music actually came out in the '80s on two different lickety-split albums. October File proper, this still under-appreciated Wisconsin band's 1986 second full-length, can almost be heard now as a halfway point between, say, '70s Aerosmith and '90s Nirvana; Dan Kubinski shrieks his vowels like some demonic spawn of Steve Tyler amid the crumbling Midwestern ruins, delivering a couple of fairly long (for punk) songs, as well as some fairly beautiful ones. But in 1984, when they put out their debut full-length — tracks 15 through 34 here — Die Kreuzen were hardcore purists, at least in the sense that "purism" means "dumping the first two Metallica LPs into a garbage compactor just to find out what the shards sound like." On their covers album, Napalm Death redid "I'm Tired," forfeiting only one of its 53 seconds.

Discharge
Why?
More unpretty Brit guttersnipes, pulverizing metal into punk like there twarn't no difference, ages before the crossbreed was legally sanctioned. Eventually, they spawned a whole subgenre of obscure "D-beat" bands whose names frequently started with "D"! They got together in Stoke-On-Trent way back in 1977, on punk's ground floor; Why?, their originally ten-song debut LP, came out four years later. "War's No Fairytale," which Napalm Death later covered, was part of a 1980 EP and one of a dozen bonuses added to this album upon its CD reissue. It's also one of three songs here with "war" in their titles; others include "Visions of War" (Why?'s opening track) and "Realities of War," from 1980. Apparently Discharge weren't too fond of the stuff.

Hellhammer
Demon Entrails
Before Tom G. Warrior was in Celtic Frost, he was in the Swiss band Hellhammer, who were black metal, death metal and nuke metal before anybody knew what those were. Being so evil and ahead of their time, they were also severely hated by most metal publications at the time, for sounding horribly wretched either on purpose or because they couldn't play their instruments. As you'd expect, Napalm Death wound up worshipping them — and covering "Messiah," the second cut on this 2008 comp of 1983 demo tracks — years down the line. Other instructive titles include "Triumph of Death," "Decapitator," "Chainsaw," "Power of Satan"… you get the idea, right?

Hirax
Not Dead Yet
The only metal band ever named after a Middle Eastern mammal that looks like a rodent but calls elephants its close cousin were also one of the few '80s thrash crews fronted by an African American, namely Katon W. DePena. They've never gotten their due, though the fact that they were classified as "metal" more than "punk" at the time despite DePena's penchant for Ramones T-shirts and his band's inclination toward songs lasting fewer than 120 seconds certainly seems noteworthy, in retrospect. They came from Cypress, Calif., and Not Dead Yet combines 1985's 14-song mini-album, Raging Violence (retaining its cover artwork, which looks like Humpty Dumpty throwing up), with 1986's eight-song maxi-EP, Hate, Fear, and Power. In 2004, Napalm Death covered the 32-second title track of the latter — in a mere 28 seconds, no less.

Kreator
Pleasure to Kill
Kreator — who are still around, incidentally — are a thrash-metal band from Essen, Germany; in fact, when they formed, in 1982, there were still two Germanies. (Essen was in the Western one.) What seemed to bring the band the most notoriety was the fact that almost all of their songs seemed to concern the once controversially popular if recently more dormant German pastime of killing people. Hence the title of this 1986 album, one track of which (the typically and aptly named "Riot of Violence") inspired a Napalm Death cover on Leaders Not Followers Pt. 2. (On the other hand, compared to Canadian punks the Dayglo Abortions — whose "Bedtime Story," from Feed Us a Fetus, the Napalmers also did a version of — Kreator weren't offensive at all!)

Meat Puppets
Meat Puppets
The Meat Puppets eventually achieved critical, and even to some extent commercial, success for a singular species of desert-baked cowpunk that Nirvana covered three times in their MTV Unplugged session — and later for a 1994 almost-hit single (No. 47 pop, No. 2 mainstream rock) called "Backwater." But the noggin-fried Arizona trio actually started out as a very weird and twisted no-wavish speedcore band. And you might still find a small contingent of humans (well, at least one — this writer) who believe this tumbling tumbleweed of a psych-core debut album-at-EP-length from 1982 was the best thing they ever did. With nearly all its crooked cuts checking in under two minutes (notice a trend here?), it was certainly the strangest thing they ever did — unless you count the even earlier (1981) 7-inch EP In a Car. That EP is also included on this expanded reissue, along with a pile of early sampler selections, demos and a Nilsson cover.

Raw Power
Screams from the Gutter
For two decades the proud work of siblings and founders Mauro and Giuseppe Codeluppi, Raw Power — who, despite their moniker, have not much to do with The Stooges — have also over the years featured fellows surnamed Prodi, Massarenti, Ferrari, Devoti, Steffanini (twice!), Bossini, Carpi, Dodi, Paolucci, Ronchini, Casali, Castagneti, Biano, Colla and Cavani. That's a lot of pasta! Born in Italy (where else?) in 1981, they developed an accent-screeching, guitar-soloing, anger-uncontrolled brand of protest hardcore that frequently struck punk fanzines as too heavily metallic for comfort. They also wore polka dots sometimes, and on one occasion in Seattle in 1986, Guns N' Roses is said to have opened a show for them. But their sound is more likely what later led Napalm Death to interpret this 1984 album's final song, "Politicians."

Repulsion
Horrified
Despite hailing from Flint, Mich. — a post-industrial hell-hole if ever there was one, ask Michael Moore — and despite this writer having grown up in Oakland County and being proud beyond reason of his state's contributions to rock history, Repulsion are bizarrely the only band in this piece that I hadn't heard of before I started researching it. (If I was going to have guessed a Michigan Napalm predecessor, I probably would've gone with savage early-'80s hardcore gang Negative Approach, given the eponymous song on Scum.) Turns out, though, that Repulsion and their larval configuration Genocide (and before that Tempter and Ultraviolence) were thrashing as early as 1984 and blastbeating soon after. They're now widely considered grindcore progenitors, to the extent that Jeff Walker of Carcass took it upon himself to gather up these 1986 recorded-in-Ann-Arbor demos and put them out on Earache subsidiary imprint Necrosis in 1989. Fourteen years later, Relapse Records unleashed them again, with a disc of even rarer rarities appended. Napalm Death, for their part, covered "Maggots in Your Coffin" in 1999.

Void
Side B
When it comes to abrasively time-shifting electric-chair metal "micro-songs" (as they've come to be known in the grindcore lexicon), there's a fairly good chance that nobody got there before this henpecked-sounding Washington, D.C., hypercore outfit. Void never put out an album in their lifetime (they recorded one, but never released it), but did manage half of one: in 1982, they split an LP on Minor Threat's Dischord label with the also intense but less distinctive D.C. band The Faith. Side B, as its title suggests, contains the dozen numbers from Void's 50 percent of that record. The shortest track, "Condensed Flesh," is over in just 38 seconds, after which Bubba Dupree charges into "Ignorant People" with what sounds an awful lot like Ted Nugent's riff from "Cat Scratch Fever." "Explode," the closer, is some deranged descendant of jazz fusion.

Friday Mixtape: My Clutter, Your Future

2011-07-08T17:36:35Z

When you've written about music for as many decades as I have, and you're as addicted as I am to constantly hearing more of it, let's just say that things pile up: all formats, from all manner of dollar bins and thrift stores and garage sales, along with whatever comes in the mail. But that's my problem; as a Rhapsody subscriber, you don't even need to dig through crates, because I've already done it for you! Hence, this all-encompassing playlist of stuff I've been listening to in all physical and digital walks of life lately, its title inspired by the Fall's 2010 album Your Future, Our Clutter, whose leadoff (and sort-of title) cut is included, along with four '80s r&b songs at the beginning, four '70s hard rock songs at the end, and 32 other selections of multifarious genres and vintages in between (a veritable top 40!), including a scattered handful from 2011, early Huey Lewis and Ice-T cuts that sound more like Thin Lizzy and Run-D.M.C., and two funky numbers about wearing wigs on the dance floor. Enjoy it, employ it, shake it but don't break it.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Friday Mixtape: My Clutter, Your Future

Metal Roundup: Summer 2011, Top 15

2011-06-22T17:12:15Z

Metal, as always, is detonating in several directions at once. But one encouraging trend seems to be a return to a certain songfulness — as if, after two decades-plus of metal mainly aiming to be "extreme" at the expense of musicality, the most forward-looking headbangers are suddenly beginning to realize that incomprehensibly thrown-up vocals (for instance) became a cliché eons ago, and having memorable songs doesn't automatically make you less heavy.

Which means, paradoxically, that the most forward-looking bands also frequently tend to be the ones looking backward — to the power-thrash mid-'80s, the NWOBHM early '80s, the biker-boogie '70s, and even the acid-rock late '60s, back before metal was called metal. Not exactly a brand-new development in all cases, but it seems to be picking up steam. It doesn't apply to all 15 of the notable 2011 albums tallied below, but it might apply to most. None of them are for everybody, but all of them are for somebody.

]]> 1. Cauldron
Burning Fortune
These three Toronto tyros sound like Def Leppard crossed with Metallica, if both had quit after their debut LPs: speed metal before the rock 'n' roll got purged from its system. The lyrics, which you can actually hear, suggest the travails (often girlfriend-related) of an average suburban teen hesher who imagines his mundane life as a comic book — and not even a gory one. Fire and desire (Cauldron's favorite rhyme) rage in "Rapid City"; boys who "Miss You to Death" offer even more hooks than hair. Plus there's a fake Van Halen solo and a dirty song about a tragic Canadian Playboy bunny.

2. Nazareth
Big Dogz
Dan McCafferty's screech flies higher after four decades than his disciple Axl Rose's did after four years. But with McCafferty and bassist Pete Agnew both turning 65 in 2011, aging is clearly on Nazareth's minds, and their more nostalgic cuts serve up a wistful autumnal swirl. The grizzled Scots get witty like a music-hall ZZ Top, too, but they're still best when heavy: in an ominous dirge aimed at religious zealots, a cynical swipe at government in times of austerity, some epic metal about mental illness, and a mean-swinging, maybe rap-inspired bilingual boogie about gang war in the barrio.

3. Kultur Shock
Ministry of Kultur
These globe-trotting Seattlites pile up menacing tar-pit riffage for a bash that's equal parts System of a Down, Gogol Bordello and Rachid Taha, with maybe some Sepultura in the percussion. But give or take the dirge-turned-jig-metal "Sheitan" and the martial "Revolutionary Song Intro," the tempos stay Eastern-European-wedding upbeat. They stampede against the free-jazz sax skronk as vocal pitches switch deftly between high-wailing emotion and low-chanted slapstick about a self-medicated nation, a rich man's war, the falling sky, and an antisocial coal-mine woman who can kick your butt.

4. Ghost
Opus Eponymous
Depending on your vantage point, these secretive Swedes' debut is terrifying, ludicrous, super-catchy — or all three. For a Satanic satire of the pre-Vatican II high mass, it's short: 35 minutes. But from the funeral-parlor pipe organ intro to the high-register acid-rock crooning, it packs more indelible melodies than most metal bands' careers. "Ritual" and the fairly lovely "Satan Prayer" owe their souls to mid-'70s Blue Oyster Cult. But Ghost are as fond of doom-toned riffs as devil-defiled nuns, and by final rite "Genesis," they're stomping with what sounds like a Mellotron and an acoustic guitar.

5. Black Spiders
Sons of the North
These Brits know their way around a hook and a joke: "KISS Tried to Kill Me" is almost too catchy and wacky for a metal band. But they are one, at least in the sense of intermittent knuckle-dragging heaviness (stoner-doomed "Mans Ruin," high-speed "What Good's a Rock Without a Roll?"), Zep rips ("St. Peter," "Si, El Diablo"), and distorted wank. There's also a memorable co-ed drinking duet, followed by a seven-minute epic that ends with a chain-gang spiritual: enough winners to excuse the not-quite-superhuman vocals.

6. Electric Wizard
Black Masses
Droning distantly from the bottomless bowl of some moss-green substance, these veteran Brit stoners open thick, blurry and muddy, then keep digging down into deeper concentric sub-basements of depressive molasses riffs. By the second song, they're taking a title ("Venus in Furs") from The Velvet Underground and distorted vocals from the early Butthole Surfers, as they honor dominatrix boots and the Zodiac. Countless bad-trip chants and occasional church bells later, "Crypt of Drugula" explodes space-metal into a black hole. Only one track is less than six minutes — and that one only barely.

7. Wolf
Legions of Bastards
These speedy Swedes remain committed to metal in its traditionally iron-clad ice-storm form. Their sixth album's statement of purpose is "Skull Crusher," which amusingly, if masochistically, screams of "obsessive and compulsive headbanging against the wall," complete with an '80s Accept shout chorus. "Road to Hell," one of two swipes at religious charlatans, is another hefty horse race. Two midset numbers get spacey and psychedelic, while other chronicled topics include werewolves, absinthe, schizophrenia and, in multipart closer "K-141 Kursk," a doomed Russian nuclear submarine.

8. New Keepers of the Water Towers
The Calydonian Hunt
For contemporary metal, this is both protean and meaty stuff. Arrangements take surprising turns but don't outwear their welcome: four (of nine) tracks clock in under three minutes. And the rhythmic throb often retains a whiff of the blues, à la certain nuclear-caveman thrash bands (Carnivore, early Voivod) from the mid-'80s. The vocals, nearly as tough to decipher when howling as when grunting, can be an Achilles heel; too bad, since these Stockholmers' alleged obsession with mythical beasts is a new twist. But cuts like chugging closer "The Sword in the Stone" hook you regardless.

9. Graveyard
Hisingen Blues
Though Joakim Nilsson's high wail suggests Soundgarden's Chris Cornell with a Scandinavian accent, the concentric blues-psych these Swedes shift through on their sophomore set harks back to more distant ancestors — from Cream boogie to Sabbath depresso-sludge to Thin Lizzy tapestry. The title track, one of two songs haunted by demons, swirls toward space, Hawkwind-style in parts; "Longing," a gorgeous, cinematic instrumental, follows "Buying Truth (Tack & Forlat)," a quick, percussive chug with wooh-wooh vocal backup. Across the board, there's an earthiness rarely embraced in modern metal.

10. TV Ghost
Mass Dream
These turbulent Indiana noisemongers' second album operates on the portentous Bauhaus-Goth end of Scratch Acid's feral mid-'80s post-hardcore, proto-grunge broheim rock. As slowly-I-turned nightmares go, it's an uncommonly hysterical one: thick, enveloping feedback drones powering dark metal (usually with eerie synth pulse attached) set to tempos that rarely slow into dirges. "Doppleganger" gurgles fast and frantic à la Suicide, and the set-concluding title cut squeaks open like some seasick surf clatter off Pere Ubu's Dub Housing, only to climax in a chorus of monks moaning in the catacombs.

11. Boris
Heavy Rocks
Not to be confused with either Boris' 2002 album with the same title or their Attention Please album released on the same 2011 day, this slab o' sludge opens with a lowdown monster-riffed downer-pounder called "Riot Sugar," then oozes from there. Sabbath chords are wed to hardcore hoots and hollers, mournful funeral croons explode rocket ship-like into the stratosphere, modernized drag-race rock slows to a standstill under kitschy doo doo doo's, maddeningly sluggish plod-metal disintegrates into the Radiohead ozone. To close, "Czechoslovakia" accelerates from classic doom to murderous thrash.

12. Boris
Attention Please
Probably the least aggressive, most atmospheric music these Japanese iconoclasts have coughed up, Attention Please is mainly a vehicle for the sleepy, breathy, Björk-y murmuring of guitarist Wata. She's always in the forefront, variously mixed atop billowing trance-tronics (title cut), flushed-toilet machine swirls ("See You Next Week") and reverberating lounge pulsations ("You"). Even the guitars tend toward shoegaze metal, though "Tokyo Wonder Land" punctuates its relaxation session with buzzsaw noise spurts, and "Les Paul Custom '86" gets some blurry glam-punk gurgle going.

13. Warrant
Rockaholic
Replacing Jani Lane with ex-Lynch Mobber Robert Mason is kind of like booting Roth for Hagar: secretly high-I.Q. humor, vocal subtlety and melodic invention make way for a more bull-in-china-shop approach. Rockaholic opens leering and riffy, rides some Bon Jovi cowboy-glam into the sunset, then alternates fast Ratt-haired rockers with Buckcherry-tawdry mid-tempo semi-ballads. Three songs wrestle with drug dependence; two (the Billy Squier-ripping "Snake" and the speedy, steely, legitimately metal closer "The Last Straw") lash out at a disreputable soul who may or may not be a former bandmate.

14. Morbid Angel
Illud Divinum Insanus
As its Latin title hints, this is one crazy record! David Vincent still mostly grunts like he's clearing mucus from his bronchial tubes, and machine-gunned prayers to Baal abound. Otherwise, there's sufficient deviation from the death-metal formula. Both "Radikult" and the sci-fi march "Destructos vs. the Earth" have an almost industrial-rap feel. "I Am Morbid" is a cheer for bleacher Beelzebubs; "10 More Dead" is a tale of brain-salad cannibalism atop a subliminal Sabbath groove. And "Too Extreme!" has enough stops, starts, oinks and bilingual backward-maskings to pass as a parody.

15. Secret Sphere
Archetype
These semi-symphonic Italians have many cheesy metal bases covered — Megadeth-level thrash, Maiden-esque operatics, meaty commercial power metal, Queensryche pomp and circumstance (complete with Geoff Tate-style emoting), and an almost electro-pop Evanescence-y love-duet ballad ("All in a Moment") where a boy calls a girl "a thousand times a day." They even do a Middle Eastern-guitared cover of "The Look," by Roxette! Between anti-war sentiments and dainty adult-contemporary piano interludes, arrangements get interesting now and then, too — for instance, when the buzzsaw guitar blows up "Future."

Source Material: Motörhead's Motörhead

2011-06-15T17:26:31Z

Back in their early days, Motörhead sure seemed like an anomaly in the heavy metal world. Thrash, aka speed metal, hadn't been born yet, and metal had been bloating itself into irrelevance since at least the mid-'70s. In fact, if we're talking about loud rock music that actually managed to exhibit over-the-top energy, punk (and eventually, to some extent, its descendants hardcore and oi!) had dang near supplanted metal — which probably explains why Motörhead reportedly tended to fare better with live crowds when they shared bills with, say, The Damned or The Adverts than when they opened for an increasingly decrepit Ozzy Osbourne.

In retrospect, some other metal had begun to speed up and strip down (somewhat) at the time — at least, by the early '80s, certain grassroots small-label British bands recording on poverty budgets. But those groups were even harder to hear about, certainly in the States, than Motörhead. And it might not matter anyway, since Lemmy Kilmister has long insisted that Motörhead were never even a metal band in the first place — and he may well have had a point. As far as he was concerned (and not unlike his Aussie fellow travelers in AC/DC), he was just in a rock 'n' roll band. He barked through gravel and leather and grime about motorbikes, gambling, amphetamines, customs offices and outrunning the law, not about Vikings, goddesses, wizards and ancient mariners.

]]> do. We're a rock band. I am rock 'n' roll; I've seen the whole thing. I remember Elvis' first record. Heavy metal is people who shriek and plod around. I wanted to be the MC5. We bend, like dance music. Except it's too fast to dance to."

I'd say Motörhead don't "bend" like they used to. Like with AC/DC, recent decades have seen them downplaying the boogie groove they were born to; if they're still not metal, they've surely become more metal with age. And unlike lots of bands once called metal, Motörhead don't seem like they've ever really been abandoned by the headbanging hordes. Me, I'm old school; I still prefer their early stuff, from the '70s, when they were basically a super-heavy pub-rock band. If you're more of a metal purist than I am, you might opt for more recent stuff — and you might not even wonder, as I do, whether they've been spinning their wheels for the past quarter-century. Whatever. Motörhead, released in 1977, is the album that started things. Here are some dirty genes it wore.

Gene Vincent
Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps
Elvis came first, of course. But Lemmy has said that it was seeing Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and Cliff Richard (!) on the BBC that first convinced him to try his hand at rock 'n' roll. Ever notice how Brits of a certain age always seem to mention Gene Vincent, way more than similarly aged Americans do? Ian Dury even did a song about him on his first album. Anyway, supposedly Vincent made his U.K. TV debut on a show hosted by one Jack Good a few days before Christmas, 1959. Lemmy, born Christmas Eve 1945, would've been just shy of 14 at the time — quite the impressionable age. A year later, Vincent toured the U.K. with Eddie Cochran. A taxi they were riding through Wiltshire crashed, Eddie died, and Vincent wound up injured for the rest of his life. Eventually, Lemmy — who still moonlights in a rockabilly trio called The Head Cat — carried on that greasy legacy.

Johnny Kidd & The Pirates
The Complete Johnny Kidd Vol. 1 and 2
In case you're wondering, Lemmy was a fan of working-class punks The Beatles, who he's said made him think he could change the world (unlike art-school phonies The Rolling Stones). John Lennon, especially, was a major inspiration. But before The Beatles, where British rock bands are concerned, there were Johnny Kidd & the Pirates. They wore buccaneer eyepatches and never charted in the States (though an early lineup of The Guess Who scored in the U.S. with a cover of their song "Shakin' All Over" in 1965, and hard rock bands from The Who to Humble Pie later covered it as well). Starting in the late '50s, they had a pile of hits at home, one of the biggest of which was "Please Don't Touch," which Motörhead covered in 1980 — not on Ace of Spades, but rather on the St. Valentine's Massacre EP (which went Top 5 in the U.K.) with their still underratedly badass sister band, Girlschool.

The Yardbirds
Shape of Things: The Very Best of The Yardbirds
"When we first started," Lemmy told me in the mid-'90s, "we were playing 'Good Morning Little Schoolgirl' and all these Yardbirds-style songs." Sonny Boy Williamson did that one first, in 1937; the Yardbirds covered it 27 years later, and it can be found on this album. So can their 1965 rendition of "Train Kept A-Rollin'," with which Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio had a hit and basically invented hard rock in 1956 (after Tiny Bradshaw originated it as a jump blues in 1951). Motörhead would charge through it in '77. This album otherwise mixes white blues, pop rock and proto Goth to immortal effect.

Hawkwind
Doremi Fasol Latido
Okay, this is cheating, maybe, seeing as how Lemmy was actually Hawkwind's bassist at the time. And in some ways, it's possible that Hawkwind mainly inspired Lemmy's later music by teaching him how he didn't want Motörhead to sound. But even if Hawkwind's heads were somewhere out in space, and Motörhead's biker boots were glued to the soil or committed to the open road, what the two bands clearly had in common was a certain kind of minimalism that didn't waste time on unnecessary guitar chords. They also had in common a couple songs: Lemmy's "Watcher" (from this Hawkwind album) and the awesome "Lost Johnny" both wound up on Motörhead's debut. And if you're keeping track of such trivia, it's worth noting that Motörhead also borrowed their equally great early punker "City Kids" from The Pink Fairies, the former crew of pre-debut guitarist Larry Wallis.

The Stooges
Raw Power
Also known, in certain circles, as "the King James version of the Bible" (well, at least that's what Creem magazine's editors called it once when they showed Patti Smith on a "Creem Dream" page hugging a copy). And sure, we could just as easily mention the MC5, name-checked back in our intro. You can totally trust Lemmy's MC5 love, but their first and third albums were more arty than he ever was, and their second (the rock 'n' roll revival one, Back in the U.S.A.) can't quite match his heaviness. The first two Stooges albums show more pretension than the early Motörhead would allow, too. ("We Will Fall"… "L.A. Blues"… are you kidding?) But it's when James Williamson joins on guitar (technically in late 1970) that the Stooges most clearly start setting the Motörhead template. Iggy really got into using nihilistic military metaphors at the same time; there's not a big leap from "Search and Destroy" to the Brits' 1979 "Bomber" and "Overkill." And make no mistake, 1973's Raw Power was The Stooges' heavy metal album (albeit with plenty of R&B still audible in the rhythm section). Wouldn't be surprised to learn that Lemmy was attuned to Detroit rock in general, though: early Ted Nugent and Bob Seger for sure, and maybe Mitch Ryder and Brownsville Station as well.

Various Artists
The Chiswick Story Part 1
Critic-who-doesn't-think-he's-one Joe Carducci, in his tome Rock and the Pop Narcotic, has suggested the primary inspiration for Motörhead accelerating their tempos in 1977 (in the wake of Fast Eddie Clarke replacing Larry Wallis on guitar) may have been The Ramones, who'd toured England the year before. Perhaps so. But what you might not know is that, at first, Motörhead were Chiswick Records labelmates with several other scummy, low-rent, rock-on-the-verge-of-punk gangs who largely shared their breaking-barstools-over-heads speed-boogie sensibility. Bands like The (Hammersmith) Gorillas, Johnny Moped, The Radio Stars, Joe Strummer's pre-Clash outfit The 101ers and maybe especially The Count Bishops, very tough blokes given to grumbling about pools of blood on the old dancefloor. (Okay, that particular song, "Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked in Tonight," was actually borrowed from an early version of Fleetwood Mac, believe it or not. But no matter who does it, heads get kicked.) The Damned, who end this compilation, also did Chiswick stuff. But remember, this was an England where the band Dr. Feelgood (another likely important early Motörhead inspiration) had already been charting for a couple years with brutally guitared Johnny Kidd throwbacks. Punk was coming, soon. But it was also sort of already there.

Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (16 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:16:50Z


*Slayer, Reign in Blood* (1986)** The wicked ibex of the netherworld is carried through his kingdom by his priestly minions as flames tickle his hooves and damned bodies decorate the walls, way down there a mile below earth with all those newly discovered Halicephalous Mephisto nematodes the journal Nature has been raving about lately. Slayer had already lowered metal cover art to the next sizzling sub-basement with 1985's Hell Awaits in '85, but Reign in Blood was a record-breaking heatwave that's yet to be equaled. Still, what with global warming and all, who the hell knows what's in store? Temp: 3400ºC / 6140ºF. Metal melted: Tungsten.
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Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (15 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:15:07Z


*Therion, Symphony Masses: Ho Drakon Ho Megas* (1993) I don't know Swedish, but judging from this record's scorching cover art, "drakon" probably means "fire-breathing dragon," "megas" means he's really really huge, and "hos" are "zombies playing violin while Stockholm bakes." This weekend's ski trip has been hereby cancelled! Temp: 3025ºC / 5477ºF. Metal melted**: Osmium.
<< Previous Album	15 of 16	Next Album >>

Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (14 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:14:26Z


*Deicide, To Hell With God* (2003) Lots and lots of skeletons (at least 15, but it's kind of hard to count given that there also seem to be heads on sticks, which look aggravatingly similar) surrounding some fellow on top of a mountain with hands outstretched to the sun. And not only is the entire landscape a towering inferno, so is the band's logo! Temp: 1770ºC / 3220ºF. Metal melted**: Platinum.
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Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (13 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:13:46Z


*Death, The Sound of Perseverance* (1998) Simple but effective image: a giant pointy cave o' fire, ready to swallow you up like it's a brick oven and you're a pizza. When you come from Florida, heat is just a fact of life. Temp: 1670ºC / 3040ºF. Metal melted:** Titanium.
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Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (12 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:12:53Z


*Heaven & Hell, The Devil You Know* (2009) In which ancient metal geezers (Ronnie James Dio again, Tony Iommi, Vinny Appice and Geezer Butler himself) beat almost all those church-burning young bucks at their own game — well, at least on the cover, which depicts a lamprey-lipped Lucifer speaking with three forked tongues and sporting a pair of barbed and thorny horns and a serpent-wrapped scepter. That the crucifix behind him is withstanding the flames may be a miracle, of sorts. Temp: 1536ºC / 2797ºF. Metal melted:** Iron.
<< Previous Album	12 of 16	Next Album >>

Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (11 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:11:20Z


*Behemoth, Zos Kia Cultus* (2003) Interesting thing about this trio of blackened-death-metal Poles: all their other album covers (they have several) seem to be gray, black or midnight blue, as their dusky subject matter may well require. But this one is red red red all the way — with a large demonic goat-man sitting on his throne, basking in the helter-skelter swelter. He's got two saber-toothed fangs worthy of a carnivorous walrus, four much-tattooed arms and a couple spear-like weapon thingamajigs. Don't want to rush to judgment, but I'll take a wild guess that he's up to no good. Temp: 1510ºC / 2750ºF. Metal melted**: Stainless steel.
<< Previous Album	11 of 16	Next Album >>

Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (10 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:10:34Z


*W.A.S.P., Babylon* (2009)** A colleague recommended these flunk-like-a-beasters' 1984 debut for this competition, but though that one sure does feature some unhealthy dungeon torture, W.A.S.P. didn't actually release their hottest-looking album 'til a quarter-century later. Maybe their best album, too, but what matters here is those four horsemen of the apocalypse riding their trusty steeds over the smoldering coals of the underworld. Of course, if they were really brave, they'd walk. Temp: 1453ºC / 2647ºF. Metal melted: Nickel.
<< Previous Album	10 of 16	Next Album >>

Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (9 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:09:47Z


*Morbid Angel, Blessed Are the Sick* (2003)** Sneaky one, this: looks like just a river of goop. Glowing tangerine-colored goop, but still. Yet reportedly, it's actually a reproduction of Satan's Treasures, an 1895 Belgian symbolist painting by Jean Delville wherein, in Wikipedia's words, "the artist depicts Satan with a wild, fiery head of hair and huge red tentacles instead of wings. Scarlet waves surround his left arm, as he presides over a river of unconscious men and women." Honestly, it still just looks like a river of goop to me, but I guess I'll take their word for it. Temp: 1063ºC / 1945ºF. Melted melted: Gold.
<< Previous Album	9 of 16	Next Album >>

Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (8 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:08:31Z


*Holy Grail, Crisis in Utopia* (2010)** Know that Black Sabbath line about "Satan laughing, spreads his wings"? Cool, what about that Meat Loaf line about "a bat out of hell"? Well, this album cover cleverly combines both images, except the Satan-bat is more like a pterodactyl, and there's sticky stuff dripping off his wings onto a skeleton in an orange-ashen, bonfire-ravished graveyard with a city skyline in the background. But the city, oddly, does not appear to be in flame, with rock 'n' roll or otherwise. Temp: 961ºC / 1760ºF. Melted melted: Silver.
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Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (7 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:07:28Z


*Death Angel, Relentless Retribution* (2010)** Have to hand it to these veteran Filipino American Bay Area thrashers: where other metal bands have long settled for just one devil goat, here there's a whole pile of 'em, stacked up like kindling on a campfire, with blazes billowing skyward. Not as frightening as it looks at first, but yo dude, who cares: awesome barbecue weather! Temp: 930ºC / 1710ºF. Metal melted: Brass.
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Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (6 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:06:13Z


*Dio, Lock Up the Wolves* (1990) Confusing title, since usually when metal bands tell you to lock up somebody, it's your wives and daughters; are the wolves actually in danger here? What, does Dio have Sarah Palin and Rick Perry (coyote, same difference) in his band? Anyway, on the cover, two wolves are pulling a dogsled of sorts, driven through the fire-not-snow by a caribou-like creature with several hundred tree branches for legs. Okay, that's confusing, too, but scalding nonetheless, and it's about time reindeers got their revenge. Temp: 640ºC / 1180ºF. Metal melted**: Plutonium.
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Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (5 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:05:05Z


*Cradle of Filth, Nymphetamine* (2004)** Just in case whoracles aren't sexist enough for you, here's Cradle of Filth to the rescue. Presumably that's Ms. Nymph herself there amid all the flaming combustion — which, curiously, doesn't seem to faze her much. Not sure about the "amphetamine" part: maybe she's just burning up really really fast? Temp: 419.5ºC / 787ºF. Metal melted: zinc.
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Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (4 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:04:10Z


*In Flames, Whoracle* (1997)** This one definitely gets ridiculous-album-title points. Also, said "whoracle" has several octopus-style appendages: always a plus. But the fire is merely raging behind her — so far, it has avoided the abandoned-looking medieval-architectural structure in which she's wailing. So she's not quite "in flames." Yet. Temp: 327.5ºC / 621ºF. Metal melted: Lead.
<< Previous Album	4 of 16	Next Album >>

Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (3 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:03:33Z


*Celtic Frost, Into the Pandemonium* (2003)** Ominous painting of an arsoned Dark Ages village at night, with somebody climbing ladders on one of the old buildings. Penalized, though, due to the fact that the ladder-climber might be a fireman, and because the art for their previous record, the aforementioned To Mega Therion, while less hot, looked a whole lot scarier. Temp: 321ºC / 610ºF. Metal melted: Cadmium.
<< Previous Album	3 of 16	Next Album >>

Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (2 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:02:39Z


*Hellmouth, Gravestone Skylines* (2010) A vulture feasts on cadavers amid roasted-red ravishes of war as patrolling soldiers in nuclear suits charge through: not chilly by any means, but despite the band's bad-breath-reminiscent name, too earth-bound to seem truly hellish. Temp: 232ºC / 449.4ºF. Metal melted**: Tin.
<< Previous Album	2 of 16	Next Album >>

Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time (1 of 16)

2011-06-07T17:01:02Z


*Lamb of God, As the Palaces Burn* (2003) Perhaps a castle is indeed cooking somewhere in this picture — they managed the proper vermillion tint, at least — but if so, it looks more like just a big hunk of meat. A delicious rack of lamb, perhaps! But a medium-rare one, at best. Temperature: 97.83ºC/208ºF. Metal melted**: Sodium.
	1 of 16	Next Album >>

Eternal Summer: The Hottest Heavy-Metal Album Covers of All Time

2011-06-07T17:00:15Z

Heavy metal may well be the Viking soundtrack to an endless tundra of ice and snow and darkness, but the genre's also obviously always been obsessed with interminable conflagration amid Dante's nine steamin'-hot circles of Hell. Seriously: if you want a really excellent suntan all year 'round, metal's where to go. Google "kneecap burning sensation," as this writer did recently, and the No. 3 possible cause (right behind "patellar bursitis" and "peripheral neuropathy") is "heavy metal exposure" — true fact! So in honor of metal's "Eternal Summer" (as apparent Beach Boys fans Celtic Frost humorously put it in a song title on 1985's To Mega Therion, which bore impossibly evil-looking H.R. Giger cover art depicting Jesus in Satan's slingshot), we decided to take the temperatures of some of metal's most Hades-blazing album covers. Time to fire up the grill, slap on some Coppertone and stretch out on a lounge chair. It's getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes. Or, as Beavis would put it, "Fire! Fire! Fire!"

As a bonus, here's a playlist of metal songs about summer and/or extreme heat: Hotter Than Hell: Heavy Metal's Eternal Summer.

Click here to see the first album: Lamb of God, As the Palaces Burn

Senior Year, 1986: Junior Yuppie Business Club

2011-05-31T17:03:07Z

You had a job waitin' after your graduation — 50 thou a year would buy a lot of beer. You were doin' all right, gettin' good grades; future was so bright, you had to wear shades! A growing economy, inflation down, employment up, Reagan midway through his second term, Top Gun in theaters — triumphalism all around! The music biz's future looked slightly less certain, but there was hope in new technology: "Annual record sales continue to fall," noted a 1986 Detroit Free Press piece, "while CD sales climb faster than the industry expected." The future wasn't punk kids buying Metallica/Beastie Boys/Run-D.M.C. vinyl, no way: it was upwardly mobile grown-ups who could afford shiny discs by Dire Straits or Robert Palmer, or Paul Simon's Graceland. So the music got super tasteful, almost always using the same antiseptic cocaine-studio drum pulse, even in Van Hagar's hard rock. "With CD production due to catch up to consumer demand in 1987, and with hardware prices continuing to drop," Richard Harrington wrote in the Washington Post, "just about anybody can be a yuppie, at least in terms of sound." Or, to put it another way, "Pick a habit, we got plenty to go around," as L.A. duo David and David sang in "Welcome to the Boomtown," their era-defining, lone Top 40 hit. "All that money makes such a succulent sound."

So here's a playlist full of truly succulent sounds for the young 1986 Distributive Education Clubs of America marketer, entrepreneur and/or middle manager on the rise. Your MBA is mere years away, and it might require a couple all-night cram sessions between frat parties, but like Billy Ocean says, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." Or, for even more inspiration, recall Peter Gabriel in "Big Time": "I'm on my way to making it ... I'll be a big noise with all the big boys/ There's so much stuff I will own." It's a highway to the danger zone, and we don't need another hero, but we're livin' in America and lovin' every minute of it. So be good to yourself. And above all, don't forget to heed the Pet Shop Boys' excellent advice: "You've got the brawn/ I've got the brains/ Let's make lots of money."

Click here to listen to our entire playlist: Senior Year, 1986: Junior Yuppie Business Club.

Cheat Sheet: Progressive Metal

2011-05-25T17:02:26Z

Truth be told, heavy metal and prog rock have been intertwined since both genres were born. My friend Frank, who is a few years older than me, remembers confusing Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" with King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man" in 1970, when both songs were new. (Interestingly, both were also referenced on Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy 40 years later — coincidence?) And as different as Crimson and Sabbath might sound to us today, what's still clear is that both moved rock away from blues-based rhythms and toward more European concert-hall structures: Sabbath by way of horror-movie soundtracks, maybe — but nonetheless. Of course, compared to most contemporary metal, Sabbath might as well be Muddy Waters.

That's partly because, around the turn of the '80s, bands like Iron Maiden subtracted even more of early metal's R&B groove, and later most thrash bands and their descendants finished the job. In the '70s, being that devoid of African American influence is something only bands like Yes and E.L.P. would've copped to. So Maiden, in fact — from Bruce Dickinson's Shakespearean-actor declamations about ancient mariners and flights of Icarus on down — might just as well be considered a really loud prog band, and maybe would've been had they emerged a few years earlier.
]]> And once they (along with Rush and any number of other '70s brainiacs) set metal on that pomp-and-circumstantial path, impenetrable concept albums, rock operas, half-hour multipart epics with symphonic midsections and countless other subspecies of pretentious bombast were inevitable. Starting at least with Queensryche in the late '80s, progressive metal has occupied its own ornate mansion on the genre's map — albeit a mansion that metal's myriad other substyles (from death to doom to power to nü) visit on occasion. Here's a rundown of some notable albums.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Progressive Metal Cheat Sheet.

Apocalyptica
Worlds Collide
For accomplished Finnish metal cellists Apocalyptica, this sixth studio effort further signifies how standard six-string shredding is no match for four-string mastery. Seven all-instrumental crushers are separated by a peppering of powerful, radio-ready alt metal tracks featuring metal vocalists Corey Taylor of Slipknot ("I'm Not Jesus"), Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil ("S.O.S"), Adam Gontier of Three Days Grace ("I Don't Care") and Till Lindemann of Rammstein ("Helden," a gloomy cover of the German version of David Bowie's "'Heroes'"). — Jen Guyre

Ayreon
01011001
This ecologically attuned two-disc "opera" — starring guys from King's X, Symphony X, Planet X (that's a lot of X's!) and Blind Guardian — is daunting. Four of 15 "songs" (including both "The Fifth Extinction" and "The Sixth Extinction") have at least five subtitles each. Lyrics are arranged like a play, and the plot's hard to follow. But the music's good: clanky buildups, Celtic folk parts, sea chanteys, a melody (in "Comatose") echoing Dido's "Thank You," a rhythm (in "E = MC2") midway between "Immigrant Song" and Eurodisco — plus some heavenly vocals from The Gathering's Anneke van Giersbergen. — Chuck Eddy

Blind Guardian
At the Edge of Time
Using John Milton, Michael Moorcock and Norse mythology among other, uh, nerdy things as inspiration, the German power-metal veterans put album No. 9 over the top. Vacillating between crushing speed metal and straight-up prog rock, and marked by the operatic crooning of Hansi Kursch, songs like "Control the Divine" (Paradise Lost set to stun) and "Curse My Name" (based on a pamphlet arguing the merits of regicide) will appeal to any longtime fan of the band, anyone heading into battle, or both. — Mike McGuirk

Celtic Frost
Parched With Thirst Am I and Dying
The weird operatic falsettos, cavernous percussion and sci-fi prog-isms of this Swiss trio's mid-'80s records haven't always aged gracefully, but in terms of influence they easily rank with the Possessed or Slayer. Then, much to the horror of fans, the band strayed into the flowery fields of pop metal — 1988's Cold Lake had the feel of a simple makeover that went terribly wrong. But subsequent efforts saw the band reasserting their claim to the blackened death metal throne, and this mismatched platypus of an anthology captures the band in all its topsy-turvy glory. — Chad Driscoll

Cynic
Focus
As metal became more technical, and influenced by the talents and proficiencies of prog musicians, Cynic rose out of their thrash roots to create some of the genre's most complex music to date. Classical influences have always been a metal staple, but Cynic were also inspired by jazz fusion, and they let it show. This 1993 debut jousts between light, introverted instrumental noodling and violent death-metal outbursts. — Mark Kate

DragonForce
Inhuman Rampage
On a cold winter morning, in the time before the light, England's power metal braintrust unleashed their transfixing third full-length. Boasting uncanny guitar virtuosity and video game-inspired keyboards alongside potent vocals so huge only an arena could contain them, DragonForce's technical ability outshines parodic metal stereotypes, despite occasional gratuitous moments. In songs like "Operation Ground and Pound" and Guitar Hero favorite "Through the Fire and Flames," uplifting lyrics of unity in battle and power metal's key fantasy elements are in full force. — J.G.

Dream Theater
Score
These fancy-pants musos' 2006 live-at-Radio-City (with Octavarium Orchestra no less) extravaganza kicks off with engaging fanfare, fire alarms, drum solos and crowd sounds; subsequent tracks pack in more time changes than you can shake a baton at. Occasionally Dream Theater get tuneful in a "Silent Lucidity" way, or even stoop to some bluesy guitars. But the two longest tracks exceed 26 and 41 minutes, and somewhere in there, Disney-movie orchestrations lead to skating-rink symphonics, which lead to a Rush imitation about a girl from a small Midwestern town. Audacious! — C.E.

Faith No More
Angel Dust
Two years after the freak anthem "Epic" made Faith No More an MTV sensation, they returned with an album that was anything but anthemic. Angel Dust is one of the more challenging albums to ever climb Billboard's chart. Filtering jagged funk-metal through a neo-Zappa sense of absurdism, F.N.M. produced an album that is dark, menacing and aggressively eccentric. Three tracks in particular — "Caffeine," "Jizzlobber" and "Malpractice" — are downright insane. That said, Angel Dust never devolves into cheap-thrills buffoonery — quite the opposite. It's a truly cerebral masterpiece. — Justin Farrar

Hammers of Misfortune
The Bastard
A three-act metal opera with recurring characters, three distinct vocalists and a fully conceived storyline, this years-in-the-making debut from San Francisco's premier fantasy-metal unknowns is something of an oddity. But, recorded on an eight-track in a rehearsal space (doesn't sound like it) and unspeakably imaginative (think Maiden played by druids, with absolutely glorious vocals), The Bastard is incredible nonetheless. Listen to it through several times — you won't get bored. This is some form of metal that existed before time, but somehow Hammers came up with it all on their own. — M.M.

King's X
Best of King's X
As this 17-song 1997 collection attests, King's X have been combining progressive hard rock, funk, soul and even Beatles-style harmonies since the '80s. Aligned with the Christian rock community in early days (but outspoken about their distaste for being labeled as such, despite songs that deal with faith issues), they started picking up critical acclaim soon after. The band has evolved since through several stylistic changes — a darker and more experimental streak, for instance, followed by a move toward the muscular chug of grunge. — M.M.

Magenta
Metamorphosis
The 2008 album by these British prog-festival mainstays hinges on two songs over 20 minutes long: opener "The Ballad of Samuel Layne" is a real beaut that climbs to the wuthering heights of '70s Kate Bush, and "Metamorphosis" itself reaches for the skies with heavy riffs, not to mention Morse-code vocal parts worthy of "Leave It" by Yes. With violins, cellos, violas, recorders, mandolins and uilleann pipes playing a major role, the two shorter numbers sparkle, too. — C.E.

The Mars Volta
Frances the Mute
Anyone doubting the Mars Volta's ability to make progressive rock a volatile and valid 21st-century art form needs to hear this. It's operatic, thematic metal crossed with hardcore, then sprinkled with surreal lyrics and headphone madness. It's like Radiohead, the Flash Gordon soundtrack and Fugazi all rolled into one. — Jon Pruett

Mastodon
Crack the Skye
While it may not be easy to figure out what the members of Mastodon are talking about — tsarist Russia, Rasputin, astral travel, wormholes and Stephen Hawking are tied together — the important thing is to be open to the ideas they are exploring in Crack the Skye. It doesn't hurt that opener "Oblivion" is descended directly from Pink Floyd's Animals, and that half the time you think you're listening to Blue Öyster Cult. The genuinely far-out groove-jam "The Last Baron" brings everything together with an effortlessness only Mastodon can offer. — M.M.

Nightwish
Angels Fall First
Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish have been big shots on their homeland's landscape ever since this 1997 debut. Alternating between male and female vocals, getting the bulk of their lyrical inspiration from fantasy novels (Tolkein and the Dragonlance series in particular) and fashioning their baroque, highly specialized and orchestrated music on film scores, the band has become a mainstay on European charts. Flute passages, strings, harpsichord and a distinctly operatic bent in the vocals of Tarja Turunen all help. — M.M.

Opeth
Watershed
Skeptics initially decried the departure of Peter Lindgren, half of the progressive death metallers' infallible songwriting duo. But with guitar mastermind Mikael Åkerfeldt solely at the helm, Watershed is an audacious experiment in sounds and textures. Mixing signature prog/metal arrangements with beautiful calmness, tracks like "Heir Apparent" show remnants of Opeth's previous work while taking large strides in new directions. "Coil" incorporates female vocals, while on "The Lotus Eater," eerie organ and background whispers and laughs add a solemn slyness. — J.G.

Queensryche
Operation: Mindcrime
In 1988, a Seattle band who'd previously looked like new-romantic fops traded in cross-dressing for deep thinking: a complicated, convoluted concept album about very important stuff, with sinister side effects of changing technology atop the list. Also: conspiracies of the wealthy, brain control, prostitutes disguised as nuns, and revolutionaries setting fire to the White House! Queensryche presented themselves as too cerebral to be a hair band, but they were sort of one anyway, even though they were also weighty and pompous enough to pass muster as "real" metal for non-false headbangers. — C.E.

The Red Masque
Feathers for Flesh
Kiarash Emami as Mr. Roboto, Lynnette Shelley as the Harpy, Brandon Ross as Lord Misanthrope, Vonorn as Vonorn: these Philadelphians have seemingly attended many a Shakespeare festival, not that their names have anything to do with that. But their wearing of long capes in the forest certainly does, as do the utter theatricality and drama of their extremely-long-song hard prog, like for instance how the five tracks on this quite listenable 2004 album go through several paradiddling scenery and costume changes, often getting loud like King Crimson or Van Der Graaf Generator in the process.— C.E.

Sigh
Imaginary Soundscape
"Bizarre," "weird," "different" — these words fail this Japanese experimental metal band's magnum opus. Sigh began as the only black metal band in Japan in 1990, but by the release of this 2001 album, they had either become bored with the restrictions of metal or had lost their marbles altogether. While the beautiful Japanese folk/classical coda of opener "Corpsecry - Angelfall" is in contrast to the rest of the song, it's subsequent straight-faced curveballs hummed at the listener's face that make this album the singular work it is. Reggae breakdowns, saxophone solos and marimba interludes fit remarkably well with death-grunt vocals and straight-up black-metal songs. "A Sunset Song" is the key track, but you want to start at the beginning. — M.M.

Therion
The Miskolc Experience
More than 110 minutes of bombast recorded at a Hungarian opera festival — which might explain those concert instruments buried in ashes on the album art. The first disc loads up on classical music, devoting two minutes each to Mozart, Verdi and some healthily chunky Dvořák, then three endurance-test tracks to Wagner. Disc 2 has these reformed Swiss death metallers finding nearly as much fanfare in their own material, managing some oddly pastoral folk beauty, and switching off between funeral and beer-drinking melodies. Kinkiest arrangement, appropriately: "The Rise of Sodom and Gomorrah." — C.E.

Voivod
The Best of Voivod
Montreal's Voivod brought forth a violent, complex sound with roots closer to King Crimson, Alice Cooper and Pink Floyd than to any of their thrash contemporaries (note this album's legendary cover of "Astronomy Domine"). Somewhere between thrash violence and the twisting textures of psychedelia, Piggy's guitar grinds with absurd intricacy. Away's frantic percussion and Blacky's roaring, low-end ferocity generate time signatures that shift like the paranoid strategies of guerrilla warfare. Snake's vocals echo with harrowing speculations, investigating the chaotic divisions between technology and humanity with cyberpunk cynicism. — M.K.

Senior Year, 1958: Class Clown

2011-05-04T17:23:20Z

Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell smoke in the auditorium. You know the culprit: Put a tack on teacher's chair, tied a knot in Susie's hair. Always writing on the wall, always goofing in the halls, always throwing spitballs. Walks into the classroom cool and slow, calls the English teacher Daddy-O. And being such a funny fellow (destined to be inducted into the Animal House upon soon entering college no doubt), we can assume that our jokemeister loved plenty of funny songs, right? (National Lampoon High School Yearbook parody writeup on Herbert Leonard "Wing-Ding" Weisenheimer: "knows the real lyrics to 'Louie Louie'.")

Well, in-depth research has indicated that 1958 was probably the funniest year for funny songs ever; even if The Coasters wouldn't hit with "Charlie Brown" until a year later, "Yakety Yak" was still pretty much a laugh riot. As were plenty of other vocal-group R&B smashes and — even more so — teen exploitation beep-beep-short-short-splish-splash novelty numbers that weren't even real rock 'n' roll at all. David Seville's "Witch Doctor" was the No. 1 song in the country for three weeks in the spring; Sheb Wooley's "The Purple People Eater" was No. 1 for six weeks in the summer. "Yakey Yak," The Silhouettes' "Get a Job," The Everly Brothers' "Bird Dog" (first line: "Johnny is a joker, he's a bird, a very funny joker"), and The Champs' "Tequila" — class-clown favorites all — topped the pop chart during '58 as well. The Big Bopper did a song with both the Witch Doctor and Purple People Eater in it, and rockabilly juvenile delinquents were still raving; Eddie Cochran wanted a job almost as much as the Silhouettes did.

Anyway, these trends and more — including a couple numbers that'd probably be deemed politically incorrect today, so be forewarned — are reflected in the playlist here. If our class clown was truly familiar with Louis Prima, I guess he must've had hilarious parents as well.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Senior Year, 1958: Class Clown

Cheat Sheet: Industrial Metal

2011-04-27T15:00:05Z

Heavy metal was always about technology (as in Iggy and the Stooges: "watch out honey 'cause I'm using technology"). The genre largely emerged out of factory towns like Birmingham, England, and Detroit, Mich., at the turn of the '70s, and its distortion and feedback were obviously dependent on electrical energy and mechanical appendages. Guitars, amps, pedals, fuzzboxes, Mellotrons: an electric funeral pyre, as Black Sabbath put it.

So when industrial noisemakers, disco producers, and hip-hop DJs put synthesizers and beatboxes to abrasive percussive use in the late '70s and early '80s, it's no shock that certain wonky metal gear geeks were taking notes. The first major industrial metal mergers actually came, oddly enough, from a side of the fence then deemed "post punk" — I'm mainly talking Killing Joke here. But before long, K.J.'s hefty, clangorous, doomsday trance-dance inspired any number of rebellious upstarts in Chicago (Ministry, etc.) and Germany (KMFDM, etc.) and the U.K. (Godflesh, etc.) to put dub in their din and vice versa. Before long, Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie were taking the shtick multiplatinum, begetting copycat scrungers in small prairie towns who hit the thrift stores for sequencers and samplers of their own. Somewhere in there, digital hardcore and crabcore happened. This rundown of 20 landmark albums charts industrial metal's history: the good, bad and proudly ugly.

]]> Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Industrial Metal Cheat Sheet

Attack Attack!
Attack Attack
Relying less on the Auto-Tune gimmickry of its infamous Katy Perry cover, "I Kissed a Girl," the crabcore unit from Westerville, Ohio, melds metalcore, emo, piano dinks, club synths, industrial throb, chanted hardcore backup choruses, contemporary R&B and hip-hop, for better or for worse, on its second release. There's probably even some old-timey ukulele music in there somewhere. Regardless of the hatred the band seems to elicit, "Smokahontas" and "Renob, Nevada" are fun, fun, fun. — Mike McGuirk

Chemlab
Burn Out at the Hydrogen Bar
Chemlab's 1993 Metal Blade debut is a sonically savage and lyrically explicit venture into sexual license, drug abuse and violence — not the sort of subject matter to have sent them splashing in the mainstream. For the adventurous, Chemlab's recordings offer a cataclysmic din of howling vocals, industrial demolition and tyrannical dance beats. — Chad Driscoll

Fear Factory
Demanufacture
This Southern California group explored, over a trio of excellent albums, just about everything, including thrash, death metal, industrial metal and groove metal; they also looked toward the rise of nu metal. A track such as "Self Bias Resistor" sounds — especially during its more baroque moments — as if it influenced an entire generation of metal dudes, including the heavies Korn and Limp Bizkit. That said, Demanufacture is far heavier than much of the offspring it helped spawn. — Justin Farrar

Godflesh
Godflesh
After playing guitar briefly in Napalm Death, then drumming and singing for Brit brutalizers Head of David, the visionary Justin Broadrick joined forces with bassist G.C. Green and formed Godflesh. They commenced twisting metal's contours, removing any backward-looking obsessions with fantasy and the occult and propelling the genre into a dystopian futurism. This 1988 debut plods along through guitar sludge and tormented wails in a low gear of gnashing beats, demonstrating that synths can be applied for purposes other than corralling disco-goers. — C.D.

Helmet
Meantime
No matter how many nu metal morons rip it off, this album's innovative zest never diminishes. When released in 1992, its unremitting succession of proggy grooves and start/stop dynamics sounded unlike anything else in modern rock. That's because Helmet were the first high-profile group to filter all the scuzzy noise-rock released on the Tough & Go and Amphetamine Reptile labels through the hardcore metal crossover then dominating New York. On top, guitarist Page Hamilton threw in arty chops he'd learned while hanging around the Knitting Factory's avant scene. — J.F.

The Hunger
Cinematic Superthug
Though certainly not above plodding in a ponderously egotistical manner, this briefly big-league trio of Texans (two brothers and a buddy, signed to Universal during the ill-advised mid-'90s quasi-alternative gold rush) was also capable of bursting to life with the occasional rhinoceros stomp, hitching post-Nirvana tuneage to progressions swiped from "I Wanna Be Your Dog" ("Phoenix") and "Immigrant Song" ("Sunk So Low"), then letting it all go Eurodigital. — Chuck Eddy

Killing Joke
Killing Joke
An intense blast of European punk anger, New Wave synths and cold metal guitar riffs put Killing Joke on the map and helped pave the way for industrial metal — and alt rock in general — over the next quarter-century. Forget that everyone from NIN to Nirvana to (gulp) rapcore owes this LP a debt: just bask in apocalyptic music that has gone beyond standing the test of time. This still defines the times. — Nick Dedina

KMFDM
Naive
Creating an unyielding audio assault, Kein Mehrheit Fur Die Mitleid (No Pity for the Majority) took dance track tactics to extremes, employing a crushing synthesis of hip-hop beats and industrial percussion as a concrete foundation for sinister instrumentation. Guitar riffs as dark and violent as Slayer's are strung tightly from oppressive washes of heavy synths. Also separating KMFDM from most other industrial dance is their radical political content, terrorizing vocal distortion, and spoken-word sample arrangements. — M. Kate

Marilyn Manson
Anti-Christ Superstar
Marilyn Manson's second album refines his frightening vision, with the help of his then-mentor/producer Trent Reznor and Skinny Puppy's Dave Ogilvie at the helm. This twisted, roiling offering is a haunted house of disembodied voices, alarming autobiography and punishing guitar honks, but it is essential listening not only because it marks Manson's baptism as the next regent prince of darkness, but also because this wry, caustic concept album hammers the final nail in the coffin of grunge, replacing almost a decade of solemnity in rock with humor, irony and skewed wit. — Jaan Uhelszki

Mindless Self Indulgence
If
Mindless Self Indulgence up the stakes of ultra-hip N.Y.C. punk-dance electro mischief on their fourth full-length release. Seemingly intent on making fun of everyone, possibly especially their fans, Jimmy Urine; Steve, Righ?; Kitty; and LynZ desecrate the graves of '80s New Wave and industrial hip-hop through 15 bumping blasts of cool-kid post-punk and club grooves. They may be snarky, but M.S.I. put songs together with an intelligence that belies their style-over-substance vibe. While "Never Wanted to Dance" is the single, "Lights Out" is the one you'll be playing over and over. — M.M.

Ministry
The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste
Got a lot of pent-up energy, rage or angst, and nowhere to release it? Ministry will take it, thank you very much. Songs like "Thieves" and "Burning Inside" put you in the center of a mosh pit full of flailing combat boots and flying fists. John Lydon lends his deranged wail to "Cannibal Song." Borders on psychopathic. — Mia Quagliarello

Nine Inch Nails
Pretty Hate Machine
Drawing from the metallic menace of bands like Skinny Puppy and Ministry, as well as the post-punk paranoia of Joy Division, Trent Reznor created a well-oiled machine run on keyboards, drum machines, guitars and samples that, somewhat ironically, released a beast of raw emotion. The only things to remind us a human is behind this madness are those feverish howls and those lyrics of existential dread, all fed straight from the self-loathing depths of Reznor's boiling psyche. — Stephanie Benson

Pitchshifter
WWW.pitchshifter.com
Pitchshifter, along with Godflesh, The Young Gods and a few others, were among the first wave of acts to tweak the metal structure with heavy doses of industrial technology. Hitting velocities only thrash acts had been able to attain, they soldered together dense frays of programmed beats, distorted vocals and guitar chunks. — C.D.

Prong
Cleansing
Prong must be recognized as the progenitors of a martial style of metal denuded of anything bluesy, grooving or fluid. Emerging from New York's thrash scene in 1987, they quickly learned to tighten the screws on their sound, using drum machines and sampling. By the time Cleansing was released in 1994, the band was giving free reign to industrial beats. Their rigid, succinct guitars are struck rather than strummed, and imperial marching beats sound (and often are) programmed rather than played. Their final albums beg remixing for futuristic combat video games. — C.D.

Rammstein
Rosenrot
It sure is a good thing that Rammstein put "Te Quiero Puta" (translation: "I Want You Whore") near the end of the LP, because with the mariachi horns and sultry singing of Texas' Sharleen Spiteri, it would throw fans for a loop if the song introduced the album. The rest of the disc isn't as much of a departure for these Teutons — German lyrics, industrial beats and huge guitars abound. — Eric Shea

Stabbing Westward
Darkest Days
Though frequently dismissed (along with Gravity Kills — remember them?) as mere Nine Inch Nails bandwagon-jumpers, this Chicago foursome actually had a knack for crossing high-grade hair-metal (say, Bang Tango) with high-grade techno-pop (say, Depeche Mode) in a way that snuck squeezed-down Zeppelin twists and turns between the decadent whisper parts. Knob-twiddling stretched the roil rhythmically, and neurotically self-analytical catch-phrases emerged as tangible hooks. — C.E.

Static-X
Wisconsin Death Trip
Straight from the factory where they make, um, really heavy metallic things come Static-X, an industrial metal band who wields guitars like lead pipes. Beats punch through songs with the force of a two-ton pile of compressed ore, while vocals are a low growl meant to scare the bejeezus out of parents worldwide. — K. Holloway

Voivod
Phobos
The most dependably experimental metal band of the past quarter-century, these chaos theorists and killing technicians from a Quebec aluminum-factory burg had mastered the art of making their guitars sound like machines years before most industrial metal types attempted the opposite. By the time this 1997 album was released, Men Without Hats safety-dancer Ivan Doroschuk, of all people, was providing computerized tones to coincide with Voivod's always-futuristic cover graphics. — C.E.

White Zombie
La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Volume 1
In the early '90s, when the term "sellout" was lobbed at every indie and punk band making the jump to the majors, White Zombie were never labeled as such when Geffen released this influential album. There was good reason: it made perfect aesthetic sense for Rob Zombie to enter the realm of high-tech studios and big recording budgets. It was there and only there where La Sexorcisto's richly cinematic, sound effects-laden blend of Texan scum, industrial and groove metal could be realized. This is one powerful, and wonderfully twisted, slab of modern rock. — J.F.

Rob Zombie
Hellbilly Deluxe 2
A quarter-century into his career and by now as famous for making movies as noise, Zombie builds another aural haunted house. There's more boogie-fied slide guitar than usual — most notably in the teen-lupine Alice Cooper homage "Werewolf, Baby!" and in the Cramps-remiscent "What?", about cannibal men, jungle girls and wild bikinis. But mostly his fourth solo set is the headbanging industrial-doom stomp you'd expect, coagulated with old horror samples, belfry bells, tribal drum parts, "papa oom mow mows," and a classical fanfare closer that stretches past the nine-minute mark. — C.E.

Senior Year, 1968: Shop-Class Thugs Waiting Behind The School To Beat You Up

2011-04-14T17:00:04Z

Things ain't what they used to be, and this ain't the Summer of Love. By 1968, the drugs were getting uglier, the draft was still in full swing, bikes were getting badder, and music was growing heavier by the minute.

It wasn't quite metal yet, though that was right around the corner just like Altamont, but acid-rock for sure. And the kids most likely to blast such stuff were also the scariest guys in the whole school, the ones who enjoyed senior year so much they were doing it for the third or fourth time; the ones who maybe didn't talk a whole lot but carried a mean ratchet wrench, and knew how to fix coal-black fuel-injected 283-horsepower-engine '57 Chevies or both of your kneecaps with it. Other popular hobbies: Hertz donuts, Indian rope burns, swirlies, pink bellies, purple nurples, atomic wedgies, royal flushes, creating mouths full of bloody Chicklets. All tactics that necessitate a soundtrack that's not full of flowers and bunnies, so here's a playlist of the darkest, heaviest, most threatening grease-monkey music 1968 had to offer — proto-metal, post-garage, frat rock, biker boogie, loud psych, even a Spaghetti western film theme and two country hits about going to prison. Which maybe your bullying master of industrial and automotive arts will soon, if you're lucky. And if Vietnam or the Hell's Angels don't get to him first.

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Senior Year, 1968: Shop-Class Thugs Waiting Behind the School to Beat You Up

Metal Roundup

2011-04-05T17:24:08Z

Whether the genre is still evolving in any significant way remains to be seen — and may not be clear until we can look back with decades of hindsight, truth be told — but 2011 is certainly already shaping up as a productive year for heavy metal. Below, with three months down, behold a lucky 13 of the year’s more visible releases so far, ranging from hardcore crossovers to hair-metal holdovers to Satanic ambiance to Gothic atmosphere to numerous dark and diverse shades of heaviness and metallurgy in between.

Between the Buried and Me
Best Of
This North Carolina metalcore unit has been active since 2000. At the release of this collection, the band has six studio albums under its belt. The 15 songs on Best Of make the case that Between the Buried and Me are like the Mars Volta of metalcore. From opener "Mordecai," off 2003's The Silent Circus, to the stylistic curveball of acoustic love song "Shevanel Take 2," the band proves itself true experimentalists, with a proclivity for prog rock. — Mike McGuirk

]]> Burzum
Fallen
From the (hopefully) reformed murderer and church-burner Varg Vikernes, here's another queasy slab of one-jerk-band elevator metal. After a brief, gurgling winter-forest intro, six subsequent extended tracks key around simple mulched-and-ringing guitar figures, submerged but repeated ad nauseam amid exasperated Norwegian whispering and retching. In 10-minute "Budstikken," an almost lovely pagan chant section gives way to rock riffs. Then the set closes with an apparent drum circle, coming off what sounds like Indonesian mallet instruments recorded four islands away. — Chuck Eddy

Buzzoven
Revelation: Sick Again
That these North Carolina sludgers sound "sick again" is no real revelation — they always sound sick! Their first album in a hound's age packs eight slogs into less than half an hour, every one of them taking off from Southern-accented spoken samples swiped from bad B movies or elsewhere: porn, horror, drug exploitation, cops pulling dudes over, a creep in a shack out back who kills his Bible-thumping Mom. From there, Buzzoven let their downtuned, deathly slow, cookies-tossing bog-metal ooze out. And from arty ("Break Me Off") to catchy ("Junkie"), you can actually tell a few songs apart. — C.E.

Cavalera Conspiracy
Blunt Force Trauma
Blunt Force Trauma is aptly titled. On Cavalera Conspiracy's overdue sophomore effort, released three years after their debut album, the group is all about brutal thrash fortified with death metal's manic precision and violently screaming hot licks. The record's second track, "Torture," is indicative of Cavalera Conspiracy's overall aesthetic; with Max Cavalera chanting "torture, motherf*ckin' torture" over and over, the band makes like a pack of hellhounds dashing across a corpse-strewn wasteland ravenous for fresh meat. Hardcore Sepultura fans will certainly be pleased with what they hear. — Justin Farrar

Children of Bodom
Relentless, Reckless Forever
This seventh full-length from the Finnish melodic death metallers is a good example of why Children of Bodom perennially enjoy a spot near the top of the metal heap. High-flying guitars and serial-killer-at-the-carnival synths lay a foundation for vocals that, despite the sandpaper screechiness, somehow invite the listener to sing along (or screech like their soul is on fire, as the case may be). Nonbelievers are directed straight to "Ugly," but longtime fans (and there are a lot) will want to just start at the beginning. — M.M.

Crowbar
Sever the Wicked Hand
The ninth album by these Louisiana metal musclemen only sludges some of the time. They actually speed up a lot — "The Cemetery Angels" opens at almost slam-dance pace, and Kirk Windstein's surprisingly comprehensible battle-march bellow betrays plenty of James Hetfield thrash. In "Cleanse Me, Heal Me," he pleads to a higher power to help him through sickness. "A Farewell to Misery" is Renaissance faire gloom with medieval high-mass chanting. But it's still the downtuned Sabbath riffs — most dolorous in the almost Swans-like "Liquid Sky and Cold Black Earth" — that really catch a groove. — Chuck Eddy

Darkest Hour
The Human Romance
On this D.C. quintet's seventh album in 11 years, the biggest surprise might be how commercial some of the music sounds: it borders on radio-ready screamo in songs like "Love as a Weapon" and "Beyond the Life You Know," with straight-ahead rock drumming in "Severed into Separates," and fairly tuneful axe solos everywhere. "Man & Swine" starts as a tantrum, but eventually turns to semiclassical thrash motifs, ritual chants and martial beats. Add gloomy short and long instrumental bookends "Terra Nocturnus" and "Terra Solaris," and this isn't exactly your typical deathcore cage match. — C.E.

DevilDriver
Beast
Barking and barfing into the moshpit, Dez Fafara deals threatening second-person accusations all through DevilDriver's fifth album: "You burned the bridge!", "You play the victim!", "You make me sick!", "I put the blame on you!" Tracks tend to open with seconds of melodrama; then, between intermittent breakdowns, rhythms are feigned mainly by regurgitating one ugly note over and over. "Dead to Rights" and "Crowns of Creation" sound relatively experimental — the former has some sort of horn-like counterpoint. But the standout is 16 Horsepower cover "Black Soul Choir": an Irish jig in slam-metal disguise. — C.E.

Mastodon
Live at the Aragon
Onstage in Chicago in late 2009, these prog-metal pachyderms start out cranking their then-current Crack the Skye — easily their most algebraically intricate album — from beginning to end. That record's precision plod comes off a bit muddled live. But by its 15-minute-plus climax "The Last Baron," they've found their footing on the time-signature tightrope, and they're making room for exploratory solos. When they delve into more compact and fast-chugging material from their three earlier albums, they really pick up steam; when they finally close, it's with an off-kilter Melvins cover. — C.E.

Rwake
Hell Is a Door to the Sun
Originally released on a tiny label in 2002 and containing only one track under six minutes, this Little Rock, Ark., swamp-sludge outfit's dense-grinding second album already showed them hollering out of some cave way out in metal's acid-noise-drone left field. Several songs hinge on demonic spoken incantations or sampled film dialogue; 10-minute closer "The River/Traskwood" opens with what sounds like a radio preacher cataloguing societal ills and ends with an interband argument. But the pinnacle is psychedelic death-rocker "The Stoner Tree" — partly about how, even in hell, one can still get high. — C.E.

Stryper
The Covering
On their all-covers set, Christ's hair-bangers fare best when sticking to sleek, speedy standards from Sweet, Scorpions, UFO and Deep Purple. Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" — an odd choice, given its polytheistic lyrics — gets an almost lo-fi treatment; KISS' four-square yeller "Shout It Out Loud" stomps harder than melodrama from Ozzy and Iron Maiden. Picking Black Sabbath's "Heaven and Hell" may suggest a sense of irony, and the mess Stryper make of Van Halen's "On Fire" is sort of fun. At the end, they add one original, called simply "God." — Chuck Eddy

Whitesnake
Forevermore
David Coverdale's late-'80s MTV mainstays put out only one studio album in the '90s and one more in the '00s. But on their first of the '10s, they're still goin' down the only road they've ever known: a couple rhythmically inclined sub-Zeppelin swingers ("Tell Me How," "Whipping Boy Blues"); a couple heavified speed-charges ("Dogs in the Street," "My Evil Ways"); a couple soul-baring strummers ready to follow Bon Jovi to Nashville ("One of These Days," "Fare Thee Well"); a closing seven-minute mountainside epic ("Forevermore"). Not to mention, naturally, plenty of bloozy and ballady plodding. — C.E.

Within Temptation
The Unforgiving
Conceived as the soundtrack to a graphic novel and inspired by the rock, goth and techno-pop tunes they grew up on, this female-fronted Dutch pomp-metal quintet's sixth album doesn't land very far from the sort of flashdance-rock that octave-climbing divas Pat Benatar and Laura Branigan made in the '80s. Combine that bombast with string and piano orchestrations, intermittent heavy chugging, a bit of Spanish guitar, occasional witchy whispering about "the bowels of hell" and a dancey number called "Sinead" that may or may not be about O'Connor, and here you are. — C.E.

Artificial Graffiti: The Most Famous Led Zeppelin Ripoffs Ever

2011-03-29T17:04:02Z

Led Zeppelin were four singular, superhuman musicians with such an iconic, gigantic sound that any rock band ripping it off is basically setting itself up for failure. Or rather, iconic, gigantic sounds, I should say — as Robert Plant put it when I interviewed him for Creem magazine way back in the late '80s, "some of it was dance music, some of it was music for folk clubs, some of it was music to play in hippie bookshops." Not to mention Celtic-via-Appalachian-via-Mississippi blues, earth-shattering metal, heavy swinging funk, even a pinch or two of rockabilly and reggae and Ritchie Valens, sometimes all at the same time, and rarely within the capabilities of mere mortals. Another thing Plant did a lot of in that interview was make fun of David Coverdale. And yet Coverdale's band Whitesnake — and Kingdom Come, The Cult, Soundgarden, Jane's Addiction, Billy Squier, Heart, U2 and several decades' worth of other bands you may never have heard of — went ahead and tried to Zep things up regardless. Some of them pulled it off better than others.

]]> Artificial Graffiti: The Most Famous Led Zeppelin Ripoffs Ever.

Source Material: Queensryche, Operation: Mindcrime

2011-03-16T17:49:33Z

Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime occupies a singular niche in the history of heavy metal. In 1988 — at the outset of that strange little window between the MTV reigns of hair metal and grunge — a band who on its previous album had totally looked like new-romantic fops decides to trade in the cross-dressing for deep thinking. So they make a complicated, convoluted concept album about, well, all sorts of important stuff, but the sinister side effects of changing technology (almost a decade before OK Computer by their fellow Pink Floyd fans Radiohead) certainly figures in big-time. As, apparently, do conspiracies of the wealthy, brain control, prostitutes disguised as nuns, and revolutionaries setting fire to the White House.

]]>
Metal critics immediately fell for the album. In 1989, Kerrang named it metal's 34th best ever. And though with 1990's Empire, Queensyrche would wind up with an actual Top 10 album, Mindcrime remained their masterwork whose legacy refuses to die — eventually inspiring, in 2006, both an expanded deluxe box set version and a sequel called Operation: Mindcrime II, co-starring Ronnie James Dio. There's long been mind-boggling talk of film and Broadway adaptations, as well. So it's only appropriate to explore what previous music might have inspired Queensyrche's minds in the first place. Below, a few educated guesses.

Fates Warning
Awaken the Guardian
In the late '80s, there weren't a whole lot of metal groups that didn't qualify as either glam poodles or thrash demons. But this Connecticut band were sort of the northeastern doppelgängers to northwesterners Queensryche, in that they fit somewhere between those two metal poles, with long lovely tresses and '70s-throwback prog proclivities. Fates Warning's press bio at the time talked about "traveling new hemispheres," but the way they accomplished it was, paradoxically, through the mega-futuristic realm of ancient mythology and classical orchestrations. Their third album, 1986's Awaken the Guardian, theoretically revolved around the concept of "fear," and you could tell because there was a big cozy — oops, I mean scary — cave on the cover that looked like a gigantic and slimy blue bullfrog thing. Nonetheless, at suitable moments, their swiped Sabbath riffs and post-Geddy Lee aria/aviary singsongs and huge cracking drum sounds could be lethal indeed.

Iron Maiden
The Number of the Beast
Famous for having the ugliest and most redundant album covers in human history, Iron Maiden almost single-handedly changed (some crazy folks even say invented) heavy metal at the dawn of the '80s, largely by removing all the boogie from it. Well OK, Judas Priest helped. And both of those goose-stepping platoons have been credited with grandfathering the slick guitar tonnage that Queensryche guitarists Chris DeGarmo and Michael Wilton brandish in the decadently hush-rapped "Spreading the Disease," over-the-top-tempoed "The Needle Lies," and sundry other Mindcrime jackbootings. On top of that, Geoff Tate's overblown thespian declamation style clearly owes more than a little to Bruce Dickinson, who made his shrieking Maiden debut on The Number of the Beast, their mathematically inclined third studio album from 1982 — which, like Mindcrime, features a song with the number "22" in the title!

Megadeth
So Far, So Good … So What?
While Queensryche might not have been unwashed speed-metal upstarts themselves, they must nonetheless have been aware of the genre-altering explosion kabooming all around them. Metallica, after all, had already had a Top 30 album in 1986, hard to miss even if it wasn't picking up radio airplay. And while Metallica may have seemed a bit extreme, Geoff Tate's Seattlites taking notes from a more compromised thrash crew like Megadeth probably makes more sense — especially given Metallica castoff Dave Mustaine's own love of conspiracy theories and protest songs about war and whatnot. So Far, So Good…So What? includes a cover of The Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K.," in which Mustaine got some lyrics wrong; a year later, Queensryche did a song called "Anarchy—X." Coincidence? Who knows?

Pink Floyd
The Wall
When it comes to endless ominous art-rock operas where anybody who tells you they can figure out the plot simply by listening to the thing is a great big liar, Pink Floyd totally originated the form. Unless The Who did, that is, but Pink Floyd are the ones whom Queensryche were clearly enamored of. When Operation: Mindcrime came out, one of the band's guitarists called it an "audio move," and when it comes to audiophilia — you know, like little fishies swimming through your brain when you wear headphones — nobody beat Roger Waters and the Floydoids. The Wall, of course, is both a famous chart-topping-for-15-weeks 1980 double album and a soon-cinematized allegory about World War II casualties, bullying schoolteachers, fascist architecture and muscle relaxants. In fact, "Comfortably Numb" seems to have especially affected Queensryche, who did their own song about syringe injections with "The Needle Lies," then borrowed the Floyd classic's melody outright in their smash 1990 ballad, "Silent Lucidity."

Styx
Kilroy Was Here
The always-amusing phenomenon of farm-fed mid-American boys trying to be all noble and fancy and British by making unwieldy concept albums about corrupt politicians and moral majorities trying to illegalize rock music reached an apogee of sorts in this graffito-inspired 1983 LP. It was sort of the end of the line as far as Styx's career as rock stars was concerned, but it immortalized the salutation "Domo arigato Mr. Roboto" for all eternity nonetheless. And given subtle echoes of Kilroy Was Here throughout Operation: Mindcrime, there's little doubt that Queensryche were listening. Of course, it probably would've been even cooler if they'd listened more to Styx's hugely Uriah Heep-schooled early hard-prog albums on the Midwestern indie label Wooden Nickel (especially Styx II, from 1983). But jeez, you can't have everything.

U2
The Joshua Tree
Hey, how'd this get here??? Did Bono get disoriented on one of his diplomatic tours of foreign lands and step into the wrong Source Material by mistake?? Nope! Listen to Geoff Tate's high-register crooning in Operation: Mindcrime's "Breaking the Silence," and perhaps the somewhat Edgily ringing guitars in "Waiting for 22," and then tell me Queensryche were not U2 fans. You can't, can you? But I mean, think about it: if you were a rock band who wanted to be taken seriously for dealing with highly relevant current events in 1988, why wouldn't you study at the feet of the most serious band on earth? (Not counting Midnight Oil, I mean, but I wouldn't be shocked if Queensryche kinda dug them, too.) Press photos at the time even depicted Queensyrche standing outside pondering life, like U2 on The Joshua Tree's cover. So now you know.

Senior Year, 1980: Cafeteria Nerd Table

2011-03-08T18:55:05Z

It would take record companies a few more years to take the phenomenon into account in their marketing endeavors, but one neat thing about New Wave at the dawn of the '80s was that if you didn't consider yourself one of the popular kids in your class — and were too much a square peg to identify with your older brother's hard rock and disco — it suddenly felt like there was music for you out there.

Before Devo/Talking Heads/Elvis Costello/Joe Jackson/Lene Lovich/The B-52's/The Buggles (or even Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen), there weren't exactly a whole lot of rock stars who looked like they could've been on the debate team. So if your idea of a good time was, say, betting on which washing machine would finish first at the local laundromat, you now had your own musical niche — one that would (down the line) just maybe make you cooler than the jocks and burnouts after all. Meanwhile, perhaps you and your nerdy friends were discovering The Rocky Horror Picture Show (technically a few years old, but it sure didn't seem like it), or finding out about Weird Al on Dr. Demento's radio show, or starting to wear skinny ties. (How about a pair of pink sidewinders, and a bright orange pair of pants?) A year later, MTV went on the air, and video would start killing radio stars for real. But in 1980, the secret was still yours.

]]> here takes into account oldsters like Billy Joel and Linda Ronstadt already jumping on the New Wave bandwagon, quasi-hipsters like The Boomtown Rats and The Police singing about the travails of actual schoolgirls, and a couple of hit songs (by Rupert Holmes and Sugarhill Gang, say) that just seemed fun to make fun of at the time. Below, though, the true greatest hits of geekdom. Someday you'll invent the Internet, and all the dumb kids will be jealous.

Click here to listen to the playlist: Senior Year, 1980: Cafeteria Nerd Table.

Senior Year, 1974: Smokin' in the Boys' Room

2011-03-01T18:08:27Z

If you want to get more specific, the boys' room we're talking about here probably would have been somewhere in the upper Midwest, out in the suburbs. And the boys smoking in the stalls at the moment (after "checkin' out the halls, makin' sure the coast is clear," as Brownsville Station put it) would've been the kind who regularly watched Don Kirshner's Rock Concert and Midnight Special (which had both started airing in 1973), and read Creem magazine.

And come to think of it, it could just as well be a girls' room — people were known to smoke in those too, y'know. Or a designated smoking area (are those even allowed anymore?), outside near the industrial arts end of the school. So we're probably talking burnouts, sure, but the truth is, the jocks and geeks and cheerleaders might've listened to much of the same music — and smoked much of the same vegetation, for that matter. Hey, it was the '70s, dude! So the teenage laments in question are hard rock, mostly: sometimes leaning toward prog and glam, but mostly stuff that's got boogie to it. Don't get caught!

Click here to listen to the entire playlist: Senior Year, 1974: Smokin' in the Boys' Room