I really should have known...
When you get advice on music from someone called Seedy bOb, you shouldn't expect too much. So for the past couple of days I've ben listening to some dreadful Metal Music. In some cases albums I had owned as a 13/14 year old before a brief dalliance with prog rock was replaced by a kind of joint punk/motown/stax period.
Many of the bands recommended to me are from a later period and were new to me but others were familier, take Uriah Heep....
I find it hard to believe now, but I quite liked this band in 1972. A sort of missing link between the prog rock bands and out and out metal they were total shit. A t the time I liked a few tracks, The Wizard from their Demon's and Wizards album is a sort of poor man's "Stairway to Heaven" but without any real high points, but at the time I loved it.
Lyrical highpoints are few and far between, but the opening stanza of Stealin' from Sweet Freedom is memorable.
"Take me across the water
Cause I need some place to hide
I done the rancher's daughter
And I shur did hurt his pride"
And thats about as good as it gets for the Heep. To be fair, they did have a better than average bass player for a heavy metal band in Gary Thaine but that was more than made up for by the inane guitar solos by Mick Box and the less than inventive keyboards of Ken Hensley.
The only album by Anthrax I could bear to listen to in totallity was a collection of covers. Some of the songs I knew, most I did not. Their version of Cowboy Song, the old Thin Lizzy track was just about passable and they did a decent job on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath but the only track I think I'll actully listen to again was a cover of the Temptations Ball of Confusion. A great song to start with an it survived the fuzz pedal guitar and the rock vocals surprisingly well. As for the bands own material, I just didn't get it, is this a how fast can you play contest? Not for me.
I loved the next album, it made me laugh out loud. Part of a genre I am assured by my nephew is called Pirate Metal. I know nothing about Alestorm, but their album is out and out funny. This cover is from an EP, but Captain Morgan's Revenge has tracks like "Over the Seas", "Death before the Mast" and "Wenches and Mead" and a stonking version of Flower of Scotland. I hope they are not being serious, because this is badddd, but great fun.
I watched the BBC Storytime on Anvil, so had to listen to at least one of their albums. I'm told they were the first band of their type and that Anthrax, Metallica etc copied their style and managed to meet with sucess. I listened to Metal to Metal which is supposed to b their best album. The drums andbass sounded just like all the other bands to me, but the vocals and lyrics sounded cliched to me, a cartoon parody of Heavy Metal - althought how you can be cliche when you 'invent' a genre I'm not sure.. The guitar solos were naff and just sounded bad.
Metallica were next, in the shape of the Black Album. I couldn't say I liked them, but there was a difference between them and the othr bands. There were a couple of songs that sounded like songs and a couple I even quite enjoyed. Enter Sandman was a decent rock track and I realy enjoyed Nothing Else Matters, thats a decent song that is. I was forced to watch part of DVD of the band and found myself impressed by Jason Newstead, the Bassest at the time. I was going to say that much of the bands music washed over me, but rather it hits me in the face like a rather unpleasant wet fish attack. I can a difference in class between this lot and the other bands of their type, but with the exception of one or two songs don't want to spend much time listening to them.
Slayer and Megadeth were next. I tried, honestly I tried to listen to them. But it was more than I could bear to listen to a whole album. Of the two they were both the worst, not for me, not for me. I had to clean my pallet with a quick blast of the first Led Zeppelin album and a Grateful Dead show from 1982. Now i'm ready to grab a box of my old singles and have a quick rummage.