Mucho splendido?
#090. Eluveitie – Spirit (2006) [spotify]
Eluveitie - Spirit
So, what do you get if you take poundingly heavy metal, add penny whistles and hurdy-gurdys, and sing over it in an extinct language? Eluveitie, that’s what! Yes, it’s more folk metal – this time hailing from Switzerland (the German-speaking bit, I think) and singing/screaming largely in Gaulish. Bloody excellent fun, this is.
TOP TRACK: #3 “Your Gaulish War”.
#089. Chris Cornell – Carry On (2007) [spotify]
Chris Cornell - Carry On
He has one of the best voices in rock today, as mentioned previously, and does a pretty fine job when not backed up by Audioslave or Soundgarden. This album came to my attention initially because of the utterly superb Bond-theme “You Know My Name”, and it’s very good indeed. He can totally do it live too, as discovered at Hard Rock Calling one summer in Hyde Park.
TOP TRACK: #8 “Billie Jean”. I know it’s a cover, but it’s brilliantly done. You’ve never heard Billie Jean like this, trust me.
#088. Lynch Mob – Smoke and Mirrors (2009)
Lynch Mob - Smoke and Mirrors
As previously mentioned, 2008 saw new albums from some of the biggest (and oldest) dinosaurs of rock – Whitesnake (Good To Be Bad), Mötley Crüe (Saints of Los Angeles), Extreme (Saudades de Rock), AC/DC (Black Ice), Metallica (Death Magnetic), The Quireboys (Homewreckers & Heartbreakers), Guns N’ Roses (Chinese Democracy for fuck’s sake!) – but the trend continued in 2009 with new material from Alice in Chains (Blue Gives Way to Black), Megadeth (Endgame), Danger Danger (Revolve), Winger (Karma), and lookee lookee here, it’s Lynch Mob, with Smoke and Mirrors. Here old leathery Lynch is reunited with the original singer from Wicked Sensation, Oni Logan, and in fact the first track “21st Century Man” sounds like a reprise of that storming title track from back in 1990. This is a cracking rock album, and it’s awesome to hear that they’re still doing it like this, and doing it this well. Rock on.
TOP TRACK: #4 “My Kind of Healer”.
#087. Logan Wilson – Geography (2006)
Logan Wilson - Geography
Full disclosure: Logan is a friend of mine, and I played in bands with him for large parts of my 20s. He was always the most natural musician of my social circle, his primary instrument at the time being fretless bass, though he was always strumming an acoustic and writing songs since I knew him. Skipping forward from the avant-garde-prog-pop-rock originals bands and pub covers outfits of the mid-90s, we find him taking centre stage with guitar in hand and a superbly soulful voice, carving out a radio-friendly niche in the singer-songwriter mould of today, and putting down some bloody wonderful songs. For my money his best tune ever was “Who Cares?” from his first CD Monsters from the Id, but overall Geography is a more mature record with great production, and I wish him every success with it. Keep it tight, brother.
(Fun fact: when Little Monkeys, the rawk band I was in around 2005, supported L.A. Guns in London, Ian the bassist was out of the country so Logan filled in for him – left of stage here in “TRAGIC WASTER” t-shirt.)
TOP TRACK: #11 “Day Has Become”.
#086. Anthrax – We’ve Come for You All (2003) [spotify]
Anthrax - We've Come for You All
Well, fuck me backwards if it isn’t Anthrax. Back in the heyday of the big 4, I spent all my time listening to Guns N’ Roses and Steve Vai, and had little time for anything even vaguely thrashesque, but it was in fact Anthrax that changed that when they released Sound of White Noise in 1993, their first album with singer John Bush, and the first therefore not to have that 80s squeal-y vocal sound that so typified much of early thrash music. Bush’s more down-and-gutteral vocal style fitted in nicely in landscape that at the time was dominated by the mighty Pantera, with Phil Anselmo’s new-found brutal style and Dimebag’s (RIP) insane riffs setting the bar for heavy metal worldwide. I wasn’t much impressed with the follow-up, Stomp 442, and after that I lost track of Anthrax until recent years when I picked up a copy of We’ve Come For You All, and it blew my head clean off. This is proper punishing stuff like it should be – check out “Nobody Knows Anything”, and fucking testify.
TOP TRACK: #5 “Safe Home”.
#085. John 5 – The Devil Knows My Name (2007)
John 5 - The Devil Knows My Name
What do you get when Marilyn Manson‘s (now Rob Zombie‘s) guitarist takes instrumental metal, industrial music and bluegrass, stuffs them in a blender , and adds one of the world’s worst album covers? Vertigo, that’s what. Pretty mental. What do you get when he does it again, a year later? Songs for Sanity, that’s what. Also pretty mental, but with a less shit cover, better production, and some even harder riffs. What do you get when he does it some more two years after that? The Devil Knows My Name, that’s what. By this time he’s really got his act together – where the first album lacked a bit in terms of hooks and memorable melodies (something pretty important when there are no words to focus on), the second album made up for it, and this third album is better again by another order of magnitude. The good Dr. 5 still injects bluegrass and country into some of the songs, but there’s more focus on good song structure here, and when he wants to get menacing, he really does it with style. The cover doesn’t suck too hard either.
TOP TRACK: #2 “The Werewolf of Westeria”.
#084. Underworld – Oblivion with Bells (2007) [spotify]
Underworld - Oblivion with Bells
Drive boy, dog boy, dirty numb angel boy. Lager, lager, lager, lager, shouting. Tina lives in Berlin, her voice so seldom on my machine.
These phrases and more will have meaning for you only if you are an Underworld fan, and particularly if you’ve seen them live. I saw them live and liked it so much, I went back and saw them again three months later. Cool fact: when you go see Underworld live, you can buy a live CD of the gig you were just at, on your way out. This is mental, and awesome. The ravers from Romford were touring to support this, their latest (5th proper) studio album, and it’s another blinder. I wasn’t that keen on A Hundred Days Off, I felt it was a bit flat when compared to the previous – amazing – Beaucoup Fish, but this is a return to form in my opinion. And in my onion. Especially in my onion.
TOP TRACK: #2 “Beautiful Burnout”.
#083. Queens of the Stone Age – Songs for the Deaf (2002) [spotify]
Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf
Good ole Josh Homme (to rhyme with Mommy, apparently) is proper rock royalty these days, having spearheaded supergroups Eagles of Death Metal and now Them Crooked Vultures, but I reckon he’s still best known as the helmsman for QotSA, and this was their best record by some way. (Rated R is fine and all, but this kicks it’s arse round the car park.) Aside from the ultra-mega-superhit “No One Knows”, standouts are “First It Giveth”, “Go With the Flow”, “Another Love Song” and “Do It Again”. Hell, it’s all good.
TOP TRACK: #2 “No One Knows”, obviously.
#082. Blind Guardian – A Twist in the Myth (2006) [spotify]
Blind Guardian - A Twist in the Myth
Not so much Folk Metal as Fantasy Metal, Blind Guardian hail from Germany and are big on concepts. Musically you could call it power metal, I suppose. It’s not speed and it’s not death – the enormous layered vocal sounds here have much more in common with Queen than Slayer, and the guitar melodies tend towards the epic rather than the shocking. I love this stuff – I’m realising lately that I’m a sucker for a good story. This is really the kind of thing that Iron Maiden were always doing, only a bit heavier and a bit quicker.
This album was also covered back in Rocktober.
TOP TRACK: #6 “Another Stranger Me”.
#081. Mattias “IA” Eklundh – Freak Guitar: The Road Less Traveled (2004)
Mattias "IA" Eklundh - Freak Guitar: The Road Less Traveled
Would you like some harmonics with that? Listening to Mattias Eklundh for the first time was one of those jaw-to-the-floor moments in guitar, where you genuinely go “How is he doing that? How would you even begin to replicate it? Are we sure that’s a normal guitar?” He’s perhaps best known for his band Freak Kitchen, but he has released two bewildering solo albums, of which this is the latter. To give you an idea of the lengths he goes to to achieve some of the weird and wonderful sounds populating these discs, he is one of the world’s leading proponents in vibrator guitar, and he even had a no-string guitar made for him by Caparison. It had a metal contact plate in the middle where the pickups normally go, and he would hang it over his shoulders and play the middle of the guitar with both hands, tabla-styley. This album really does have something for everyone, careering wildly as it does from soulful laid-back acoustic melodies (“Father”, “The Woman in Seat 27A”) to hyper-mental cover tunes (“Smoke on the Water”, “Fletch Theme”) via hard-to-listen-to experimental music (“Difficult Person Music”) and odd sound canvasses (“Toxic Donald”, “Toxic Mickey”) and also some blindingly good conventional instrumental guitar pieces, like the title track and the sublime “Print This”. The inlay booklet is a blast too.
TOP TRACK: #1 “The Road Less Traveled”.