Who could have possibly imagined, back in the wilderness years from ’94 to even 2003 or so that I could be writing an end-of-year rock review here in 2008 which encompasses storming brand new albums from Extreme, Whitesnake, AC/DC, Metallica, The Quireboys, Mötley Crüe, and even… yes, who would have dared to even dream it, Guns N’ Roses. What is this, 1991 again? Seems so, and I love it.

What follows here, then, is my rundown of all the decent rock and metal albums to have graced my ears and collection from 2008 - that is albums released in 2008, which is why Airbourne’s “Runnin’ Wild”, Crashdiet’s “The Unattractive Revolution” and VR’s “Libertad” don’t make the list, awesome though they are. (There are 17 mini-reviews coming at you, so you may want to fetch a beer or such before you dig in – this is going to be a long post.)

Some might think I’ve been pretty generous with my ratings, but bear in mind all these albums are here because I like them, or else I wouldn’t be reviewing them. I’m not doing this for a job, or being sent things to review, so you’re unlikely to see any 1 or 2 star ratings. All albums are marked out of 5 stars (though I reserve the right to use half stars) and I can tell you that out of them all, there is only one to which I have awarded the full 5. (I guess I’ll save that one for last, actually. If you don’t like suspense you can happily scroll down…)

I shall take the rest in alphabetical order by band/artist, which brings me first of all to…

Black Ice, by AC/DC

Well the old masters are back in the saddle again (which as the Grauniad points out must mean the economy is properly in the shitter), so the question must be what’s new this time?

The answer, as usual, is absolutely nothing. And that is exactly, honestly 100% what it should be. The day AC/DC get big ideas and start trying to do anything new or different is the day the world will truly come unglued and spin off its hinge into a black (ice) hole where we all have to listen to the fucking White Stripes all day long. DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN! Support AC/DC today! Say no to Jack White! Buy Black Ice! Cracking. Rating:****

Black Butterfly, by Buckcherry

Buckcherry are a band who do not fuck about when it comes to rock, and they like to remind you of this with one “shock” song on every album. On the 1999 eponymous debut it was “Lit Up” with its memorable chorus trumpeting “I love the cocaine, I love the cocaine”, but even this paled next to track 4 from the 2001 follow-up “Time Bomb”, the irrepressible “Porno Star”. Following their 5-year absence the band came back with “15″ in 2006 which sported “Crazy Bitch”, and on this latest disc the track that reminds you you’re not listening to Radio 2 is “Too Drunk…”, the implied full title of which I’m sure you can pencil in yourselves. That’s not to say by any means that Buckcherry rely on shock tactics and nothing else to grab your attention. They’re experienced hard rockers that can hold it with the best of the old breed, and “Black Butterfly” is in my opinion a return to form after the somewhat mediocre “15″. This is good hard party rock and roll as good as it comes, and it’s never off my playlist rotation, although “Child Called It” is a trifle irritating. It’s all good – quality tunes like “Too Drunk”, “Rescue Me” and “Fallout” will keep your foot tapping and your head bobbing through to the end of the album. Rating:****

Indestructible, by Disturbed

I like Disturbed. My favourite album of theirs is “Ten Thousand Fists”, though, and like a particularly rich chocolate cake, it’s easy to have too much Disturbed in quite a short time. Best enjoyed in occasional slices, I’ve found. That said, this is a solid album, though no tracks really leap out and distinguish themselves from the rest of them except perhaps the title track. Good, but not great. Rating:***

Ultra Beatdown, by DragonForce

Ah, DragonForce. I won’t say you either love them or hate them, as there will be many out there who honestly couldn’t care less, but I do think that in order to like them at all you have to 100% buy into their brand of swords-and-heroes mythology meets ultra-fast power metal riffs and ludicrous nintendo-tinged guitar hypersolos or you’re going to despise every second. And with these guys, one second can mean a lot of notes.

When I started listing the albums I was going to touch upon here I was sitting on the tube with them all on shuffle, and I assigned a star rating to each one as I considered the album and my experience with it thus far at that time. The rating I gave this album then was 2.5 stars out of 5, but that was – I must admit – before I had sat down and listened to it as a whole. This I have since done and concluded that, like its predecessor “Inhuman Rampage”, this album works best when devoured in its entirety in one sitting, and its rating is increased accordingly by one whole star. There’s nothing new here, but there’s a whole lot of DragonForce, and that – in my opinion at least – is a good thing. Rating:***1/2

Saudades de Rock, by Extreme

Saudades, you say? Well well. Whatever will they think of next. Saudades. Well I never. That’s good to know. Was wondering when we’d see some Saudades around here. Good-oh.

Wikipedia, that great bastion of all things reliable, informs me that the album title translates roughly (from Portuguese) as “Nostalgic yearning for rock”, which is definitely something I can get behind. But is it any good?

In short, yes. It is. It’s a damn good rock record, is what it is, and should banish any faintly turdy memories of 1995′s frankly poor “Waiting for the Punchline” – an album which left me doing exactly that. Here we are treated to the quartet’s heavily Queen-influenced brand of rock histrionics from the outset – in fact the opening track “Star” sounds like someone took Queen’s “Stone Cold Crazy” plus a handful of other 70s Queen tracks and threw them all in a blender, but somehow manages to come out sounding like an original piece and not simply a homage.

And Nuno’s still the energetic little riffmeister – check out the intros to “King of the Ladies” and “Slide” for incontrovertible proof in the first 15 seconds. Rating:***1/2

Sex Drugs Anarchy, by Gemini Five

Goddamn the Swedes can rock. Saying that, this is a cracking album when it’s on, though probably only a few of the tracks (“I Am Hollow” and the awfully named “Here 2day Gone 2mrw” for starters) are actually going to lodge in your brian once it’s off, so it’s unlikely to make the top 5. That said, it’s good hard rock and roll in the Swedish tradition. The style reminds me quite a lot of Backyard Babies, as it goes, and more recently Crashdiet. Well executed, good fun, but not a particular standout. Rating: ***

Silence Followed by a Deafening Roar, by Paul Gilbert

Let’s shred! Paul’s first instrumental album “Get Out Of My Yard” was eagerly anticipated, yet for me it didn’t really deliver. I didn’t feel that Paul’s innate sense of humour really came through as well as it might (admittedly a tricky thing to do without words) and I just found the tunes themselves to be overly fussy and not particularly memorable.

Well all that is well and truly fixed on this, his second instrumental album, and I feel he really hit a groove while writing for this. Long standing Gilbertians will practically be able to picture the Tall Guy making the guitar face during the crushing riffs of “The Gargoyle” and the eminently groovy “Bultaco Saturno”. The only negative thing I’ll say about it is, well, it’s an instrumental record, and who buys those any more? It is a good’un though. Rating:***.5

Chinese Democracy, by Guns N’ Roses

OK. This is going to be tough. How the hell do you properly write a one or two paragraph review of the most anticipated album in rock history, an album that almost every critic leapt at the chance to denounce or deify the second it came out, the most expensive album ever made, an album that had absolutely zero chance of living up to the ludicrous expectations it had set itself?

You don’t. I agree pretty much 100% with Chuck Klosterman, so if you have 5 minutes more to spare here, take a break from this inflated post of mine and go read his review. (Oh, and if you need any further proof of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, just read some of the comments…)

Back? OK, now you know how I feel about the album. I think it is a fantastic record, certainly not flawless, but then I would expect nothing less from Axl Rose – a fantastic and flawed person. And here we begin to hone in on the problem as I see it – half the shit being talked about this album is by people who are not real rock fans, people who expected “Appetite For Destruction 2″.

Everyone and their dog bought “Appetite”. Those that didn’t buy it when it was new have all bought it over the years as “Sweet Child O’ Mine” got played over and over and over on every radio station in the world, and as rock eventually became unfashionable, and then started to become fashionable again it even became a kitsch album to have in the rack next to Roni Size, the Divine Comedy and Aphex Twin. But these people are the ones who are going to be disappointed by “Chinese Democracy”. This is a true epic rock record, and it needs you to buy into it. It doesn’t just start out rocking, rock for a bit, and then stop (for that see Gemini Five). This album swoops and soars and asks you to come along for a wild journey into new sonic lands, not to just pop down to the rock mall to hang out and chew on some three-chord tricks.

Ask a real rock fan what they think of this album and the very least you should get is a frown while they try to sort out their emotions about it. Ask them again in a couple of months, they may well have figured it out. And if they say “It’s not as good as Appetite For Destruction”, they’re not a real rock fan. The two albums honestly cannot be compared.

I say congratulations to Axl on producing an interesting, involving, emotional vision of an album, and to all the nay-sayers I say try Kings of Leon. They’re probably more up your alley. Rating:****.5

Requiem, by John 5

It’s a hell of a slab of music, this. Though ‘slab’ kind of implies genericism and simplicity, and that’s not what we’re talking about. The good doctor 5′s particular brand of menacing-yet-country flavoured instru-metal is probably an acquired taste if you’re not a musician yourself, and to be honest I’ve only ever really heard other guitarists talk about his music, but this – like his previous 3 outings – is pretty fucking far from being some generic shred’n'sweep album. Think of the musical equivalent of watching a good horror movie. Rating:***.5

Death Magnetic, by Metallica

Third on the “Here Come The Big Guns” sub-list, we have Hetfield & Co.’s latest offering, which leaves me in a bit of a quandry to be honest. A lot of reviews and friends have said “It’s a return to form” and “It reminds me of Ride The Lightning!” and gone on to enthuse about it. But my problem is just that… my favourite Metallica album is the black album. I was never particularly sold on their earlier work. What can I say? I’m more a rocker than a metaller, so I guess it’s to be expected. I will simply say that – as always – this is just my opinion, you are welcome to your own. That said there’s only one tune on here that I skip when it comes on (“Broken Beat & Scarred” – I just find it punishably irritating), and a couple of the others (“All Nightmare Long” and “The Day That Never Comes”) have quickly earned 4* ratings in my iTunes. Solid throughout, but not entirely my cup of Assam. Rating:***

Saints of Los Angeles, by Mötley Crüe

Another undeniable giant, a glam collossus visible in the rock landscape from a thousand miles away, their influence still felt today by myriad “hairspray and lipstick” bands worldwide, you just can’t stop the Crüe, it seems (Nikki Sixx is fucking 50! How the hell did that happen?) This, their 9th studio outing, is the first album of all new material since 2000′s lacklustre “New Tattoo”, and the first album which a) sports the full original line-up, and b) was written for that line-up since 19-fucking-89′s “Dr. Feelgood”.

With this in mind, the first listen through doesn’t totally swing one round by the nuts as you might expect, but by god it’s a grower. I think I was expecting “Dr. Feelgood” to happen again, and for that I was a fool. But this record definitely rocks, and even first time through tunes like “Down At The Whisky” and the title track are obviously the work of a Crüe firing on all four JD-fuelled cylinders once again, partying like it’s 1989. But leave this bugger in your CD changer for a week and I guarantee it’ll become indispensable, as long as you don’t mind the somewhat self-congratulatory feel of some of the lyrics. Rating:****

Homewreckers & Heartbreakers, by The Quireboys

I have a soft spot for the Quireboys (It’s 7 o’clock! Time for a party!) though I wasn’t particularly blown away with 2004′s “Well Oiled”. This though is good enough to hark back to all those Spike impressions in the pub back in the day. Good stuff. Rating:***

Silver Spoons & Broken Bones, by Stone Gods

Cor! What do you get if you take the Darkness, remove Justin (the singer), put the (new) bassist in front of the mic with a guitar on and hire a new bass player? Stone Gods! That’s what! (In the interest of fairness I should probably review the album by Justin’s new band Hot Leg, but I honestly can’t be fucked to listen to it… Oh, I just found out it’s not out yet. Even better.)

And what we’ve got here is not failure to communicate, far from it. What we have here is good honest heavy rock and roll, with far less of the pomposity that made the Darkness so hard to stomach once the initial joke wore off. I had the dumb luck to catch these guys in a support slot recently and they rocked a fat one, as people used to say. You can’t fault good honest rock tunes like “Burn The Witch”, “You Brought A Knife To A Gun Fight” and “Don’t Drink The Water”. This is really great stuff and it’s nice to hear what the band sounds like without the falsetto caterwauling over the top. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Darkness back in 2004 or so, but really. Enough is enough, and Dan Hawkins has lost none of his catchy riffability (plus you have to love an album with a song called “Where-o My Beer-o?” It’s the law.) Stone Gods? Rock on. Rating:****

One of Us, by Underride

I happened upon Underride through sleazeroxx.com‘s news feed, and liked what I heard on their CDBaby page enough to cough up there and then (though I had to buy from iTunes, as Rhapsody still won’t sell MP3s to the UK). Seattle has given the world of music a few notable things, and not all of them grungey. GNR/VR’s Duff McKagan is perhaps the city’s second most famous musical son, the mighty Queensrÿche also hail from Jet City, and it is from the town that famously (almost) killed off the music I love best that Underride come unto us.

This is a corker of an album, I must say. “Candy Girl”, “My Little Hell” and “Upstart Coming Up” will soon be rattling around your brainpan if you see fit to drop the £7.99 in the ITMS, that much I guarantee. Refreshingly energetic. Rating:***.5

First Hit For Free, by Voodoo Six

These guys fucking rock, too. And they’re British! Good to see a few BritBands making the list, I must say. M’colleague Dan tells me that one of the guitarists in Voodoo Six also plays in the country’s top Pantera tribute act, and you don’t get a gig like that unless you can play some. This album is in fact a re-release of their debut which came out in 2006, but this release is 2008 and that means it counts, and it rocks my socks. Gritty but melodic, and somehow noticeably British. Good work fellas! Rating:***.5

Good To Be Bad, by Whitesnake

Did someone say Whitesnake? Cripes. When you look at the history of Whitesnake from a guitarist’s perspective, it reads like a who’s who of hard rock. Micky Moody, Bernie Marsden, John Sykes, Adrian Vandenburg, Steve fucking Vai for Pete’s sake, Vivian Campbell, Warren DeMartini, and more. So who’re the current string-manglers? Oh, no-one special. You know. Just Reb Beach and Doug Aldrich.

And I tell you another thing – this is a brilliant album. I’d say it tops “Slip of the Tongue” in many ways. Coverdale seems to just get better with age (just like cheese, and you know where there’s Whitesnake, there’s cheese!), and the 11 songs on this record are all masterfully constructed globs of molten rock that you just can’t deny. Stupendous! Rating:****

That’s 16 down, 1 to go, so without further ado Clive’s album of the year 2008 is…(drum roll please):

Folklore & Superstition, by Black Stone Cherry

These guys make me sick. Their ages range from 20 to 23, and they have the world of rock and roll at their feet just at the moment. I’d already become a fan of their 2006 eponymous debut album, but when I heard this album it fair knocked me out of my boots. There’s not a bad tune on it, and while they have included a couple of ballads this time round, they’re so well done you just can’t help but raise a zippo, mentally at least. Chris Robertson’s voice is one of the best in rock at the moment, I swear. I saw them live a week or two ago in Brixton and they were just fucking epic.

So awesome is this album that my band – the currently singer-less Panik Attakk – are covering not one but two songs from it, “Blind Man” and “The Ghost of Floyd Collins”. Other standout tracks are “The Bitter End”, “Long Sleeves”, “The Key”, “Devil’s Queen”… dammit, they’re ALL standout tracks. Hey, don’t take my word for it, honestly avail yourself of this album at your earliest opportunity if you have even the slightest interest in rock music. Better yet, this Christmas give the gift that keeps on giving, give the gift that shows you know rock, give the gift that anyone who’s ever listened to a rock album needs whether they know it or not. Give Black Stone Cherry. Rating:*****

So there it is. And since it’s Christmas let’s have a top 5:

1. Folklore & Superstition – Black Stone Cherry
2. Chinese Democracy – Guns N’ Roses
3. Black Butterfly – Buckcherry
4. Black Ice – AC/DC
5. Silver Spoons & Broken Bones – Stone Gods

Oh, and my best non-rock album of the year is Angles by Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip. This is some seriously intelligent hip-hop, yo. I, like many others I would imagine, first became aware of the duo with their internet smash hit “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, but I tell you there are many better songs than that on the album. Check out “Tommy C” and “Letter From God To Man” and tell me that’s not some good shit.

Thanks for reading, take it easy, I’m off for a beer.
–c.

It’s not the one with an id of 500, that went long ago, but lots of posts have been deleted or whatever, so the numbering system is out of whack there, and according to WordPress this one right here what you are currently reading of the nowtime, is #500 Fo Real.

Thrilling, huh?

The archive goes right back to March 2003, and covers posts produced by least three blogging engines. Greymatter and Pivot were useful at times when my hosting situation dictated certain constraints, but now with the emergence and dominance of the mighty mighty WordPress, everything is handled by that. EVERYTHING, mark you.

We’ve covered my solo gigs, the joining of Claytown Troupe (and recent discovery that I’m no longer in the band), and the emergence of Little Monkeys through to their transformation into Crashstars and almost immediate shelving. I’ve changed jobs a couple of times, I’ve dyed my hair, broken a tooth, grown a few beards and taches, moved house, got engaged, been on a few holidays, bought a car, sold it, Flickr’d several thousand photos, posted a buttload of YouTube videos, embraced the LOLCat phenomenon, balanced cans, I’ve told you about my books, my CDs, my movies, my friends, my original music, my cat, my code, my inner self, I’ve bought guitars and sold them, I’ve cast pods, I’ve ranted, I’ve raved, I’ve Opened Letters, I’ve kicked faces, I’ve shuddered, I’ve gone NNNNNG and Errrrr…, I have rocked and I have been rocked, London has burned and the sun has set on Camden.

Thank you all for reading, and coming back for more even when I’m being hateful. I’ve had a personal website full of stuff for over 9 years now, since before the word “web” got glued to the word “log”, since the place was wild and free and not driven by advertising revenue and clickthrough rates.

I’m not going anywhere, so settle in for another 500 posts, why don’t you?

Cheers,
–c.

PLEASE FUCK OFF AND DIE.

Yours sincerely,
–c.

I am a long-time hitherto satisfied user of your DHTML/Ajaxian dynamic homepage product. I enjoy it’s customisability, the ease of adding new feeds, the tabbed navigation and of course the core functionality of pulling all my RSS feeds and services into one place for me to read and manage.

However, two things have come to my attention in the last couple of weeks.

1. There are now a number of other competing services out there, and
2. Yours is starting to FUCKING BREAK.

When I open one of my feed boxes and read all the new stories in there, I would like them to stay marked as read, thanks. Also, please to be remembering when I have closed the feed boxes so that next time I return, they aren’t randomly sprung open again.

If I don’t notice any improvement in the next week or two, you can shove your homepage and I’ll go look at Google’s offering, or perhaps just install PC Safari.

Savvy?
–c.

The English words “ten” and “sin” do not rhyme.

Kthxbai.
–c.

Fuck-knuckle.

–c.