Mordy's Metal Listening Club - New Albums Every Monday

Ha, I was just listening to Operation: Mindcrime a week or two ago. I'm not sure that "Suite Sister Mary" works but otherwise I think it's quite strong if you like that sort of thing (Rush meets Maiden meets Metallica but even more theatrical and bombastic than that sounds?). Tate's vocal gymnastics are pretty dazzling, e.g. on "Revolution Calling" and the title track. "The Needle Lies" sounds weirdly like a prototype for much mainstream emo from the past decade and may be my favourite. In fact, I like it so much that I want to give Fates Warning another shot.

I'm going to check out those other albums.

excited, as usual!

Tempted to see if I still have Operation: Mindcrime in my box of cassettes. It'll be neat to hear it again after all these years. Love the Accept, and the Bathory looks familiar but I can't bring it to mind. Looks like a fun week!

Ugh Queensryche. Despise them, no way will i ever sit through that album again! Yay for Bathory though!

Ha, now we're talking. Outstanding choices, Ioannis. This is my era right here. I don't know where to start.

I'd been into Queensryche since '84, I really dug how daring Rage For Order was, and by 1988 I just knew these guys had a classic album in them. With my tastes in metal getting increasingly proggy I was thrilled to learn they were putting together a rock opera in the vein of The Wall and Quadrophenia, and I was counting the days, that was the most anticipated album of 1988 for me, more than Metallica, Maiden, Megadeth. But I didn't expect Mindcrime to be that good. The songs all stand up on their own as separate pieces, the storyline actually goes somewhere (a rarity for concept albums), and bombastic or not, the lyrics are damn smart. The singles are the best of the band's more accessible fare, the tension and melodrama in "Suite: Sister Mary" is totally over the top, but in the long run the one track that's always stuck with me the most is "The Mission". It's simply gorgeous.

On a side note, the band made the album in Montreal, and the Quebec separatist movement was a big inspiration for the whole "Mindcrime" thing.

!

Are those other two albums similar at all?

Rush meets Maiden meets Metallica

I mean, there's something more overtly pop/glam/synth going on in there too, of course.

spotify links (yay!):

Accept - http://open.spotify.com/album/2twCPCDGJjVD90GWUjA8vN

Bathory - http://open.spotify.com/album/450O7sJi2GTzmLqHS03T88

Queensryche - http://open.spotify.com/album/6030cjvuQJHGvWCR4LD9N4

Sundar - Accept sound kinda like classic AC/DC to me (except more German/metallic than that lame and obvious comparison would imply); riff-rocking sing-along anthems were their thing, and, boy, were they ever great at 'em! Bathory are sorta ground zero for all things BM. the sound is cold, distant, agonized, faintly post-industrial. all that good stuff. and Mordy's otm, re: the vocals.

K - all we are saying is give Geoff a chance! (c'mon, dude, get in the spirit of this thing and try to listen beyond your biases.)

Adrien - completely on the money, re: O: M, concerning the quality of the songs as discrete individual musical pieces--as opposed to mere component parts of a greater whole, a la Tommy and The Wall, say.

And how awesome is Bathory's "Enter the Eternal Fire"? You see a band like Watain go for broke with similar theatrics, but after listening to their new one repeatedly for a review and then digging out Black Mark tonight, there's no comparison.

more catchup--everyone pretty much saying what i was feeling abt gorefest--great drummer and lots of fun riffs. dude's voice on the live tracks was really annoying but on the tracks that sounded like they were the actual album it didn't bother me. unfortunately my mp3s were all out of order in this case. good choice tho!

Great choices. As a big fan of Rush, Voivod, The Wall, Tommy, and SF Sorrow--I've never understood why Operation : Mindcrime love has eluded me. It's time to try again.

Accept - love them, but it's been years since I spun anything off Ball to the Wall except the title track.

Bathroy - this is the most important album in the catalog that I've never spent time with.

Looking forward to a great week! :)

I came to Bathory a bit late, so my personal favorites are the second 3 (Blood Fire Death, Hammerheart and Twilight of the Gods), but even so I can see that arguably Under the Sign of the Black Mark is the first perfection of the style. I always adored Bathory most for the combination of epic bombast and guy-in-a-garage insularity, which in a way for me connected black metal to some other more synth-based non-metal stuff I was into at the time, and thus helped kind of reunify my musical world.

Operation: Mindcrime is a fascinating piece. For me Rage for Order was genre-definitive, and O:M is clearly a refinement of the aesthetic, musically. But the weird semi-inverse-Orwellian concept-album baggage squats on it like a giant aluminum-foil-hat-wearing toad. It doesn't exactly interfere with my appreciation of the music, but it definitely makes me reluctant to push the record on others. (On the other hand, it makes all those Rush albums seem subtle and literary by comparison, so that's a kind of roundabout public service.) Taken song-by-song, though, it remains monumental. If I had time and re-production skills, I'd love to make a de-conceptized version that grinds out all the dialogue and interstitial stuff and makes a ruthless 40-minute song-based album out of this. I suspect that would actually surpass Rage for Order for me.

But oh, man, what a tragedy to watch this band's decline over the years since.

[Accept is up next. I don't think I've ever heard this whole album!]

scorpions alb is from the hard rock/early metal era that i don't really care for, but even ignoring that, there's something pretty tacky about that record.

Well, I can't say the Accept record does a lot for me. I've heard worse AC/DC albums from AC/DC, but I guess I don't really need more of them from anybody.

Dieter Dierks' production on Balls to the Wall is incredible. It's like chrome. Really unique sound.

man, I am so far behind on this thread that it's not even funny. but I'd just like to say that the last few weeks of picks have all been REALLY interesting and I'm looking forward to setting aside a chunk of time for em.

I just end up playing the Bathory instead of the others, even though I've heard it hundreds of times! Spotify has all of the Bathory and its just too tempting to listen to Bathory.

Spent the morning with this weeks picks, and I'm surprised to say I like them all! Well, maybe not really surprised; the only one new to me was this specific Bathory album.

I'll start there - I love, love, love the production. It sounds like they recorded in the same cement box Motley Crue used for their debut, only the microphones were left outside the door. I think a higher fidelity recording would have ruined it; the scuzzy patina keeps the bombast from being ridiculous. I have no interest in a black metal Manowar, though I'm sure it's been done by now. The long sequence from "Woman of Dark Desires" to "13 Candles" is amazing. Really happy to be introduced to this record.

Balls To The Wall is classic for a reason. Great tracks, great production, and the result is probably my favorite early 80s Judas Priest album (I'd have loved to hear Halford and co. tackle "Losers and Winners" and "Turn Me On"). I know the stock comparison is always AC/DC, but - except for Udo's raspy growl occasionally calling to mind Brian Johnson - I think they're past it by this point. Anthemic sing-alongs but not hip-shaking in any way; the rhythm section has zero swing (sadly, AC/DC lost their swing too as the 80s went on, but 83's Flick of the Switch still has some groove). I like Restless and Wild more, but I'm always happy to revisit this record.

The Queensryche record is better than I remembered, but i'd rather hear the two that proceeded it (The Warning and Rage For Order), despite the improvement in songwriting and skills. Like Glenn said, this is just a bit too bloated. Some great stuff ("The Mission" stands out) but a bit of a slog. And Geoff Tate, talented as he is, sounds absurd when he sings the word "fuck." He swears as convincingly as my mom.

Good week - thank Ioannis!

cool.

28/6 jeff
05/7 aldo
12/7 A. Begrand.
19/7 Call All Destroyer
26/7 pfunkboy
02/8 mordy

ahhh...lookin' forward to a pleasantly girly week. ;^)

dammit, how many tech death albums am I going to have to review to get rid of that reputation?

dude I'll take girly power metal over the top three most popular other forms of metal right now - get as girly as you want in my opinion

What are the top 3? Doom, whatever Killswitch Engage is, and uh -- stoner metal?

I would guess Death, Black and Metalcore?

metalcore, black metal, and indie rock

id be very surprised if black metal was outselling death metal in the usa

i wonder who the biggest selling "doom" band in the US is and how much they sell? about 5k max?

Volume 12: Stuff Jeff Likes

Cirith Ungol - King of the Dead
http://www.metal-archives.com/images/1/7/6/6/1766.jpg

Doom(?) metal classic. I'm not sure how to classify this, other than "awesome." Still ahead of its time, 25 years later.

http://open.spotify.com/album/5yFnOSjF9MFMokZwXvwofm

Warlock - Triumph and Agony
http://www.metal-archives.com/images/1/9/4/2/1942.jpg

Female-fronted power metal at it's finest! The pop singer they have fronting Nightwish right now could learn a thing or 666 from Doro Pesch.

http://open.spotify.com/album/1Vdxmu8PwATvePFNVrjPMO

Sigh - Imaginary Sonicscape
http://www.metal-archives.com/images/1/6/0/160.jpg

One of the most dizzyingly experimental metal records of all time, this took everything killer about metal, threw it through the Japan filter, and then got the band dropped from their label. Great driving music!

http://open.spotify.com/album/6vX4o28Pp5IFFjCyvhVqqV

love that sigh album!

I love that Cirith Ungol record! So good. Looking forward to hearing the other two which look promising.

A friend introuced me to that Sigh album, and it blew me away. They haven't topped that one since, in my opinion.

The Warlock album is part incredible ("I Rule the Ruins", the ubiquitous "All We Are"), part head-scratcher ("Metal Tango"). But definitely a solid album overall. Doro still sounds great to this day.

http://theninecircles.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/doro-pesch-warlock.jpg

Still a remarkably attractive woman.

man Jeff I only know 2 out of your 3 but those are quality pics. Cirith Ungol is an all-time favorite, a band from an L.A. era when to not have a sound you could call your own would have meant shame worse than death to any band who really wanted to leave its mark. The riffs, the vibe, the overall atmosphere, and just that mood of going for it right now without much regard for whether people will be able to stomach this completely insane vocal style (which, I gotta admit, I love this band on average for 30 minutes at a sitting and then it's like "ok gotta hear somebody who doesn't sound like he's working off a meth hangover in the vocal booth"). I think I prefer One Foot In Hell for its peaks, but yeah, for a good view into an era on its weirder fringes, hard to beat Cirith Ungol.

Warlock I don't know of but I have lots of time for power metal as I say.

Sigh's Imaginary Sonicscape is the only Sigh album that's ever clicked for me -- I haven't heard it in a long, long time but I remember really enjoying getting lost in it.

in re this:

id be very surprised if black metal was outselling death metal in the usa

I would be extremely surprised if black metal didn't outsell death metal in the us by a factor of like 5:1. the leading US based metal mailorder is...blackmetal.com. look at it this way. a lot of indie people fuck with black metal -- it has a fair amount of reach outside its base. death metal is pretty much for the faithful only; the occasional indie dude (whassup) is into it, but if you go to the death metal show, you're not gonna see a lot of guys who'd be able to pick kevin shields out of a lineup. whereas at the doom metal show, you might well see kevin shields.

I had Greg Lindstrom sign my CD copy of King of the Dead when I saw his band Falcon play a few years back. Usually I don't bother with stuff like that, but I kind of had to.

finally, it took cirith ungol three minutes to drive mrs. aerosmith from the music room for the quieter, non-caterwauling environs of the living room

has mrs smithy ever heard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B_ckUBC95E
(one of my fave songs ever)

"Master of the Pit" is one of the all time classic evil metal anthems.

My current username is a Cirith Ungol lyric, so yeah, I'm into it. Not so much into Sigh; the whole school of "look how much stuff I can do!" in rock and metal generally fills me with disgust and rage (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Pan-thy-monium, etc., etc.). I'll give the Warlock disc a try.

Cirith Ungol were an incredibly ugly sounding band, though, for a group that was actually pretty melodic with their songs. Besides the singer, you had the guitar which literally did sound like a bandsaw, thudding bass, and just brutally sparse production. but that just adds to the charm.

You should try this Sigh record if you haven't heard it. That's the one where they got it together.

man what a classic track "finger of scorn" is

and the awesome excess of Tocatta in Dm...there's so much more to this band. I'm kind of obsessed with their bio, how the drummer was so insulted by being asked to play to a click that he never played drums again...deeply tragic story, I have visions of setting it as a novel or an epic poem

interesting interview with drummer here: http://www.sleazegrinder.com/int_CirithUngol.htm

yeah this is what I'm talking about:

Did everyone continue to play music after the band broke-up?

I sold my drum set the next month, and have never touched a stick since. I told Ron and those at Restless that I would rather never touch another drumstick than be in an industry with such scumbags as them. I have kept my word to this day.

if you find other interviews with him & the band, you find that they went "up" to the style where the first thing you do is record all the drum parts at the tempo they're supposed to be at, using a click track. I can 100% see how a guy who'd been playing live with his band for 10+ years would be like "no, I'm not doing that" - but I think the deal here is he got pressured into doing it, and then the production sucked anyway. a bad experience in the studio can really make you want to quit forever if the thing you end up with is something you'd thought you'd love and instead you hate.

sounds like he's ok tho--just working on his ferrari and stuff.

sure, but I'd rather be struggling & still getting the joy I get from playing than doing ok but feeling permanently estranged from what was once a great passion - I mean one can say "he didn't love it that much if all it took was one shitty studio experience to get him to quit" (bob rusay doesn't play any more, either - hasn't since cc gave him the boot) but it just feels very sad to me, that somebody can actually stop playing altogether because something happens that makes them want to not play.