It is possible to look at an album like Innuendo without the context of their singer, Freddie Mercury's illness and approaching death? Not for me. It is just shimmering through every song and note.
Queen's last record published in his lifetime is a foreshadowing, moving, theatric in the best sense, and graceful piece of music. Upbeat at time, almost defiantly so, especially in its faster songs, it however can't hide its sadness: the very human struggle with one's own mortality. Here is a singer who, facing the inevitable, literally sings for his life.
Framed by the majestic album-opener Innuendo and concluding with the emotional tour de force The Show Must Go On, the album is a kaleidoscope of tunes, themes and moods - each single one of them is strong, even captivating. There isn't any filler. From straightforward rockers like Headlong and Ride The Wild Wind, to the playful and carnivalesque I'm Going Slightly Mad, to fragile gems like Don't Try So Hard and Bijou - Queen covers such a wide variety with such masterful musicanship.
Innuendo is really Queen at their peak. And when the last note is ringing out and silence creeps upon you, you might feel a little lump in your throat. What a record!
It's probably fair to say that this album started the 80s. At least when it comes to hard rock/heavy metal. Such energetic songs, the top-of-the-line production and, most critically, Eddie van Halen's groundbreaking guitar.
He is often described as the one who brought tapping to the electric guitar, but while its certainly a spectacular technique, I actually rate his characteristic sound (the so-called "brown tone", the blueprint for the 80s-typical high gain) and his masterful use of the instrument in the context of the songs actually as his bigger achievement.
Like Jimi Hendrix ten years before him, van Halen's playing blends rhythm and melody together so naturally, so skilfully that its just sheer exciting joy to hear these songs. So much talent, yet so much tasteful playing for the songs and not for the sake of virtuosity (well, most of the time).
Ain't Talkin' 'bout Love is a perfect example for that. It kicks off with this brilliant riff (its a bit overused maybe, but that's not the riff's fault!), which still sounds modern despite being recorded 40 years ago. Same applies for the Kinks-cover You Really Got Me, which feels like a natural evolution of the original song. After all, the Kinks where amongst the first who experimented with distorted sounds. Namely on this very song, so there is that.
Eruption, on the other hand, is a different animal altogether. I remember when I listened to it for the first time and it sounded so futuristic. Like the guitar turned into a synthesizer in some parts - brilliant!
Of course its pure technique-wanking, lets be straight about that. A highly skilfully played tapping demo and it can't hide its nature, despite being played with a lot of melody and taste. It therefore sounds a little dated today. Tapping is not as revolutionary anymore and shredding became commonplace really. Or - even worse - something like a sport.
Therefore, Eruption feels to me now like a magician's trick when you find out how he did it: the sense of wonder simply has worn off a bit.
This doesn't stops being Van Halen's first from being a outstanding, game changing record and really fun to listen. The duo Eddie Van Halen (guitar, of course) and David Lee Roth (vocals) works together so congenially and turns the album into a damn good party.
Lyrically the album ticks all the boxes of sleazy cock-rock. But you don't listen to Van Halen because you expect something meaningful or even poetic, so don't expect to get it.
All in all, its a spectacular record. Probably one of the best debut albums of all time. Technically and musically it is still brilliant and quite timeless. The only weak spots are the shallow and sleazy lyrics really, but with that Van Halen are in excellent company.
At the end of the 90s, when my music-horizon expanded into the dark side (because of the cookies), Lacrimosa was one of my favourite "newish" bands I was listening to. I loved their particular blend of slow, doom-influenced gothic metal with complex arrangements and the bits of classical music thrown into here and there.
Sadly, around the year 2000, with their album Elodia, the classical bits took over and pushed the metal aspect into the background. It was for me all just too polished and - tame. So began to lose interest into the band until a couple years ago, when I started to rediscover some of the old stuff, I used to listening to. I guess for some people such rediscoveries can be quite a shock ("I was listening to THAT???"), but for me it was quite a pleasant experience so I began to delve into their more recent material.
Which brings me to their 2012 album Revolution. Its a much rougher record than what they did when I left them, and I am quite happy about this. Sound wise it is closer to albums like Satura and Inferno, but with a level of angst and aggression in its lyrics I did not expect to hear from this band. It is a bitter reckoning with our modern society. A society that is heading to self-destruction by vain ignorance and pure greed.
And it is brilliantly written. Take the song Feuerzug(Part 2), for example: The singer describes a burning train (a Feuerzug) that is jumping out of its tracks. First he appears to be a distant observer. Full of disbelieve about what he is witnessing, until he realizes the train is unstoppable; destroying everything on its path - and is heading towards him and everyone he loves.
Eventually he understands that he himself - and actually every single one of us - is sitting in the train and steers it into its doom.
Today, six years after the album's release, with all the recent political developments, his words ring more true than ever.
Revolution is probably Lacrimosa's bleakest album. It sounds so pressing and dark. Vicious at times. A more than welcome change in direction, if you ask me. It might not debate the nicest things in life and certainly is far away from any dark romantic sentimentalities of their past - but that's exactly what makes it so interesting and compelling.
There are barely more genres a single album is said to have originated than Black Sabbath's debut. I'm not going to list them all, but rock music definitely hasn't been the same since. Other bands might have experimented with heaviness in their sound as well, but the sheer amount of rawness and doom the first couple of minutes on this album evoke - for a big part thanks to Ozzy's haunted madman voice that brilliantly complements the instrumental part - were something new and literally unheard of. The band later said that their inspiration for their name and sound were horror films and well, it shows!
Beside all its heaviness - and there is plenty - Black Sabbath eponymous first album album also shows that they didn't fell from the sky as the band they are known as, but evolved into it. There are still some strong bluesy, even distinctively jazzy elements in their playing that were pretty quickly phased out in later songs. Especially in the second, more improvised half with Sleeping Village and The Warning have the feel of a heavy-rock-meets-jazz jam really, which actually works really well.
Another quite distinctive attribute this album has is its raw, unpolished sound, which has almost live-qualities. If we can believe guitarist Toni Iommi, and I do, the album has been recorded on a single day, with very few overdubs. Quite the opposite of what they would do just in a couple years time, where the studio sessions dragged on for weeks, even months.
Like many debut albums, Black Sabbath isn't as perfect and polished as their later work, but shows a band that has opened the gate to a new world. In the coming years they, and after them many other bands would step through this gate and continue upon what this album started.
What a weird piece of music: Already the first track You Shouldn't Do That, that clocks in at about fifteen minutes, greets you with repetitive, chanting vocals, proto-stoner rhythm guitar and driving drums, like a spaceship racing on hyper-speed through the universe - and on top of all that is a saxophone! Welcome to Hawkwind! Welcome to In Search of Space!
And really, this is an astonishingly whimsical record. Not the most accessible, as you might have guessed by now, even with their hit-single Silver Machine included as bonus track. But all in all, certainly a captivating, even hypnotic melange of the LSD- and space-age aesthetics of their time.
If you like trippy music far away from the usual conventions, In Search of Space is definitely for you. Its maybe not quite on the level some of their later records, like Hall of the Mountain Grill, but still a strong piece of music with a lot of character and atmosphere.
While many great bands of the 80s, if they are still around, are well past their creative zenith, live off their reputation from their "glorious old times" and haven't really released anything relevant in years, some bands just keep getting better and better.
I am glad to say that Iron Maiden falls into the latter category. Especially after seeing them live in the mid 2000s, where they delivered a smooth and polished, but essentially unexciting best-of-show. You know, the sort of show you do before you retire.
In this context, The Book of Souls was quite a surprise. Not only that the band is still able to write exciting new material, they also made serious moves into progressive-metal territory. I think this mix is the magic ingredient of this album really: songs that work as well on an emotional level as on a technical, songwriting one as well.
Despite the majority of the songs being well over six minutes long (and three of them over ten), they are all varied, engaging, keeping the listener interested - and deliver quite some punch.
The most outstanding song of the album is without a doubt Empire of the Clouds. An 18-minute long epic on the tragic maiden voyage of the Airship R101, that perfectly builds up from a dreamy piano-melody into the thunderstorm that eventually crashed it down - all carried by Bruce Dickinson's brilliant vocals and lyrics.
And the best of all of this? They achieve all this without abandoning the character of the band. This is still Iron Maiden; the band that wrote The Number of the Beast, Fear of the Dark, The Trooper - you name it. The new songs fit stylistically perfectly to their old material. They are simply enhanced, have grown and matured into - I won't say perfection, but they are pretty damn close.
Listen closely, guys from Metallica: That's how it's done.
This is probably the best band you have never heard of. The Psychedelic Avengers were founded in 2004 as a collaborative project of a number of artists and bands, the best known ones probably being Colour Haze and Vibravoid. I think their goal is best described with their own words on the back of their first album: 'This is the first psych-o-phonic, in-head science fiction b-movie for inner-eye-listening pleasures, which is being transvisualized via the soundtrack to your very own imaginary space, psych, teen, mutant, love, trash, porn, noize sci-fi movie'. And yes, its really all that!
The songs usually feature lengthy, pulp-inspired titles like 'The discovery of the lost transdimensional time-space vortex on the iceplanet of Vistar 7' (and that's not even one of their weirdest) and are colourful mixtures of stoner, psychedelic and electro, combined with radio-play like sequences to drive the story ahead. The result is more than compelling.
Be it the tranqulity of space, trippy warp-jumps, radio broadcasts from deep space, or tense battle-scenes - the Psychedelic Avengers are utterly immersing and entertaining. So many different moods, so many different musical worlds to discover.
From the two albums they released, their second ...and the Decterian Blood Empire is the more refined and coherent one. The tracks are more focused, with the overarching storyline of the peaceful civilisations of the Galaxy having to defend themselves against the... you guess. it. The album doesn't gives up any of its inventiveness and diversity though. It just flows and takes you on a wild ride through the ups and downs. An amazing "Space Opera" in the sense of the word.
A pity the Psychedelic Avengers disappeared into obscurity (or into the depths of space) after this album. They really created a masterpiece I love listening to again and again.
As if to prove how obscure this album is, there is only one song from it on Youtube:
A lot of modern metal, or rock music in general, is pretty formulaic and to be blunt: pretty dull. Its really astonishing that so much talent gets wasted on so uninspired and unexciting material.
Well, The Octopus (or just Octopus, pick your favourite) are different from that. Sure, you could argue that female-fronted retro-psychedelic-metal is not the most inventive of all stylistic choices, but who cares: The Octopus does it so damn well!
As far as I could gather (they are not really well known, you see), they have been around for a while, with their earliest published videos dating back some eight years ago. That's probably part of the reason why their debut album, which just came out this year, sounds so - accomplished.
Catchy riffs, in combination with a superbly groovy rhythm section and on top of it all a very charismatic voice: great ingredients that blend seamlessly together into engaging and diverse songs you just want to listen again and again. Their songwriting and dynamic reminds me quite a lot of Purson or Blood Ceremony, with the heaviness and rock'n'roll drive of Led Zeppelin. Not a bad combination for sure!
When I was listening to a Sex Pistols song on the radio the other day, I was utterly unimpressed and wondered for a moment, if there wasn't anything better that came out around that time. In the same moment I realized, it did: Motörhead's debut album!
I must confess that I came relatively late to Motörhead and I completely blame my own ignorance for that. I always thought it was something like a mix of AC/DC meets punk rock - neither of which can excite me. One of the first encounters I had with the band was on the Soundtrack to Hellraiser III (or was it IV?), which didn't really impress me either. Too polished and too off the shelf.
Luckily I gave them another chance, namely with some of their earlier stuff and holy shit, I was so wrong about them! They quickly turned into one of my favourite bands. So much about prejudices, huh?
As you might figure, I like their earlier material most, with No Sleep till Hammersmith being their peak. The sheer raw energy is just astonishing and really outstanding. Their first album, while overall not quite up there yet, shows the band already had together the right ingredients from the outset: lean and fast paced urban rock'n'roll, speed-freak paranoia - and a good dose of dirt, sex and violence. Especially the amazing song quartet Lost Johnny, Iron Horse/Born To Lose, White Line Fever and Keep us on the Road blend these things together perfectly (and they are even in sequence) - for me the absolute highlight of the album.
Yes, there are a couple of fillers, namely on its 2nd half, but it still transports enough energy to keep you entertained. And once it is finished - after a bit more than half an hour runtime - you definitely will crave for more!
Fireball doesn't have it easy. As follow-up album to In Rock, Deep Purple's immensely successful, all-out-assault on the audience's hearing, it probably met the wrong expectations. Despite its fast namesake opener (and probably one of the very first times in rock history to feature double-bass drumming), it is a much more nuanced and varied affair.
Bluesy rock 'n' roll elements can be found here just as well as progressive spacerock-tunes. Hell, with Anyone's Daughter, even a country-song made it on the record - and it does good there!
If someone expected In Rock II however, that can only end in disappointment. In Fireball you can hear a band that doesn't needs to prove anything, but instead can experiment a little and extending their scope. The driving urge of its predecessor is gone and replaced by confidence and playfulness, without losing any of its heavyness - resulting in a brilliant, if slightly atypical album.
Its a pity that Deep Purple didn't pursue the direction they took with Fireball further. The next album, Machine Head, would become more restraint, and straightforward. Possibly reflecting the growing tensions within the band, which eventually led to their split in 1973 and a long painful road to disbandment a couple years later.
In this context, Fireball gives us a glimpse into the band Deep Purple could have been, if this line-up just had a couple more creative years. Who knows what amazing songs they would have made?
This album could have been so great. Houses of the Holy, Trampled Underfoot and the monumental Kashmir - three songs that alone would have guaranteed Physical Graffiti a masterpiece-status, if that would have been all there was.
Sadly they decided to make a double-LP, which meant that the other, roughly three quarters of the runtime had to be filled as well... somehow.
The result is a at times brilliant and exciting (as aforementioned songs document), at times terribly meandering and aimless record. Great material, like In My Time Of Dying get dragged out and swamped seemingly endlessly without any need. And its not doing the songs a favour really. A lot of the material on Physical Graffiti could have worked in half its run-time and maybe preserved more of its emotional impact in the process.
And that's the tragedy of this album: It shows that Led Zeppelin indeed could have lived up to their own standards with wonderfully crafted songs and their feel for melody and their distinctive inventiveness - just by far not often enough. The album as a whole is just way too rambling and meandering. One could think that half the time they just kept the tape recorder running and jammed along. A pity, since it makes Physical Graffiti feel uninspired and yes, tired.
At least this makes the few good songs in it really stand out:
For many, In Rock is Deep Purple's de-facto debut album, despite the band being already around for a while and having released 3 studio albums and a recording of their Concerto for Group and Orchestra. But by all means, In Rock is the record where they finally got their act together!
Prior to it the band was stuck in a creative limbo somewhere between aping Vanilla-Fudge-style psychedelica and playing with string quartets. You can argue about the former being a good idea or not, but the latter is for itself certainly not a bad thing at all. Alas, the band didn't feel really at home with the music they were making. Its not like their songs of that era were bad. Not at all. Unfocused maybe at times, but played at a high standard of song-writing and musicianship. It was maybe just a bit too cerebral and melodramatic to really grab you.
A change in line-up (Ian Gillan replaced Rod Evans as singer, and Roger Glover took over bass-duties from Nick Simper) brought finally a shift in direction towards the more condensed, no-frills heavy rock-style of In Rock. And indeed it sounds like this is a different band. Sure, you recognize the musicians and their individual styles if you listen closely, but the end result is just so staggeringly different. In Rock is almost brutal in its directness and sheer noise. At the same time its very groovy too, but like heavy machinery running at high speed: with an undeniable urge and density. A captivating, even radical performance that takes you for an exciting flat-out ride, leaving their past works behind in the dust.
This said, the album isn't the most diverse. With the exception of the monumental Child in Time, the songs are pretty straightforward and mostly tend to be either fast and heavy or slow and heavy. Not a bad thing really. It makes in Rock a coherent experience, saturating its listener in sound. The album is one of the earliest, defining moments of hard/heavy rock music; it doesn't has to be all polished or refined. To the contrary: its raw, uncompromising nature is what inspired generations of bands after them to do their own thing.
Listening to it in 2018, In Rock still excites me. Yes, you can hear its age. It sounds very late 60s, early 70s, but looking at how many bands are trying to emulate a retro-sound and look, that's not really a bad thing. And the album still excites. The sheer energy and playfulness of the band is just as present as when In Rock came out.
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