The Batlord

Well, I'm in need of another outlet apart from my main journal since that's gonna be taken up with other things for the foreseeable future. I suppose I could restart my other two journals, but...meh. I don't feel like ****ing around with moderator queues at the moment. I'd rather just ripoff Zer0's "50 Indie/Alternative Albums You Should Listen To" thread.

So, I loves me some raw, ugly, sloppy metal. Metal made by and for brain-dead cretins who are probably wearing mullets as we speak. Metal with trashy lyrics, bad production, more energy than good taste, all that good stuff. There are plenty of great metal bands that make awesome music through high-minded experimentation, technical wizardry, or what-have-you, but the ultimate goal of metal is to be loud, and sometimes it's good to just forget all the bull****, unplug your brain, and headbang to some gloriously ****ty metal made by bands who probably can't even spell "sophistication" and would probably beat up anyone who could.

So, I'm gonna write about some albums that follow my arbitrary guidelines of what constitutes "scuzzy, low-rent metal". I'm gonna try to throw in a variety of old and new bands, and well known and unknown bands, to keep things interesting. If that wasn't clear then I don't care. I just spent ten minutes on that and I'll be damned if I'm gonna spend any more time on this ****.

Motörhead: Motörhead - 1977

I thought about doing Venom first, but then I was like, "Dude...Motorhead," and I thought that that made a lot of sense. I mean come on, Motorhead are the grand daddies of loud, raw, ugly metal and deserve to be the first mention. The easiest way out would seem to be writing about Overkill or Ace of Spades, but since this is a thread about scuzzy metal, then I should go for something even scuzzier than those two. Their debut fits the bill beautifully.

It's certainly not their best album, and it's certainly not their most accomplished, but don't let that fool you, this album has everything that made Motorhead great...just in it's infant stage. Just take the glorious ****tiness of their cover of "Motorhead" from Lemmy's old band Hawkwind. They just stripped it down, sped it up, and recorded it. What punk band hasn't done the same thing with the only result being that you end up realizing that the original was played at the correct speed? But "Motorhead" is just a blast of pure amphetamines that encapsulates everything that is Motorhead in three minutes and is a preview of the next three decades to come. Brilliant.

But for the most part, the songs on here only hint at future greatness. This is really just ugly biker rock that has been stripped of all prog pretensions, AOR prettiness, or anything else that could give this album even a hint of class, and then revved up by the Clash and the Sex Pistols. It's also the pure beating heart of rock'n'roll. I can just imagine them playing "White Line Fever" in some shit-stained pub at twelve in the morning: there's a Hell's Angel holding some guy up by his shirt with his left hand, and wailing on his face with his right; his buddy is sitting next to him and trying to ignore the altercation and watch the football game on TV while stuffing his face with stale peanuts; the barkeep is considering stopping the fight, but only if he has too, he has twenty bucks on the other guy after all; and in the back, behind a chicken wire fence to protect from flying beer bottles, plays Motorhead. See that puddle of urine in the corner? They did that.

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Paul Smeenus

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Gentle Giant Catalog Review

The entire Ditty Bops catalog reviewed

Plankton

You mean like this?


Helmet "In The Meantime" - YouTube

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Trollheart

What about some IRISH scuzzy, unpretentious metal?

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Plankton

...and/or this?


SACRED REICH - Surf Nicaragua - YouTube

You should also check out Zoetrope. My buddies now defunct band.

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Forward To Death

Music doesn't have to be sophisticated to be good, so I'm not really with you on calling these bands low-rent. I'll play along though since I know exactly what kind of music is going to be posted in this thread.

The Batlord

Die. And **** Ireland.

Most thrash doesn't quite cut it for this thread. Much of it, aggressive or not, is just far too polished for that. Sacred Reich might not exactly be polished, but they're also not quite what I'm looking for here.

"Good" and "low-rent" are not mutually exclusive terms. If they were the vast majority of punk would be "bad".

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Plankton

I'm not really into categorizing music as much as most people, so I'll sit and watch as the Lord of The Bats unveils his unworldly knowledge before his minions. He is but a fair and a kind Lord.

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The Batlord

Slayer: Haunting the Chapel EP - 1984

This is an obvious choice for me, and a good way to illustrate some of my criteria for "scuzzy, low-rent metal". Anything from Reign In Blood on is just too polished. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The debut would apply, but it lacks that raw ugliness that is all over this and Hell Awaits. And this beats out Hell Awaits simply because it's more primitive. So, Haunting the Chapel...

I think this EP is the only time that Slayer ever truly crossed over into full-on, first-wave black metal. It all starts with "Chemical Warfare", quite possibly Slayer's darkest song of all time. From the word go you are assaulted with a wall of raw, heads-down, guitar riffing, from which all of the pretty melodies from Show No Mercy have been removed. Tom Araya's hateful growl then belches forth from the dark abyss, and the ugliness is complete. The stripped-down production, heavy on reverb, gives this a dense, claustrophobic atmosphere, that truly makes this song a masterpiece of early black metal. The next two songs that make up this EP are much the same, if not quite as monumentally brilliant as "Chemical Warfare". It's a shame they charge full album price for this EP over at FYE or I'd have bought this years ago. **** FYE.

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Forward To Death

Low-rent, gloriously ****ty, whatever. You're still calling the music ****ty, which it isn't.