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 s
hit-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.