Thor Keep the Dogs Away 1977 (RCA)
Heavy Metal
A cheeseburger with a metal dressing!
When people think of cheesy metal, they normally think of the less serious sounding power metal bands of the 1980s or some of the excessive sounding glam metal bands from that same decade as well. But before these two genres were even coined, a certain ex-Canadian bodybuilder and stage-wrestler called Jon Mikl who was simply known as the Norse God Thor, may well have had a strong case for being the originator of all the cheesy aspects, that would go on to affect metal over the following couple of decades. He had already recorded a debut album with his band the previous year, under the name of Thor and the Imps and it was titled unsurprisingly
Muscle Rock, and despite its shortcomings the album was deemed a success in Canada and the band soon attracted attention in the USA from the RCA label. After a stint on stage in Las Vegas, Jon Mikl Thor now simply known as Thor, reshaped his band and they released their first album under the Thor name
Keep the Dogs Away and this album certainly had a one mother of a chessy and camp album cover to accompany it.
Song wise most of the songs here are as cheesy as hell and they’re not helped by watching Thor performing on stage in his leather clad muscle man outfit either, but the songs by and large have an almost subdued and lazy feel to them, and surprisingly the whole thing comes across as a kind of enjoyable easy-listening metal. Despite the furor that circulated around Thor at this time, success outside of the club circuit never quite happened for them and despite the odd EP release over the next few years, the band never released another album until 1984 and by that time their music slipped into the power metal labelled box. This album is strictly for metal fanatics that don’t take their metal too seriously.