Are you calling me a slut?

That'll cost extra.

i like hearing how music got started. i seen a doco on the bona vista club. Ry cooder traveled around south America finding all the old Latin American musos that played in the 40s and 50s. they were great yet relatively unknown and probably around at the same time as the early Jamaican musos . i can hear that similar beat and style in both. i also like that movie Cadillac records about Lenard chess and all the blues musos from the 40s to 60s and how they got started. chess records recorded muddy waters and chuck berry as well as many lesser known artists like little Walter and howling wolf. i enjoy listening to the old black blues singers from the south like lead belly and Robert Johnson. i like the history of music very interesting.

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Metalhead?
Brought To You By Metal Month II

When I was little, back in the early eighties, heavy metal was the awesome Iron Maiden, Scorpions and Judas Priest posters that were plastered all over the walls of the bedroom that my older cousins shared in my grandmother's basement. I was so intrigued by the artwork—that creepy skinless monster with the Devil on puppet strings, the guy in the straightjacket with the forks tearing his eyeballs out, that gleaming robot eagle swooping in for the kill—and I just knew that all these bands must scary and cool and like nothing I had ever heard before. But once I heard them, I was disappointed. They just seemed like regular music, nothing at all like what their artwork suggested, and I think I decided at that early age that I just would never be a metalhead.

When I was a little older, in the late eighties, heavy metal was the Anthrax, S.O.D. and Metallica played on a boombox at the back of the school bus by the older juvenile delinquents who lived around the corner from me. These were the kids who rode around on dirt bikes, shot small animals with BB guns and harassed younger kids like me. Now this music sounded tougher and edgier. I liked it and I liked the atmosphere it gave the bus ride, but I didn't really listen to it outside of that environment. Somehow I didn't want the music of those jerky kids sharing space in my tape deck with my Pink Floyd and REM tapes.

Within the next two years I had made some new friends, friends who decidedly were metalheads. We used to hang out at my buddy Jon's wasteland home—a house with no furniture, with plywood floors where the carpets had been torn up, with peeling paint and an overgrown lawn full of trash, with a sink piled high with dirty dishes, with his psychotic mother perpetually locked in her bedroom, and with a group of us sitting on the floor in the basement blasting the likes of Sacred Reich, Slayer, Death and Obituary on a surprisingly nice stereo. I loved this music like I loved my friends, but somehow it stayed in that dysfunctional place. The only thing I really had in common with my friends musically was Faith No More. Otherwise, they teased me because I listened to stuff like Bob Mould, Siouxsie & the Banshees, They Might Be Giants and Love & Rockets, but hey, that worked for me. I was a misfit among misfits, but not a metalhead.

By the time I got to high school, I had started to get into more loud music, but by and large it wasn't metal. I liked hardcore and punk and especially industrial—I had become a rabid fan of Wax Trax! Records. A lot of the stuff that got lumped in with industrial—bands like Godflesh, Ministry and KMFDM—overlapped substantially with metal territory, but at this point I had started to look down on metal a bit, thinking that it was all a little cheesy and dated. The funny thing is, toward the end of high school, I found myself recruited by some guys I knew to be the singer for their metal band. This was the first band I was ever in and we were all kind of pulling in different directions, but it was a great experience that I think somewhat renewed my appreciation for metal, though, despite actually being in a metal band, I would never have called myself a metalhead.

In college, I got into a lot of different things: bebop, swing, acid jazz, trip hop, post rock, post punk, rock en español, bluegrass, zydeco, surf rock, IDM, African pop… you name it really. The biggest change and influence on me was definitely the jazz though. It was a kind of music I really didn't listen to at all growing up but a sliver of exposure to it on a school retreat to a rocky Maine island hooked me forever. Meanwhile, I had these two roommates in a row, Eric and Zach, who I shared a variety of music tastes with as well as a sort of humorous appreciation for all things "satanic". Hanging out with these two inspired me to go back and revisit some of that thrash and death metal that my friends had been into in junior high. This is when I started buying albums by Motörhead, Metallica, Sacred Reich, Slayer and Death in larger quantities, as well as more recent metal like Sepultura and Korn. I loved to dabble in all of this stuff, but nevertheless, I was still no metalhead.

Throughout my twenties my taste kept expanding in all kinds of directions. I got into more metal, but then I got into more of a lot of things—hip hop, krautrock, indie rock, afrobeat, experimental and free jazz, grime, tango, flamenco, samba, vintage electronica, country, and so on and so forth. After all this time I had amassed a pretty huge CD collection and in the spring of 2005 my girlfriend, who is now my wife, bought me my first MP3 player. So suddenly I had a massive amount of music I had to convert. I tried to do this as systematically as possible, but my computer had very little memory and as a result everything had to be ripped then stored on CD. Doing this, it seemed to me that the best way to organize was by genre, and so I did, creating huge stacks of CDs throughout my living room corresponding to different genres. The funny thing was, despite my assumptions to the contrary, the metal stack was by far the biggest, so large in fact that it had to be split up into multiple piles. Suddenly I, the guy who never really considered himself a metalhead, had to face the inescapable truth that not only was I a metalhead, I was a pretty huge metalhead.

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In Honor of Metal Month II
Our Test Subject Examines NWOBHM

In my ongoing effort to participate in Metal Month II, I've decided I'm going to listen to and review six NWOBHM albums that I've never heard before. I know 666 albums might have been more appropriate, but you know, time constraints and all that.

As I mentioned in my "Metalhead?" post, thrash and death metal were really my entry points into metal. What came before, especially the NWOBHM stuff, is metal that I've always had a hard time getting on board with. I tend to like my metal heavy, aggressive, off-the-rails crazy or at times simply moody and evocative. Mostly I like it sort of abstract too. NWOBHM is none of those things. It's not metal as a monstrous genre unto itself, it's metal as very much a subgenre of rock, complete with overblown vocals, an overabundance of guitar wankery, generally boring and underutilized percussion and an overall cheesy vibe evocative of nothing but a bunch of guys playing their instruments. Or at least that's how I've always felt about it.

So why have I decided to listen to and review a bunch of it? Obviously, a lot of it has to do with trying to broaden my musical horizons, and a large part is simply curiosity. These are the bands, after all, who were the biggest influence on a lot of music that I like so I figure there must things to be unearthed here that I might actually enjoy. Plus, it's music that a lot of people I like and respect are fans of—members here, my aforementioned cousins, quite a few of my friends—if nothing else I'd like to at least try to understand what it is they enjoy about it.

All of that said, I'll start posting my reviews soon and plan to have a new one up every other day or so. I'd like to thank Trollheart, Unknown Soldier and Batlord, whose journals and general postings were all a huge help in me putting together this list, and I'd like to thank Trollheart in particular for starting Metal Month and for giving me some much needed guidance for this little plan.

Janszoon: Making Music Banter cooler since 2007.

Unlike you I embraced the ways of those kids playing Anthrax, S.O.D., and Metallica on the school bus but I would never shoot BBs at younger kids or harass small animals.

Since a lot of your metal tastes are at the opposite end of mine when it comes to metal (even though mine are very broad) I'll be interested to see what you think of the albums that you're going to review.

How did you choose the six? Are you going to tell us the six or is it going to be a surprise?

Thanks. :)

And thanks for not shooting me with a BB gun.

I chose the six based on childhood memories, reading the journals of you and the other two people I mentioned, other internet research, and some consultation with Trollheart. I was planning on keeping them a secret, though I doubt anything on the list will really be surprising to you.

At a guess I’d say four of the six might be albums by Diamond Head, Angel Witch, Saxon and Tygers of Pan Tang.

Be wary of Trollheart’s recommendations, he has a habit of picking a band’s weakest album as the ones to listen to. :)

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Exhibit #1:
Iron Maiden—The Number of the Beast (1982)

In many ways, the album I've chosen to start this series with is the hardest one of all for me to review and the one that comes with the most baggage. As I implied in my "Metalhead?" journal entry, the poster of this album cover, along with several other Iron Maiden posters, was plastered on the wall of my cousins' bedroom when I was growing up. I can still picture exactly where it was positioned, over the foot of one of the beds, up near the ceiling, above several other posters. I was both intrigued and terrified by the various images of Eddie on that wall and they were instrumental in forming my notion of heavy metal as something crazy and scary. Unfortunately, Iron Maiden were also instrumental in dashing those hopes once I finally heard Bruce Dickinson's ridiculous way of singing and the music's somewhat conventional style. On top of that they're also a band I've heard a lot. I've had numerous friends who were fans. I even gave the band's debut album a full listen a few years back in the hopes that a Dickinson-less Maiden might be something I'd enjoy, but to no avail. So like I said, I come to this review with some baggage.

Nevertheless, I have tried to commit myself to giving this album as open-minded of a listen as possible and have done so several times before writing this review. I have to confess though, Bruce Dickinson still gets on my nerves. Listening to this album is like trying to watch a good movie while a clown keeps jumping in your face tooting a bicycle horn. And that's the really frustrating thing, because the "good movie" part of that metaphor is as true as the clown part—this is a very solid album aside from Dickinson's absurd bombast. The biggest thing I noticed listening to it is that this band is fucking tight as hell, tight as the tightest bebop group, tight as anything. I was pretty much expecting the twin guitar attack of Dave Murray and Adrian Smith to be that way—it's the kind of thing I have always associated with Iron Maiden—but even still I think I underestimated them. Just listen to the closing track on this album, "Hallowed Be Thy Name", and you'll see what I mean. The way the two guitars stop and start and weave around each other, they sound like they're being controlled by one mind. The real discovery for me here, though, is Steve Harris. I'm apparently quite the ignoramus because I've lived my entire life completely unaware of what a phenomenal bass player this guy is. I was duly impressed with the way he effortlessly shifts from playing lockstep harmony with the guitars to flying off on his own almost jazzy tangents. It's great stuff, and if there's one thing that could bring me back for more visits to Maiden territory it's his bass playing. Clive Burr is not too shabby either. He doesn't really flaunt it, but he provides a solid framework for all the instrumental acrobatics going on around him. Truth be told, there are even a few moments where Dickinson works well with the band instead of trying to masturbate all over them. The choruses of both "The Prisoner" and "Run to the Hills" come to mind as moments on the album where he manages to contribute something worthwhile to the musical proceedings.

My overall impression of this album is that it's good, but flawed. Bruce Dickinson is so annoying 90% of the time that I'd actually be curious to hear what it would be like with the vocals simply removed from the mix. I think it could almost work that way. I say "almost" because of Clive Burr. The man is clearly a skilled drummer but I feel like his playing here lacks both passion and creativity. This album is almost Rush-like in its bass and guitar virtuosity and I think the presence of a drummer more of Neil Peart's caliber could have pushed it into classic territory for me. Nevertheless, for the past few days, every morning when I get into my car to head to work, I feel a powerful urge to listen to "Children of the Damned", "The Prisoner", "Run to the Hills" and "Hallowed Be Thy Name" and it's an urge I always succumb to. That has to count for something. And so this album is a win for me.