Metallica - The Justice Demos

Until St. Anger arrived and took the heat off it, …And Justice For All was known as the Metallica album with the worst production: the guitars sounded flat, muted and sterile, the drums were precise to the point of sounding mechanical, and the bass – infamously, there is no bass presence whatsoever on that release. You’d have an easier time spotting the four-string on your average second-wave black metal record. The album doesn’t even have a conceptual excuse, either (I let off the sterile and uber-precise playing on The Faceless’s second album because it fits their lyrical concept).

So when I found this vinyl-only (as far as I know; it’s not official, so there isn’t much to check it against) release, my hopes leapt up that somebody, somewhere, had found the Justice tapes that presented these songs with a more organic production, or at the very least, some bass to fill out the album’s woefully vacant bottom-end.

So once I dropped the needle, during that period when static gives way to the first track, I was a bit apprehensive…yet when Blackened kicked in – holy hell! Hallelujah to the lords on high, we have bass!

Actually, you know what – this whole thing sounds better than the finalized record. Most noticeably, you have the bass, which rumbles along steadily, keeping pace and cementing the bottom-end that the finished work lacked so sorely. To compliment this, the guitar and drum tracks sound better than their finished counterparts: they’re rawer, more energetic, and a touch sloppier. Normally I wouldn’t give points for rawness alone, but when the alternative is playing so uncomfortably precise that it sounds less like a human and more like a Terminator, I’ll take it. These riffs and fills sound like the band – wait for it – is actually having fun, unlike the stone-faced sterility of the final record.

The vocals, as you’d probably expect, are a touch shakier, but it’s nothing that would be considered unacceptable for the fast-and-loose 80s thrash scenes. James has a higher pitch here, sounding more like his Master Of Puppets era than he does on the actual …AJFA album. Some of the lyrics are also different in their embryonic form, but it doesn’t impact the songs too much.

So the rumour that there exists, somewhere, an official version of …And Justice For All with bass remains but a rumour, though you can find at least one fan-made version of the album online with bass lines plugged back in. But this is the next best thing, if you can somehow get your hands on it.

Also some quick trivia, that tour poster by Pushead you see just above was also used as the cover art for this LP. So if you’re one of the legions of Metallica fans who would love to see Justice with a more organic feel and bass – now you know what to look for.

Waking The Cadaver - Perverse Recollections Of A Necromangler

Best feature: it makes you appreciate all the great music in the world a lot more

Worst feature: that this exists as well.

Today I’m breaking from my rule of only reviewing albums that I own, to touch upon an album that takes elements from brutal death metal and deathcore, and mashes them up beyond recognition into something that defies explanation. I own many albums I dislike – American Soldier, some Kittie album, et cetera – yet this album is not a part of my library, for unlike those benignly-bad albums, this CD actively sucks the musical integrity and artistic depth from all other albums in the vicinity. Meat Loaf would lose his voice; Hellhammer would break his sticks; Pavarotti would become skinny. This CD is a black hole of bad.

How about the vocals, which make Gene Adam look like – well – anyone else? These vocals are actually quite identical to the sounds that your ass makes once you’ve just expelled a mighty turd, but then you think to yourself, “No, you’re a big man, you can do better” and let rip a great spill that cleans you out for the afternoon, after which you use your free time and listen to albums that are presumably better than this. That sound of the second turd wave hitting the bowl adequately describes both the sound of the REEEing and gorping (or orting, whatever) that the vocalist (or, to be more accurate, verbal diarrheist) present here, as well as the sound that you, dear reader, will make upon hearing it.

On the subject of the vocals, the lyrics just suck. I get that deathcore is generally stupid-as-fuck, and oftentimes celebratory of this fact, but these odes to raping/dismembering women (always women, because misogyny is so fucking edgy n’ shit these days) and getting high just take it so laughably far over the top, mixing the standard BDM gore stuff with those “gangsta” sensibilities we all love so much into a formula that actually makes Grinded Nig look like a band that doesn’t deserve to have every copy of their CDs spontaneously shattered, in comparison (disclaimer: they do).

Cannibal Corpse does the whole gore thing well (even though twenty years later, even those DM giants are starting to see their lyrical shtick wearing thinner), and…okay, I can’t think of a single metal band who does the whole “gangsta” thing and makes me want to listen to them, so we’ll toss that part of the comparison. Bottom line, these lyrics are about as dignified as that time your friends found you passed out on old man Carruthers’ farm with your hand and forearm lodged firmly in a very distressed donkey’s ass.

Fuck, that means I have to describe the music at some point, which means actually taking another bite into this shit sandwich rather than running on cached memory from the last time I heard it. Okay, so I can give this record one thing: save the pointless “we get high aren’t we awesome” interlude, these tracks actually are organized in a way that convinces me the band put some kind of thought into arranging this music, but recall the shit-eating scenes from the movie Salo: you can put shit on a silver platter, but at the end of the day, it’s still – you guessed it.

This is mostly comprised of half-assed grooves which are disturbingly bland on the best of days, a bassist whose musical vision seems limited to standing near the rest of the band at photoshoots, and head-shakingly forgettable drumwork, interspersed by the aforementioned microphone-rapist and, of course, a platter of breakdowns. I plea of you, what the hell am I supposed to say about these…things that hasn’t already been beaten to death, and then beaten into dust? They lack the conviction of a good Suffocation breakdown, they seem tailored purely so that “tuff” kids can punch that mean ol’ floor during shows, and they’re just slightly more relevant than Emmure’s.

Now, about these breakdowns – in fact, this goes for the whole “center your music around the breakdowns” fad – I’ll grant that it seems to excite the kids, and good for them, even if the metal community may stare down their noses at them for getting all worked up over these things. But once the lights are up and when the crowds are gone (this Savatage reference is too good for this review), what musical merit do they have? Truly good music will stand up on its own without the exuberance of a live context to prop it up. Without that extra bit of inherent dignity, you’re just left with these bafflingly bland, monotonous moments that serve no point.

In listening to a record like this, the average death metal fan may be inclined to wait for the ‘punch’: the point during many extreme albums where the band ‘cranks it to 11’, as it were, and brings out those killer riffs like it’s 1990, where you don’t even care about any potential musical faults in the section because it’s so exciting. This doesn’t happen here. There’s nothing on this record that even remotely approaches excitement.

So a zero percent for redefining ass. I’m sure there’s far worse music out there in the underground of the “brutal gore sick women-hating” genre (a fellow MA reviewer put it brilliantly when he said that none of these adjectives that these bands often use to describe themselves even approach a synonym for making worthwhile music), but the fact that these boys have become somewhat infamous in the scene lately for being horrible caught my attention.

Recommended tracks: The ones where you switch out this CD for a Dismember album before hitting Play.
Final thoughts: is there any room left in that New Mexico landfill where they dumped all those E.T. cartridges?

Iced Earth - Box Of The Wicked

And to cap off our back-to-back "What the hell, Schaffer?" overview, we come to a product that's actually kind of insulting.

Normally I only review albums that I own, but here I just didn’t feel the need. What you’ve got here are four CDs of previously-released material, plus a bonus disc. It’s a decent idea in concept – if you’re someone who absolutely has to own everything that Schaffer has ever laid his riff over for some reason, or if you love IE but haven’t picked up the Something Wicked albums for whatever reason. For everyone else, you can skip this.

Look, if you want to know my feelings on the albums, you can look up my Metal-Archives review of The Crucible Of Man. In short, I enjoyed Framing Armageddon (especially the ripping strains of the climactic tracks), and Crucible redefines unambitious disappointment. The singles don’t really offer anything out of the ordinary; they were meant as teasers for the respective Something Wicked albums, and they’re rather superfluous here having served their purpose; granted, the Barlow redubs of Owens tracks aren’t –bad-, and your morbid curiosity may inspire you to check out the butchered version of The Coming Curse, but other than that, like I said – superfluous. Not the kind of thing that one would be inclined to double-dip for, and yet here we are.

As for the bonus disc? Don’t bother for it. It’s only twenty minutes long, and contains just another Framing Armageddon track redubbed with Barlow (A Charge To Keep) and three live tracks from Graspop ’08. But the insulting thing is that with several more albums’ worth of material under the band’s belt since Alive In Athens, they chose to give us three tracks that also are played on the Alive In Athens album, rather than show how newer IE tracks shine in the live setting. Really? That’s like going out of your way to avoid pleasing the fans. I don’t have this set so, for all I know, these could be the best live renditions of Pure Evil, Dark Saga and the band’s self-titled song ever, but I’m rating this on principle.

How about a full live set, featuring old and new material? How about bonus tracks on each album, like demos or covers or what-have-you? As it is, this is just a lazy cash-in with a bonus disc (with an EP’s worth of only quasi-new material) thrown in to entice any fan with a loose enough wallet who forgot to research before buying.

Don’t get me wrong; I know that box sets are a hard thing to get right. They’re typically valuable/expensive, so from the jump, you have to assume that they’re for the die-hard fans (because if you were getting into a band and wanted to buy a CD, what would you go to first: their best-reviewed album, a cheap greatest hits package, or a box set that costs as much as dinner at a fancy restaurant?). And typically, the fans who buy box sets that are otherwise nicely put together, like Soundtrack To The Apocalypse and Warchest, have to put up with a ‘greatest hits’ section of the set full of material that they already own. So the question with any box set is, is the exclusive material worth it? Here, the answer isn’t just a ‘no’. It’s a ‘no’ supplemented by a slap to the face of whoever thought this was a good idea.

Please don’t support releases like this. IE fans, save your money for the live CD/DVD set coming out soon; for the first time in too damn long, it’s a Schaffer product that looks promising.

Sons Of Liberty - Brush-fires Of The Mind

Just play the Metal Gear game instead.

Stereotypes are usually identifiable as sweeping generalizations that, if they do have any basis in reality, certainly can’t be applied as broadly as the person saying them would like. So what am I supposed to make of this, where metal’s own Jon “AMERICA!” Schaffer has essentially lived up to every negative stereotype about him and then one-upped them all?

I mean, Christ, “Jon Schaffer makes an entirely self-performed solo album ranting about the new world order” sounds like something a troll would say on a forum trying to get a rise out of Iced Earth fans.

But at the end of the day, lyrical content isn’t so much of a make-or-break factor in music for me. Cool lyrics are a plus, but I’ll overlook iffy lyrics if the music is good. Which this isn’t, really.

Imagine Iced Earth, except suck out any sense of excitement or dynamic until you’re left with bland, chugging riffs that go throughout the whole song and do. Not. Stop. You’re probably imagining The Crucible Of Man right now, but at least that album had a few moments where Barlow was able to let loose. In essence, take everything that made some Iced Earth exciting, strip it down to its least interesting, least ambitious form, and press it to plastic. That’s Brush-fires Of The Mind. It’s a propaganda piece, pure and simple – you can clearly tell the music plays second fiddle to the message. Even if you agree with the message (that global banking organizations are pulling the strings behind American and world politics), you can just read blogs about it or watch Zeitgeist again. That’s what this is, really; if, say, Enslaved is ‘viking metal’, then Sons Of Liberty is Zeitgeist metal.

Look, I’m keeping my politics out of this, whatever you might think they are, but the fact is that from a musical standpoint, this CD is much more a testament to unambitiousness, and mediocrity, than The Crucible Of Man ever was. I mean, despite the riffetition, Schaffer had it once. I mean, remember how in Travel In Stygian, he surprised us with that melancholic piano outro representing the protagonist’s numb descent into Hell? Or how about Barlow’s massive “I am your anti-Christ!” scream section in The Coming Curse? Total catharsis there. Here? There’s nothing. It’s a plain doughnut, except it spouts political epithets at you. And the moment my pastries start shrieking about the new world order, I’m changing my snack order.

I mean – it’s not bad, because it isn’t ambitious enough to be. These songs just plod along, every facet of the music structured specifically to draw your attention to the vocal lines – which don’t even carry very interesting, or varied melodies. This is an album that serves the exact same purpose as a political blog, and for that reason it just can’t be good on its own merits; it doesn’t care about anything more than the message.

I haven’t touched on the individual instrumentation, or individual highlights, because there’s nothing TO touch on.

The fact that we’ve got a fully produced live Iced Earth DVD set coming out this year answers the prayers of many fans (the Alice In Athens DVD wasn’t so much “fully produced” as “taken from a Greek TV broadcast”, mind) and shows that Schaffer isn’t completely detached from musical reality quite yet. But none the less, save your money for that and avoid this.

Avantasia - The Wicked Symphony and Angel Of Babylon

In the middle ages, a practitioner of a craft would undergo three stages: apprenticeship, journeyman (an artist who would travel the world in honing of his craft) and finally master. Tobi passed the apprentice stage long ago (playing songs heavily similar to his musical elders in an effort to develop a musical personality of his own), and with this release has finally broken out of the journeyman stage: this is Tobias Sammet’s masterpiece.

At its heart, this is classic Sammet: you’ve got the close focus on memorable melody, songwriting that at time hovers somewhere in that enjoyable, but amorphous realm between power metal, traditional and AOR, and as is the case with every Avantasia record, monolithic vocal work from all sides by a myriad from the A-lists of Sammet’s chosen styles.

As they’re the aspect of the record(s) that people will be drawn to first and foremost, the vocals deserve special mention: once again, Sammet puts forth songwriting that places each singer within their musical “comfort zone”, yet it always benefits the album as a whole, never pandering. Once again, Kiske is placed primarily within a classic power metal framework in Wastelands, the spiritual successor to so many double bass-fueled chargers from his Helloween days, but with beefier production and some of the best vibrato Kiske has ever put forth. He even gets a chance to stretch his smooth lower range towards the end of the colossal Runaway Train. Ripper Owens, meanwhile, dwarfs Tobi on Scales Of Justice with his wild screeching presence, a track that draws heavily on an Iced Earth-style riffing base (despite Tobi’s vocalized disdain for Schaffer’s riffs), but that’s not a bash against Sammet – when you get into a shrieking contest with the Ripper, all anyone will end up with is a bruised windpipe and a bruised ego.

To cover all vocalists in detail would be a review in itself, but the story of the albums also becomes a musical factor: as the protagonist sinks deeper into temptation, The Wicked Symphony presents the darkest and most intense part of the trilogy, while as he begins to break from the influence of Jorn’s Mephistopheles-like presence in the Angel Of Babylon album, the mood gradually, yet drastically shifts into a more up-tempo one, in a more classic hard rock framework. We work from the intense, cinematic title track of The Wicked Symphony, which at parts sounds vaguely similar to the heavier, darker moments of perhaps Tarot, all the way to Angel Of Babylon’s closer Journey To Arcadia, with Bob Catley’s sensitive vocal over the prog-rock framework, with even surprising hints of subtle, yet extremely moving gospel influence and some of Sammet’s most passionate and ranged singing ever. Out of the dark and into the light.

That said, I do think that Tobi’s skills as a songwriter shine through more prominently on the more ambitious The Wicked Symphony, where tracks like Runaway Train – in which Bob Catley, Jorn, Tobi and Kiske sing over a sprawling, epic ballad worthy of the best of Meat Loaf – and the downright cinematic title track show Sammet at what is, so far in his career, the absolute peak of his powers. The humbler numbers bear mention as well: the arena-friendly Forever Is A Long Time and the wonderful, even transcendent-sounding rocker States Of Matter will take an industrial drill to get out of your head.

It’s not that this release breaks borders; it would be more accurate to say that it simply doesn’t care about them. Even though you can attempt to slot each song into a certain genre – the brooding Black Wings into a gothic metal slot, and the aforementioned Wastelands into its classic power metal place, for example – but each song merely feeds the mood that’s required of it in context with the story.

Granted, while there are moments that one might regard as “safe”, there are also moments which are borderline unclassifiable: of note being the chorus of Crestfallen, which features some very…unique harsh vocals laid around the doomiest moment of Tobi’s entire career (“And you’ll fall away from Heaven…”). Yet, somehow, it works, fitting the schizophrenic mood of the lyrics themselves.

Sammet’s often deservedly lauded lyricism is in top form here as well: perverted twists on religious allusions (“Pray the wine my will to take”, “No sign of wings / as you turn your back on me”) further accentuate his character’s descent into deluded grandiose insanity.

Weak points? If they exist, they’re few. I do think that The Edge and Blowing Out The Flame aren’t as strong as Sammet’s usual ballad fare, though their moods – The Edge as forlornly angry, and Blowing Out The Flame as a rather calm, melancholy number – do suit their respective albums very well. I was surprised to find how little a role Andre Matos plays, in how his one song, Blizzard On A Broken Mirror, is so Sammet-centric, whereas Tobi usually allots one-time singers on The Wicked Trilogy to have the lion’s share of a song to themselves (Alice Cooper, Ripper, etc). But it’s a fine song with an interestingly tense mood none the less.

Granted, as a whole, I enjoy The Wicked Symphony more than Angel Of Babylon, but the albums truly were made for each other; one completes its counterpart, in a way. The deluxe set itself is marvelous; the glossy digipaks inside perfectly compliment the box in which they’re encased, and the bonus book is very interesting and informative. They match the production of the actual albums: Paeth’s mixing and producing on these two albums matches The Scarecrow before them in their three-dimensional, balanced, but most of all organic soundscape. Sammet has, essentially, written a trilogy of albums about himself, transposed and dramatized into a period piece. Such a move would often be considered amazingly egotistical at face value [and let’s face it, Tobi is no stranger to those criticisms], yet it’s pulled off here: this is a man who’s splayed himself wide open for the world to see, bleeding out an accumulated career’s worth of musical passion. If you at all enjoy Edguy, Meat Loaf, or – really – any of the bands from which this myriad of musicians comes, get this for what is so far the magnum opus of the Ed Guy’s career.

There are many reasons why we love music as both art and as an integral part of our lives, and every so often, an album comes along to remind us why; these are some of those albums. Listen to them.

Fozzy - Chasing The Grail

Let’s face it – between being burdened with a name that brings to mind mental associations of stuffed toys more than heavy metal, having a singer who comes from the wrestling arena and having started out as a cover band, Fozzy face a kind of unjustified struggle to be taken seriously that most bands don’t have; Jericho’s a damn good singer on his own terms, but he could have pipes like Pavarotti and still be straddled with the “gimmick” tag by naysayers because of his previous career.

But on this release, Fozzy have broken from stigmas and stereotypes to deliver an album that easily tops their former original work, and elevates their status in the heavy metal pantheon. On top of their traditional metal framework, they’ve expanded their sound in several different directions.

First, the two ballads on this album mark the first time Fozzy has “gotten soft”: Broken Soul may not attempt to break from the mould too much, but its straightforward attempt at hard rock balladry instills such a sense of nostalgia in me (granted, reviewer nostalgia should hardly be counted as an objective system) that I can’t not enjoy it. Meanwhile, New Day’s Dawn shows the band attempting an interesting, but soothing falsetto chorus, and despite the occasional awkward lyric ("Stopped and struck by a semi-truck of bad luck", guys?), it’s a good song.

At the same time, their sound has attained a heavier edge, which brings us to album highlight Pray For Blood. This song just kicks ass, with its borderline extreme tendencies, centered within a traditional metal framework for an absolutely punishing display of tastefully blasting drums, monstrous riffs and surprisingly convincing vocals. This is the kind of song that demands to be cranked up. God Pounds His Nails is also one of the album’s heavier numbers, and while good, it lacks the skull-crushing, yet acutely melodic assault of Pray For Blood.

The more typical Fozzy sound, of heavy metal with slight, unobtrusive influences from groove and hard rock, comes into play on most other tracks; opener Under Blackened Skies shows the band waving their banner hard and with a firm sense of balance between their various influences, while tracks like Watch Me Shine and Martyr No More show the band in similar form to their previous album.

But its album closer Wormwood that truly showcases Fozzy’s evolution as a musical unit. This almost fourteen-minute epic based on the Book of Revelation doesn’t merely dabble in me-too prog territory, as many bands approaching such a feat for the first time may be want to do; no, it is a full-blooded prog song at its core, allowing itself to build naturally, rising from a humble acoustic cut to a full-on attack of memorable guitarwork, powerful vocal arrangements, a Hammond organ somewhere in the first half and even one movement with decently-executed harsh vocals. None of it feels out of place, either; the band shows amazing fluency in the style despite this being their first cut over ten minutes. If you like Dream Theater’s songs of this size but aren’t a fan of their extended instrumental sections (of which there are none here), make it your duty to check this. As relative to the rest of the record, it’s one of the finest climactic songs I’ve ever heard; considering the mythology being invoked, I almost look at it as a more organically-arranged counterpart to Iced Earth’s Dante’s Inferno.

It took Fozzy three albums in which to find their grounding as a totally original group, and another one in which to put forth what I think is a truly great record, but they’ve finally done it. Pick up this surprise smash and support a band that’s really put their best foot forward.

Nile - Those Whom The Gods Detest

Alright, credit where it’s due: Karl Sanders is probably the only songwriter who can title a song “Hittite Dung Incantation” and not have me chuckle on first hearing about it.

But that’s the special thing about Nile’s (once again well-researched) lyrics: despite the elaborately mythological, often explicitly brutal concepts they growl about, the lyrics take themselves entirely seriously, and not in a later-Cannibal Corpse way, where all that’s missing is some kind of tongue in cheek sensibility. Rather, Sanders’ way of lyric writing is from the perspective of one who so fervently believes in the brutal concepts being written about. To use an older example, the lyrics to Black Seeds Of Vengeance wouldn’t have been nearly effective if their gory aspects were played for shock value rather than as a desperate rallying cry.

That said, in any genre where the vocals are distorted so, the songwriting craft must play first fiddle to any aspect involving the vocals and lyrics. In that respect, and in the tradition of the killer Annihilation Of The Wicked, this album succeeds where the aforementioned Black Seeds did not.

The first thing to hit is the production: the wicked, deathly crunch of Kafir’s opening riff sets a tone of pitiless anger that gets carried throughout the record. That opening song will please fans like myself of Ithyphallic’s opener; though it carries a vaguely similar atmosphere, it’s a more compact listen. The drums have a less in-your-face sound than on this album’s predecessor, the quality-wise somewhat ambivalent Ithyphallic, letting the riffs and vocals steal the show. (bass? What’s a bass?)

The vocals are similar to Ithyphallic’s, in that you can probably understand most of the higher growls without the booklet, and this is a turn for the band that I prefer. But the booklet itself deserves a special look nonetheless: anyone disappointed with Ithyphallic’s lack of liner notes will be happy to know that they’re back, and just as informative, entertaining, and far lengthier than ever. Once again, they’re quite a fascinating read on their own terms.

My absolute highlight of this album is the title track: check the band’s signature reverberating acoustics, blended with the dominating riff attack and chorus bearing a strange, new quasi-clean vocal effect that manages to be downright chilling. While Nile has their hit and miss moments, here they manage to create a truly towering, imposing atmosphere.

The more compact songs – the aforementioned dung ditty, Permitting The Noble Dead etc., Utterances Of The Crawling Dead and so on, show Nile in traditional form, albeit bolstered by the production value. It seems that with the exception of the muddy Black Seeds Of Vengeance, Nile’s production improves with every release. I, for one, prefer their more sprawling work as opposed to the more compact numbers, but these aren’t bad. They flow together well, although taken separately, all but the most veteran of Nile aficionados may have difficulty telling them apart.

Karl Sanders is a musician who seems bent on pushing his songwriting and performance abilities with each successive release, and this album is a finely balanced example of brutalizing, yet distinctive modern death metal. It’s not perfect, yet it still deserves a place in the extreme metal fan’s library.