Awhile ago I mentioned something about Heavy Metal. I figured I should start working on that. Lets start with a story of metal and me. My cousin Stacie was into metal starting with Def Leppard. That didn't influence me much it was the artwork. I remember drawing Eddy off the back of some guy's shirt in English. I was in middle school so that's 7ths grade. I remember seeing an Iron Maiden concert on Mtv that summer and being like eek they are scary evil. I started watching some metal show called Hard 30 and Headbangers ball and got into the weak hair metal. Then into sort of the dungeons and dragons sounding speed metal that people were playing. Down hill from then on.
I guess you can say N.W.O.B.H.M. ,prog metal and speed/trash metal are my favorites. That is the new wave of British heavy metal, bud. Bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Venom, Angel Witch, Diamond head and def lep. It's usually complex technical music with a strong voiced tenor that screams like an air raid siren. Prog Metal is a movement to graft in bands like Yes and King Crimson. Rush's Caress of steel and Deep Purple are sort of a genesis of this. Modern bands are Dream Theater, Fates Warning, Voivod, countless others you can find at Rastupin records in Campbell. Speed metal is the evolution of nwobhm / reaction to hair metal centered in the Bay Area. Metallica and Megadeth are thrash. Testament which refined the sound down a bit with Alex Skolnik is speed metal but a better example is Cacophony. This music is virtuoso fast and to quote Strongbad "meedlie meedlie medlie meedlie!"
In the spirit of High Fidelity here is my top five metal records
Bruce Dickinson - The Chemical Wedding
Testament - The Legacy
Black Sabbath - Mob Rules
Voivod - Nothingface
Slayer - Reign in Blood
Give em a try there will be more coming on this
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1 comment:
Black Sabbath's Mob Rules is a great album. It certainly set a kind of standard in the early 80's. I think Judas Priest goes back to the mid to late seventies, as do Iron Maiden? Certainly, pioneers in that new wave from over there. Great bands, an intereseting time. The late 60's said goodbye to peace and love, the seventies said to hell with all of that, and proceeded to find some darker, heavier place in wihcih to draw from, perhaps somepace not desireable, but more realistic, more honest. After all, was peace and love going to ever really happen, no!! So, Black Sabbath crawled out from under some dark cloud and showed us the other side of the world, where the chords are heavy and the vision dark. That is heavy metal. That is where I think it was really born, some dirty dark corner of Birmingham, England.
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