Every year in November the ABC hosts Australian Music Month, and every year in November I listen to an Australia album every day, and share the picture on our socials.
Day 0: Kings of the Sun - Full Frontal Attack
Why Day 0? Well I made my career in the IT industry, and IT personnel know that numbers in computing start at zero, and so does our annual countdown.
Kings of the Sun were a band that were in a similar league to the hair metal bands of the LA strip in the 80s, but they were much more streetwise, and nowhere near as gratuitously ridiculous and grandiose as Motley Crue, RATT or Poison. Their first album was produced in America by Eddie Kramer, famous for working with Led Zeppelin among other artists. It had a big polished sound, but none of their singles charted higher than #47 in Australia and their albums sold well, but not well enough to be remembered.
Full Frontal Attack was produced by William Wittman and did poorly in the marketplace, despite some provocative press advertising.
As a record, it still stands up, but I still reach for their first album as a preference. This one has a few flat spots in terms of songs, but tracks like "Drop The Gun" are indispensable.
This year, June 4 marks 25 years of the release of Metallica’s controversial album “Load”. Although it was a huge seller at the time, it drove an ideological wedge through the band’s fanbase, and even between band members. The story is a rich and complex one, and one that really needs to ask questions of both band and their fans.
Metal fans are an unforgiving bunch. They know what they want from their favourite band, or so they think. They want the same thing but better than last time. This goes a long way to explaining why a Status Quo record from 2010 sounds a lot like one from 1972. Yet for creative types, musicians especially, it can get tiring retreading the same formula over and over again. The problem is that fans are always the first to tell their heroes “I've followed you from the very beginning, but what you’re doing now is a travesty, man”.
It reminds me of that scene in the Simpsons where Bart and Lisa are persuaded to participate in the focus group about cartoon show Itchy and Scratchy, and their responses lead creator Roger Meyers Jr to snap at them “you kids don’t know what you like!”
Herein lies the problem. How can Metallica, one of the most influential metal bands of the late 20th century, a band who were one of the defining acts of a new genre called “Thrash Metal”, diversify and try something new, still keep their muse intact, and yet keep their fans happy? If they go one way, they’ll be hammered for doing the same thing as they’ve always done and this time it sounds boring. If they move too far away from their “signature sound”, they’ll be criticised for sounding nothing like they used to. Metallica fans had already been asked to relax their standards to accept the new glistening and streamlined sound on the band’s 1991 self titled album, after the band explained that the complex arrangements of the songs on their 1988 album “...And Justice for All” were too complex to pull off successfully on stage.
As music fans, we don’t know what we want, really.
And let’s face it. We didn’t know we needed Metallica, or Nirvana or the Beatles or ANYONE of any of the millions of artists and musicians in our lives until we heard them for the first time, right? So how do we know if any new record by any band is worth listening to?
And is “Load” any good, after all this time and listening to it again with fresh ears?
Well it depends on what your metric for evaluation of it is.
Does it stand up against the band’s classic works that came before?
And does it hang together as a body of songs unto itself?
On both fronts, “Load” is found wanting.
“Load” was never going to hold a candle to “Master of Puppets” or “Ride the Lightning”. Nor could it - as musicians and as people, the members of Metallica had changed. They were never going to write those sorts of songs again. Change is inevitable, but rarely is it accepted by metal fans who just want loud and heavy. As a work that explores new horizons, it is admirable and brave, but it misses all the aspects of Metallica that make them unique. Instead of incorporating new directions into their sound, they spend too much time trying to sound like other bands. Bands like Clutch, Kyuss and Gov’t Mule, who were likely influenced by Metallica originally, and bands who do this kind of groove-heavy sound better.
As a body of songs? Well...the band have put all their stock in the riffs and forgotten to write melodies to most of these songs. And the riffs themselves aren’t terribly interesting. Standard blues rock fare that has been done a million times before, with a leaden backbeat that doesn’t know how to swing.
Knowing what Metallica’s fanbase is like, it takes some balls to put out a song like “Mama Said”, with its loose country twang and lap steel guitars on it. It also takes some guts to put out “Until It Sleeps” which was so clearly influenced by grunge that it sounds like an outtake from a Smashing Pumpkins album. They get credit for being daring in the face of audience expectations, but it doesn’t make them highlights.
If there is a jewel anywhere in this rusty crown of a record, it is “Hero of the Day”, which has a gorgeous heartbroken melody and good use of swelling dynamics. A highlight on an overlong album with very few of them. At 79 minutes long, the album has a lot of noise but is short on clever configurations of it. I should be thankful that it’s not a longer album. The final track “The Outlaw Torn” had to be trimmed of 50 seconds in order for the album to fit on one CD.
Most, if not all of the hair metal bands who survived the grunge explosion of 1991 were given a bit of a kick up the butt from the younger upstarts of the new scene, leading many to evolve and change their look and sound. Metallica did the same, cutting their hair (Shock! Horror!) and trying to move in new directions. The first fruits of these changes are on “Load” and despite spending 12 months recording it, Metallica still came up with something that is less than the sum of its parts.
In a strange way, the harbinger for the disastrous few years to come after the release of this album was when singer James Hetfield and bassist Jason Newstead made a trip to Australia in person to appear on Triple J’s Request Fest in May 1996 to premiere the album’s lead single “Until it Sleeps”. They played the song twice and Hetfield and Newstead took talkback from the fans, who largely panned it. This led to many callers getting a serve from Newstead, being told they weren’t real fans because they couldn’t understand where they were coming from. “Load” then only sold about a quarter of what their previous self-titled album sold. And then the Napster thing happened. Then things turned into a full blown crisis when it came to record what eventually became the “St Anger” album, with the band hiring a “personal enhancement coach” to counsel the band and to sort out their personal issues before a record could be made, as seen in the film “Some Kind of Monster”.
To the credit of the band, they have managed to stave off the heat of criticism by keeping a steady stream of fan club only releases of live sets from the “golden” era, keeping fans happy while trying out new things on their albums, including a highly controversial duet project with Lou Reed, but that’s for another time…
Inimitable frontman for Motorhead and former bass player for Hawkwind, Lemmy has died at age 70 after a short battle with illness.
Lemmy's rock and roll lifestyle has never been up for debate. Indeed, he never hid his vices either. The faster and louder aesthetic was, in a sense, a musical reflection of how he lived. However, he always seemed unflappable. He always seemed as though he was rock solid. Despite the fact he often sang about living in the moment and not giving a shit about tomorrow, it felt like he'd be around forever.
From a musical standpoint, his bass playing was more akin to a rhythm guitar player. Heavily strummed with a pick and played at massive volume, it had its own unique sound. You knew instinctively, as soon as it starts, that it's Motorohead.
The last album Motorhead released, "Bad Magic" was issued in 2015 when Lemmy was 69. It's one of the loudest and heaviest things the band have ever done. There was no signs of slowing down, or even changing the well-worn formula. Age did not weary him.
Putting aside the ridiculous admission of an Australian entry into Eurovision 2015 for just a moment, Finland have just chosen the act to represent them in multi-national song contest in 2015.
Now, normally this wouldn't get so much of an airing, except for the fact that the band is quite exceptional. They are the first punk rock band to represent anything at Eurovision in its entire 60 year year history for a start. But the real talking point is that the band is made up of middle aged men who have Down's Syndrome and/or Autism.
Singer Kari Aalto told a Finnish broadcaster : “Every person with a disability ought to be braver. He or she should themselves say what they want and do not want.”
And I couldn't agree more.
Far from being a gimmick, here is a band that are doing things their own way and are making a good fist of it. They're not letting anything in their way. This is a bold move on the part of the band. They ain't ABBA, but I hope they go a long way.
Now come on Wiwibloggs. Really? Since when has Eurovision been about music? If anything, in recent years Eurovision has been more about the dresses of the female singers and the schlock and awe of some of the entrants, especially some of the more sexually ambiguous ones - Romania, I'm looking at you.
Seriously though, this should be a feel-good story for all of us. PKN are choosing to ignore the obstacles and doing things their way. I wish them every success in Vienna in May.
Check out the song that PKN are performing in the contest below, entitled "Aina Mun Pitää”
The last time Finland won the contest was the only time they ever won the contest, and that was in 2006, with a performance by horror-metal band Lordi. Lordi were a band who make Kiss look like a church choir. Their performance of their winning song "Hard Rock Hallelujah" is a sight to behold and it shook up the contest in a big way. Take a look below:
HI Folks, we're back on deck after the summer holidays.
You gotta love the post Christmas sales, with heaps of cheap music available. Here's a quick review of an album I scored on the cheap.
It wouldn't be a long bow to draw to suggest that Monster Magnet bridged the gap between the Grunge explosion of the early 1990s and the Post-Grunge period of the start of the new Millennium, that gave us horrible bands like Nickelback, Creed, Default, and Staind.
I'd heard a few of their songs during the 90s, but paid them scant attention. They peddled a type of stoner rock that borrowed heavily from Black Sabbath, not too dissimilar to Kyuss and label-mates Soundgarden who were their peers. Unlike the aforementioned bands, Monster Magnet churn out a watered down, paint-by-numbers sound that tries too hard to justify its own existence. Lyrically they try too hard to have you believe they're really stoner rockers, as if constantly mentioning weed and pills is going to prove they're legit. They play guitar riffs that lack personality but are overdubbed to be pummeling. They have a vocalist in the form of Dave Wyndorf who is neither melodic nor memorable.
In other words, the perfect template, albeit watered down somewhat, for Nickelback and their similarly uninspired peers.
So are there any virtues to this release? Firstly, the term "Greatest Hits" is loosely applied, in this writer's view. The band never had anything like a chart hit, except a couple of tracks on the Billboard Modern Rock chart. This album collects album tracks, singles that were issued that scored radio play around the tracks, such as the deplorable "Space Lord" that commercial rock radio in Sydney used to play incessantly. It also collects four b-sides and compilation tracks on disc 2, as well as a CD-extra part that is played in a PC with a stack of the bands videos.
Most of the tracks on this album sound like a band trying to be in the same league as Kyuss and falling way short of the mark. Writing lyrics about taking pills or "driving a tractor on the drug farm" sound like a band trying to prove they're in the same league as the cool kids.
The b-sides, although few, are somewhat interesting, but the Black Sabbath cover among them is horrendous. Pretty much anything off the first 6 Sabbath albums featuring Ozzy Osbourne is bomb-proof: in the hands of any halfway competent garage band they still sound great. Taking a straight forward track like "Into The Void", opening it with a bizarre psychosis-induced rant about dinosaurs in Vietnam which drags on for almost two whole minutes before the song kicks in. Ending with another bizarre and heavily expletive laden rant, the mix contains way too many overdubs and additions that turn it into a long and very ugly 8 minutes - it's a monumental catastrophe of a track.
Highlights include radio favourites "Dopes to Infinity", "Powertrip" and "Negasonic Teenage Warhead" as well as "Silver Future" and "Black Balloons".
Take a listen below and you decide for yourself. I reckon you'd be better off spending your money on a Soundgarden album instead.
"Hands Up, Who Wants to Die?" Cheery imposition, isn't it? And, not surprisingly, I don't see too many hands up either.
What's interesting about this release is also one of the more confusing aspects to it. The contents of the EP are made up of 6 remixes of the eponymous song. Each remix is retitled after the style of music it has been remixed into - "Hands up who Wants EBM?", "Hands Up Who Wants Metal?", "Hands Up Who Wants Dubstep?" and so on. A novel concept, to be sure. But it's confusing because what does the original version sound like? Which version on the EP is actually the original version?
Still, what you have here is a version in one of 6 different styles, playing to the strengths of the band and cleverly using a broad knowledge of music in which to transmute their sound. The result allows the song to be played in different arenas for different purposes - on alternative rock radio, in a goth club, in a warehouse rave party DJ set.
The "Metal" version is probably the closest to the Astronauts signature sound. Chugging guitars, swirling synths and David Bury's strangled-seagull vocal delivery. He tends to oscillate wildly between a man channeling Johnny Cash in goth makeup and someone having their teeth extracted as the numbness wears off. Seriously, it's a very arresting combination, and it's the version that works best in my view. That's not to take anything away from the remixes, each of which have their own unique character and flavour, while staying true to the core elements of the band's sound.
It's an interesting experiment, and one worthy of a serious listen. Get into it below.
Here is the final in our series of amazing talent from Adelaide, South Australia.
Kaleidoscope
Kaleidoscope are NOT the same band as the US psychedelic band of the 1960s. These guys play a kind of noisy, catchy post-grunge with a small degree of feminist leanings in the lyrics. Bassist Kylie Cowling and her partner Craig Lewis have been instrumental in nurturing many bands in the Adelaide area with showcase events like "Show Us Your Riffs" and producing music for other artists in their own studio.
The Superjesus
The Superjesus formed in 1994. They took their name in homage to the many bands who have "Super" and "Jesus" in their name (i.e. Supertramp, Superchunk, Supergrass, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Jesus Lizard, Jesus Jones et al). They had a sound that was equal parts Smashing Pumpkins-esque gutteral rumble and sweet songbird pop, thanks to the layers of overdriven guitars throughout their music, with Sarah McLeod's sweet vocals floating over the top. Their lineup was destabilised after founding member Chris Tennant left in 1999, but then Tim Henwood joined and the band went from strength to strength. But then he left and the band laboured on for a final album as a three piece before calling it a day in 2004.
Testeagles
The Testeagles were a band that fused hip-hop, rap, techno and metal into a furious blend. Known for their fiery live performances, they have been plagued with issues with record labels, resulting in most of the music not actually reaching the general public. Their only LP, "Non Comprehendus", issued in 2000, summed up their sound in the most intense, speaker-damaging fashion, riding the wave of Nu-Metal that was current at the time (and they did it better than most of the better known exponents of that style), but were dropped by their label not long after it was issued. They laboured for the next few years, picking up many shows on the Festival circuit and called it a day in 2008.
Groove Terminator
Groove Terminator is a hip-hop DJ and producer who achieved notoriety in the late 1990s-early 2000s with infectious party jams like "Here Comes Another One". He has also mixed a few Ministry of Sound compilations and is still a highly sought after performer on the club circuit.
The Mark Of Cain
The Mark Of Cain formed in 1984 by two brothers, both ex-Army members, John and Kim Scott. It took the band four years to get their first releases out, on Sydney indie label Phantom, and their popularity was at its peak between 1995 and 2002. Their sound is extremely heavy and aggressive, inspired by combat, with songs like "Battlesick" and "Ill At Ease". They are a ferocious live band, and can count among their fans such rock music heavyweights as Black Flag singer Henry Rollins.
The Audreys
The Audreys are a rootsy folk band formed in 2004. Usually consisting of two core members, lead singer Taasha Coates and guitarist Tristan Goodall, the band is often augmented with a number of session musicians and live players for tours. Their albums are highly rated by critics and they have a solid live following.
The Mad Turks from Istanbul
The Mad Turks from Istanbul started as a power-pop band featuring a young Charles Jenkins (now of Charles Jenkins and the Zhivagos) on vocals. They were signed to Greasy Pop records in 1987. After the release of their first record, Cafe Istanbul in 1988, they relocated to Melbourne and renamed themselves The Mad Turks. After the failure of their second album, "Toast" in 1990, the band split up and regrouped in 1992 under the name Icecream Hands, and went on to be far more successful, with the ARIA nominated album "Sweeter Than The Radio" in 1999.
Hilltop Hoods
Hilltop Hoods are a hip-hop collective from the Adelaide suburb of Eden Hills. They formed in 1991 and comprise of MC Suffa, MC Pressure and DJ Debris. They are now one of the most well known, if not THE most well known, Australian rappers, but they haven't had it easy. It took years for Australians to warm to the sound of Australians rapping in their own accent, with most people only accepting rap music performed by Americans (the nation who actually invented the form). Despite this, in 2006 their album "A Hard Road" was one of the best selling locally produced albums that year. Their last three album releases have shot to the top of the local album charts and they have a voracious live following.
This marks the end of our musical trip to Adelaide. We hope you have enjoyed it.
How often these days, in the context of a pop album, is a standalone character with an interesting personality introduced?
*tumbleweeds*
The Infectious Grooves were a funk-metal side project of Suicidal Tendencies members Mike Muir and (future Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica bassist) Robert Trujillo, and Jane's Addiction drummer Steve Perkins. Their first album "The Plague That Makes Your Booty Move..." in 1991 features some vicious funk workouts interspersed with some skits about a wise cracking, jive-talking reptilian lover named Aladdin Sarsippius Sulemenagic Jackson, the Third, trying to get into the studio to lay down some vocals for the band, but he can't convince the security guard to let him in.
Sarsippius is voiced by singer Mike Muir, and he's a rather endearing little cheekpot. The first album didn't have him singing any tunes, but he did hint at having hits (that no-one ever seems to have heard of) called "Whipped Cream (Put It All Over Your Body) and "The Love You Will Find Is The Love That You Will Never Find 'Cos It's The Love That Is Not Always Able To Be Found".
On the second album, 1993's "Sarsippius' Ark", he gets space for a tune, called "Spreck". This is one little funky monster of a tune, truly the definition of an "infectious groove" is ever there was one. Rob Trujillo plays the coolest bass line I think I've ever heard him play, while our man 'Sip tries to convince his "layday" to "Spreck" with him.
I have no idea what "Sprecking" is. Is it a distortion of the German word "Sprechen" which means "speaking"? If so, it makes something so simple sound so sinister, and downright fun!
Check out the YouTube clip below, kick back and "Spreck it, y'all".
Music journalists seriously have a case to answer for. Especially ones who write for rags like the NME and Melody Maker. These people who, for some reason, just invent names for styles, scenes or genres of music that they feel need a name.
No longer content to call music "Rock", or "Pop", or "Metal", now there's Death Metal, Hardcore, Extreme Hardcore, Metalcore, Mathrock, Deathcore, Emocore, Screamocore, Grindcore, Nintendocore (yep - apparently that's a thing), Brit-pop, New Wave of New Wave and who knows what else.
The funniest one I have heard in a long time was not featured in this article, but is just as random. It is...
...wait for it...
CRABCORE.
Yep - you read that right. Crab. Core. The name is just as stupid as the term "Baggy" was for describing the sound of the Stone Roses. (Baggy came about because in the video for one of the Roses' songs, Ian Brown wore a loose-fitting, or "baggy", shirt. And so a sub-genre was born...)
Crabcore. For those who don't know (which pretty much describes, well, everybody) it is a style of heavy music, not unlike Emo (another contrived and ridiculous genre name) but it is so named because of the way the band members stand and hold their instruments.
(click to enlarge)
That's right - they look like crabs.
Tim Berners-Lee might think the internet is the place to solve everybody's information needs, but when you let the weirdos loose on it, you get crap like this.
The exponent of this earth-shattering genre we will witness plying their trade below is a US band called Attack! Attack! Note the presence of a rather attractive blonde girl throughout the clip. She seems to have her hands over her ears for most of it. Coincidence? You be the judge.
It's interesting evaluating an artist's work after his or her passing. Especially one whose life and work was so heavily marked and affected by their own life choices.
With Alice In Chains, of course I'm talking about the late Layne Staley, whose heroin addiction was the prism through which his world view was seen, and as such that is the prism that, for better or worse, his lyrics and music was filtered through.
Ultimately, it was this addiction that claimed his life, but it also incapacitated him, and effectively ran the band off the road, right at the height of their career in the mid-1990s.
When I first heard the band's breakthrough single "Would?" in 1992 at the insistence of a schoolmate of mine, I hated it. As the band's legend grew, and their reputation as hard drug users, my interest in the band was killed off.
It was this unplugged show that changed my mind. Hearing it purely in audio format, the power of the music is what shone through. The songs are uniformly strong and almost always feature the bands trademark harmonies, which are almost always a perfect fifth, lacking a major or minor tonal centre.
The beauty of the "Unplugged" format was that you got to see and hear the artists without the layers of effects and distortion applied to their instruments. This didn't work too well for Nirvana (in my view) but in the case of Alice In Chains, it was a perfect demonstration of their strengths while removing the aspects of their sound that they would usually hide behind.
This album proved to me that here was a band with a strong back catalog with talented musicians who can blend their various talents in an impressive format.
The band obviously draw heavily from their two acoustic EPs "Jar of Flies" and "Sap", but they treat us to acoustic arrangements of songs from their heavy albums too. Of particular note is the acoustic treatment of "Down In A Hole" which sounds like it should have been acoustic all along.
Recorded in 1996, it turns out that this was one of the last public performances by Alice In Chains. It was the first for some time, and one of the last with Layne, who died in early 2002. As such, Layne looks like he spent the entire show in a typical kind of narcotic haze that makes you wonder how he managed to play this show at all. Still, it is great to have such a wonderful souvenir of the band's talents in their rawest form.
Apparently, tickets were extremely hard to come by to this show, and were offered up at something like US$300 a pop (unheard of at the time). The four members of Metallica had front row seats. Bassist Mike Inez wasted no time getting stuck into the Metallica lads and their (then) brand-new short haired look (it's a heinous crime to cut your hair if you're a metal band, apparently) by scrawling "Friends don't let friends get friends haircuts..." (sic) on his bass.
Anyway, here below is the full performance of Alice In Chains unplugged, complete with between-song improv stuff, and a stuff-up and retake of "Sludge Factory". There is a few choice words in this broadcast that would make it somewhat Not Safe For Work and small children, just so that you are warned.
During a visit to the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) yesterday, I heard a story about a project a student was working on, which was developing an exo-skeleton, for those who are disabled or who suffer from reduced muscle capabilities.
This exoskeleton fits to the exterior of a person and has sensors, motors that can increase and decrease the amount of torque applied, with the purpose of giving the wearer increased strength.
Does that concept sound familiar to you? It kinda did to me...
...and a suitably heavy guitar riff to match the heavy hardware of the wearer...:
I was listening to this the other day and some young and impressionable tried to tell me this was "screamo". What the hell is Screamo anyway? Is that some kind of derogatory description of hard and fast music that they probably don't like?
Who cares anyway. There's nothing like a bit of vintage hardcore punk to remind you that you're alive. And what better than a band like Broken Bones to deliver it to you.
In 1989, after a career languishing in the doldrums through most of the previous decade, Alice Cooper hit paydirt. Aligning himself with the current crop of Big-hair-and-Glam-metal bands, his then current LP "Trash" was a perfect fit for the style at the time. Even the lead single "Poison", with it's lead guitar intro, sounded like a sibling to "Sweet Child O'Mine" by Guns 'n Roses.
Of course, this sudden surge of popularity caused the more curious music fans to dig deeper into Alice's back catalog. Some of the records from the 80s were hard to come by, such as "Dada" or "Zipper Catches Skin", while "Pretties for You" was impossible to find at all.
Slowly but surely, by hanging out with these guys, I absorbed most of Alice's albums by osmosis. Slowly I purchased all the albums myself, but certain ones stick out as favourites.
"Love it to Death" is actually the band's third album and probably still the anomaly in Alice's discography. For many years it was the band's earliest available recorded music (Rhino, having absorbed the non-Zappa releases on his Bizarre and Straight labels, have only, in the last 10 years, reissued the first two LPs) and it features the band in a pivotal time in their development.
The band were trying to find their look and sound on this record. They knew they wanted to create shock and outrage and, looking at the front cover, they were about 20 years ahead of their time. Like David Bowie (on the cover of "The Man Who Sold The World") they were wearing women's clothing. In 1971, this was guaranteed to upset the moral majority in America and elsewhere. They then changed the image to be a more macabre image, with gore and blood on stage, as this would in fact pay greater dividends. As Jayne County said in an interview for the BBC program "Dancing in the Street", they were on the right track but "Americans understand horror", not transgender-ism and androgyny.
Musically they had hit upon a nice mix of melody, heavy metal crunch, prog-rock structure and experimentation. The proto-metal the band would be famous for gets its first run here. The hit from the LP "I'm Eighteen" still strikes a chord with disaffected kids, even those two generations removed from the kids listening to this on first release. Ironic then, that when the band recorded this, the average age of the members was 22.
The first three tracks leap out of the gate like a bat out of hell, solid rockers, all of them. Track 4 is "Black Juju", a Doors-esque post-psychedelic freakout. It shows hints of the calculated weirdness from their first two albums, but it is buffed with a palatable sheen that makes it easier to listen to.
The jewel in the album's crown is the 1-2 punch of "Second Coming" and "The Ballad of Dwight Fry". "Second Coming" plays like the overture for the main feature, but it is a sombre rumination on mortality and madness before segueing into "Dwight Fry", which is a full-on examination of an institutionalised mental patient. This is clearly the precursor to tracks on mental illness that have turned up on later record like "From The Inside".
After 6-and-a-half minutes of "Dwight Fry", track 9 follows on straight away with no space. It is a version of (wait for it) "Sun Arise" by Rolf Harris. In a sense it is the dawn after the darkness of the previous two tracks, and makes perfect sense...at least it did 42 years before the ugliness of the accusations that have since surfaced about Mr Harris...
Alice Cooper had hit on their future direction here and, on successive records until the band imploded in 1974 (on successive records, lead singer Vincent Furnier took the name for himself as a stage moniker) they further refined the blueprint.
For my money it's the best record they ever made, with the first follow-up "Killer" a close second. Even if these albums (both released in 1971) were 20 years old when I got into them, they were still fresh and timeless, even then.
Today brings us the news that former Iron Maiden drummer Clive Burr has shuffled off the mortal coil. Not being a big Iron Maiden fan, and only being into a few key tracks, I still took a minute to reflect on his work. He played in Samson before leaving to join Iron Maiden, in which he played on their first three LPs (Iron Maiden, Killers, The Number of the Beast) and then left, for reasons my research has not been able to provide me with.
His passing was due to Multiple Sclerosis, or MS for short. By all accounts, the final stages of MS are horrific and I am glad to say that despite this Clive, by all accounts, kept his spirits up and his humour and battled hard until the end. While knowledge of MS is common, it is still misunderstood, so a small positive of this is that Clive's untimely passing will raise some attention towards the plight of MS sufferers.
He was a great drummer, there's no question of that. Check out his work on a Maiden classic, from 1982: Run To The Hills.
Well it's the start of another month and therefore the end of another one. That means it's time to share with you the latest Spotify playlist of our musical travels here at The Sound and the Fury Podcast Blog.
What can you expect this month? Well, about 12 hours of great music for a start. Including:
Tunes from new releases by Johnny Marr, Tomahawk, Arbouretum, Parquet Courts, The Delta Riggs and Local Natives
Tunes from The Troggs (Reg Presley), Mindy Mcready and Tony Sheridan in memorium
Classics from Donovan, Faces, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Muse, Prince, The Motels
A beautiful laid back jam from Buckethead and Travis Dickerson which has to be heard to be believed.
and heaps, heaps more.
Put it on random, crank it up and discover your new favourite song!
Wet and cold on the east coast of Australia today. But despite this comes the latest Spotify playlist from The Sound and the Fury. And it's cool and groovy and warm and delectable and awesome.
You'll find delights within such as:
New stuff from San Cisco, Biffy Clyro, Birds of Tokyo, Calling All Astronauts and Bored Nothing
Hidden gems from Andy Clockwise, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Buffalo Tom and Hey Ocean!
Classics from Free, Herman's Hermits, Small Faces, Bo Diddley, Louis Jordan and Hunters and Collectors
Extended jams and workouts from Branford Marsalis, Jimi Hendrix and Healing Force
Classic Oz tracks in honour of Australia Day from INXS, Matt Finish, Mondo Rock, Mental as Anything and Screamfeeder
Laid back grooves from Bob Marley, Damian Marley and The Melodians, not to mention an appearance from Rastamouse & Da Easy Crew!!!
and some crazy crap from Peter Sellers, Scared Weird Little Guys, Parry Gripp and Tripod
and heaps more. Put it on random, crank it up and have some fun. Discover your new favourite tune.
One-time Sydney Triple J Unearthed winners Sick Puppies are now based in LA. There's a new LP coming later this year (that would be number 4) but in the meantime, let's check out some classic stuff from their first record "Welcome to the Real World". This was the song (albeit in re-recorded form) that won them the Unearthed prize: "Nothing Really Matters".
