Category: reviews

Most people who even know anything about Grim Reaper only know them from an episode of Beavis and Buttheadthat savagely made fun of a video of their most popular tune, “See You in Hell,” with one of the cartoon duo saying that they looked like a band you’d see at the county fair. If I was a typical metal fan that required total allegiance to bands that weren’t good but were still an “influence” or whatever, I would have been pretty upset by that cartoon. But, I’m not stupid like that, so I thought it was pretty damn funny, because face it: for the most part, Grim Reaper really did suck.

I actually did listen to these guys back in the day, mostly because a friend of mine made a mix tape called “Heavy Metal Hell” and it had a cut from each of the English band’s three albums. That made me rush out and buy their third (and last) album, Rock You to Hell, which made me think that even though they weren’t very original with their song titles, they sounded okay. This was also at a point when I was buying a lot of thrash metal, and maybe in comparison, it didn’t seem that bad. I lost or sold the tape a year or two later, and didn’t think much of it for a long time.

When trying to buy back a lot of my old favorites on CD, I picked up this compilation, which offered 17 cuts on one disc. As far as representing their three albums, there are most of the basics here, like “See You In Hell,” “Fear No Evil,” “Rock You To Hell,” “Waysted Love,” and “Suck It And See.” (ugh…) As you can see, these guys were not exactly prolific in the ability to come up with neat song titles. Maybe if they would have taken a note from Carcass and bought a medical thesaurus, their career would have lasted a bit longer.

Upon listening to the tracks, I really wonder why I ever liked these guys. As far as the basics, these guys are a typical NWOBHM-influenced early thrash band, with a very standard chorus-verse-solo-repeat style, nothing more. Their lead singer, Steve Grimmett, mostly belts out a bad falsetto that sounds like someone trying to imitate Don Dokken, although he occasionally does some “sexy” homoerotic grunts and “uhs” in various places. And Grimmett isn’t exactly the kind of guy you’d want up front in spandex, thrusting his codpiece against the mic stand. I guess other English frontmen like Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickenson or even Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott have been able to front a band with an equal lack of physical glam, but it just doesn’t work here. Maybe I liked this band so much in the 80s because back then, MTV didn’t play their videos, and I just didn’t know how Spinal Tap-eque they looked.

As for the actual songs, some of them are surprisingly similar, almost like they found a good melody and structure and just re-used it over and over. “See You in Hell” and “Now or Never” have such similar introductions, I thought my CD was messed up for a minute. Older stuff like “See You in Hell” sounds almost like a demo in quality, very compressed and tinny. They predictably have the cliched heavy metal “rain and thunder” intro on the song “Let the Thunder Roar”, and “Final Scream” has this weird intro with a screaming girl and a synthesized voice that is possible the worst King Diamond rip-off ever.

That said, some of cuts from their third album, Rock You to Hell, aren’t bad. I think they got the production figured out by then, with a much thicker sound, and the lead guitar work is more Dokken-eque, with good leads and tappy emphasis stuff here and there, but without totally showing off. The title cut, plus “Lust For Freedom” and “Waysted Love” are particularly decent metal from 1987. Grimmett’s vocals aren’t howling or shrieking, and although it’s not exactly Rob Halford or anything, they’re a dot or two ahead of the curve. I can’t ignore their song “Suck it and See”, though. Aside from the fact that this is a completely hilarious yet stupid song title, the actual song itself is pretty bad. You’d think with a title like that, it might be some sort of brutal, sexist theme song, like a thrashier version of “Ram it Down.” Instead, it’s this half-speed, swingy number that makes absolutely no sense.

In retrospect, I probably should have listened to these songs online somewhere and realized that it wasn’t worth having the first two albums, then bought the third and called it a day. It’s sad that a 17-song collection by a band that only had 26 published songs could actually not have two or three songs that I really wanted to hear. It’s even more sad that those 26 songs would probably fit on a CD with 40 minutes to spare. I think this whole thing is an exercise on how to not put together a collection.

Rating: 4

After the release of Keeper of the Seven Keys, Pt. 2, you’d think the world would be great for Helloween, since it cracked the top 30 in England, but instead, it turned into a world of shit for the band. First, their leader and guitar player Kai Hansen freaked out and quit the band on the verge of a tour. Then, they got a deal with EMI to buy them out of their contract with Noise Records, but it tied them up in a huge legal dispute for over two years. The product of that dispute was three live EPs, released by EMI to keep the band alive during their troubles.

I have to admit that I bought the US version of the EP when it came out. (There are also UK and Japanese versions, with different recordings, but only slightly different setlists. Oh, and the EPs have Kai Hansen on guitar, they were recorded before he split.) And for whatever reason, I listened to it a LOT. I still listen to it now and again. But I have to be honest with you: 85 percent of this 42-minute album is completely useless. I know, that’s heresey, but it’s true! Since it’s short enough, I will break it down for you track by track.

1: Intro/A Little Time: They waste a lot of time with the crowd chanting “happy Helloween.” Okay, I timed it, and it’s only like 25 seconds, but it’s such a huge waste of time, and this is a short album that’s only made to make us pay to keep thinking about the band until they put out another album, right? The song is not bad, with very Bruce Dickinson-sounding lyrics that are pretty tight, but then about three minutes in, there’s some vamping part that’s in there to kill time, probably while vocalist Michael Kiske slaps hands with people in the front row or something stupid.

2: Doctor Stein: Kiske spends TWO AND A HALF MINUTES babbling like a drunken idiot before the song starts. The song is okay, except where Kiske inserts a “1-2-3-4” before singing part of a verse, which drives me fucking homicidal.

3: Future World: About a minute and a half of rambling and guitar tomfoolery until the song starts up. Kiske tries to get the audience to sing the first verse, and only about three people know the words. For fuck’s sake, if you are singer, DO YOUR JOB and sing the song instead of trying to get the audience to sing it. Nobody cares.
Seriously. He does this in one or two other places, with predictable results. Then about six minutes into the song, they go into one of those huge audience participation wastes of time where the drums keep the same beat, and the guitar does dumb shit for six bars, and then the singer tries to get everyone to sing, etc. Iron Maiden did it on the song “Running Free” and it wasn’t even cool when they did it.

4: We Got the Right: About thirty seconds of guitar noodling, which is actually better than the song. I hate this song for some reason. It’s just mid-paced ballady bullshit. I wish the US version
of this EP had something better here.

5: I Want Out: Finally! A really good song, no stupid intros, no audience sing-alongs. Unfortunately, it only lasts four minutes, and then we get a bunch of chanting of “here we go, here we go, here we go,” as Kiske tries to rev the audience up for an encore. Another two minutes are wasted, as he sets up the next song.

6: How Many Tears: Perfect. Nine whole minutes, a great song, good solos, the lyrics are great, and it’s a great choice to end a set. THIS IS GOOD. I even like the fake finish and total speedy climax thing they do halfway through the song.

This album could be good. I’d up my score by two points if it was trimmed of all banter by the lead singer, and if track four was replaced, and maybe one other track was added to make up for the difference. I don’t have the other two import EPs, so maybe that’s what they did. But otherwise, this is just awful. This should serve as an example to all other bands who put out a live album that we really don’t care what is on your singer’s mind. Just play your damn songs. I’m sorry this is such a low review, and for some reason, I still listen to this a lot. But it’s also trained me how to operate the fast-forward on my iPod, so keep that in mind.

Rating: 5 (but the last track is like an 8)

Every once in a while, I listen to a CD that I am almost certain no human on the face of the earth would ever listen to. For example, take this CD by the Keith Emerson-derivitave band simply called 3. This CD, called …To the Power of Three consists of eight songs that are top-40 friendly in the same way that the exceedingly sterile Pink Floyd album A Momentary Lapse of Reason was supposed to be radio-friendly. With a reunion of former ELP stars Emerson on keys and drummer Carl Palmer, the band was fronted by Bay-Area producer and singer/songwriter Robert Berry.

This is a 1988 attempt at a serious rock album, back on the tail end of when Asia was charting pop tunes, and Yes actually got a smidge of mainstream airplay and even time on MTV. (Anyone else remember the April Fool’s day when they played like 267 different versions of the video “Leave It,” with the band upside down and singing? Except they swapped out band members for roadies and office staff at the studio and whoever else for the different iterations, and even played some of the commercials upside-down to keep with the joke. I know only like three people found that truly hilarious, but I was one of them…) This CD came out on the tail of an ELP reunion (but with Cozy Powell), a GTR album that sold some copies, and a few other prog-rock has-beens that picked up some Korg M1s and headless Steinberger basses and made another serious go at it. And this peaked at #97 on the Billboard 200, which tells you this formula worked to some extent.

Although it did chart, the 3 album is a pretty weak stab at world domination. Everything’s very ballady, and the sound overall is very tinny and brittle. The highlight is probably a song “Desde La Vida” that is a three-parter, the middle showing that Emerson can still get around the ivory. It’s also got a cover of “Eight Miles High” that’s marginally interesting, but the whole thing is basically 37:38 of vintage cheesomatic synth and very cookiecutter drums that could’ve been done by a synth or drum machine. Some of the songs have a slight memorable quality, but they are very much pop numbers and not prog-ish in any way, except for maybe a quick run or two on the keyboard by Emerson. It is not by any means an extension of ELP’s previous work, and even if you expect it to be 66% of something like Trilogy, you’d be very far off the mark.

I think I borrowed the tape from my friend Derik Rinehart at the time, and I’m not sure if I ever returned it (my old car had holes in the floors, many tapes didn’t make it.) A couple of years later, I found a used copy of the CD for 88 cents, and picked it up. It’s one of those albums that is definitely stuck in my head, that I listened to at the time and thought “wow, Emerson sure can play! This MIDI shit is the wave of the future!” and then got sidetracked when I found out about Primus or Nine Inch Nails or whatever else was cool at that second. Now, every once in a while, I listen to it (mostly because 3 is the first band on my iPod’s alphabetical display) and it immediately takes me back to 1988, when I listened to this stuff constantly. But yes, it’s a tough sell.

Rating: 6.5

I will get a lot of flak about this, but I’m not a big fan of this album. It’s not horrible, but to me, it’s nothing more than a mid-point between the near-perfect Kill ‘Em All and the completely perfect Master of Puppets. It doesn’t have any of the raw aggression of the former, or the fine detail or complex workmanship of the latter. It’s got good songs, and sounds okay, but it’s not an album like …Puppets.

Okay, a few things should be said here. Metallica went out with their first album and did good, and Megaforce pulled them back in the studio in 1984, pretty much with the intention of releasing another album with ten clones of “Seek and Destroy.” And moving from one good thing to the volume two of it is always problematic. Do you copy your success? Do you try to go that extra bit you didn’t get to do on the first album? Do you try completely new formulas? And Metallica (or let’s be honest, Cliff Burton) decided to do a bit of each.

There are some songs that follow what happened on the first album closely, like the anti (or maybe pro)-military “Fight Fire with Fire,” that has the fast riffs, the barking lyrics, and some screaming leads. Ditto for “Trapped Under Ice” and even more so for “Creeping Death,” a very riffy little number that actually tells the story of Moses and his battle against slavery in Egypt. But it isn’t a good-times, Davey and Goliath bible story; it’s got a real edge to it that makes it much more rockable, and forecasts the kind of work the band does on their next album. It’s also got a nice little chorus part with the lyrics “die/by my hand/I creep across the land” that people love to chant when the band plays the song in their live sets.

Another song that shows the band’s movement in a new musical direction is “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” about the Ernest Hemingway book of the same name. It’s a slow dirge that seems to almost be the antithesis of thrash metal at the time, but the sludge of the guitars and the eerie lyrics (plus the giant bell that they used) make the song so authentic and true that it still remains a hugely popular number for the band, who still play it live. The album, while not a concept album in the strictest sense, features songs that all have to do with death in very intense circumstances, and this song fits that theme well.

There is one song here that alone deserves a perfect ten, and that’s the ballad “Fade to Black.” The song, which deals with suicide, was apparently written after the band’s entire equipment truck was stolen, almost derailing their entire career. It starts with simple acoustic guitar and haunting lyrics, then builds to very powerful rhythm chords and an incredible hook brought through the distorted Marshall stack sound. The tune swaps back and forth between totally clean acoustic guitar for verses and this blinding power chord riff before launching into a much faster ending, complete with absolutely perfect, harmonic lead guitar work by Hammett. This song is probably one of the most perfect examples of heavy metal I could think of. If I were going to Mars tomorrow and could only bring one mix CD for my voyage, this song would be on it. It’s a flawless production and I love it.

The album in general has good sound, and is the first production credit for Flemming Rasmussen, who also recorded the aforementioned Master of Puppets and remained one of those strange names that every headbanger saw on the inside of their album cover and wondered if the dude was a Swedish Chef or something. (Danish, I think, and oddly enough, his biggest credit before this was engineer on a Cat Stevens album. Rasmussen also recorded …And Justice For All before getting the boot for Bob Rock and the black album.) My main complaint is that a couple of the songs, like the title cut and “Escape”, sound pretty atypical for Metallica songs, especially the vocals. It makes it sound like they were trying too hard to experiment with song structure, and it didn’t work well. And the album ends with “The Call of Ktulu”, a nine-minute instrumental snoozefest that sounds like they were listening to too much Rush that week.

Like I said, the album’s got some good cuts on it. But it doesn’t fit together well, and I don’t think I’ve ever been able to listen to this start to finish without heading for the fast forward button. It’s good to see them taking the first step toward what I think might be their best album, but as an album, it doesn’t entirely work for me. I’m loath to say that, for fear of a slew of Metallifans telling me I’m wrong, but this was the kind of album for me where I’d take the two or three good songs on it and pad out that C-90 tape that I used for one of their other albums with those tracks. But it got better, much better, and it’s good to hear this in-between point.

Rating: 7.5

There’s a rumor (not much of a rumor) that this album was going to be called Metal Up Your Ass until their label’s legal team got a little concerned, and I wonder if Metallica would have become the era’s first and biggest thrash metal band if this record were not injected into every mall and record shop across the country. The four horsemen took a pile of NWOBHM metal influences from earlier European bands and mixed them with some early punk/hardcore and a dash of Motörhead to brew up these ten tracks of aggression that pretty much set the gold standard for all thrash and metal bands to follow.

You probably already own this album, and if you don’t, maybe you should steal a copy and piss off Lars. You also probably know the boring history of how Dave Mustaine got kicked out of the band and all of that, so I’ll leave that to the VH1 specials. I wouldn’t say this is their best album (it’s probably Master of Puppets), or their most important (…And Justice For All showed they could go on without Cliff. The black album showed that they could become art collectors and rich snobs), but it’s a good introduction, and it may be the most listenable of any of their stuff.

This album has been reissued at least three times, and that’s fitting, because there are essentially three groups of Metallica fan. There was an original release of the LP with just the ten basic tracks. If you are a die-hard, “go against the grain until the end” fan, as the song “Whiplash” might say, you’re going to have a tape that doesn’t have any bonus tracks. If you were a metalhead that got into the band in the first few years, you got this tape and played it until it fell apart. To you, Metallica meant raw aggression, total brutality, the loss of all control. Songs like “No Remorse,” “Seek & Destroy,” and “Metal Militia” were your way of life. You probably got started on Judas Priest and Motorhead, and needed to go that extra step. While you were banging your head to this album, all of the other dorks in your high school were listening to Stryper, or maybe Journey. You either thought that Ride the Lightning was the sell-out point for the band, or it’s possible you never heard any of the band’s later work because you were put in a Supermax prison for killing 14 cops while on angel dust.

The second release of Kill ‘Em All came with two bonus tracks, the covers “Blitzkrieg” and “Am I Evil?”. If your tape (or CD, if you were rich) had these songs, you probably got into the band later, but still in the late 80s, when they were little more than a minor phenomenon in the greater music world. That meant that you probably heard a lot of other thrash, some better than this, and some bands that were much sicker than Metallica. But you still had to listen to Metallica because they were the originals. They were the band that would never release a music video, never cut their hair, and never make the top of the music charts, but that’s what you liked. And maybe their later albums seemed a little plastic or conceptual, but you could always go back to that first album that contained the core of the band’s energy.

If you bought Kill ‘Em All in the late 90s or so and it didn’t have the bonus tracks (again), you got in after Metallica released the Garage, Inc. collection and decided to remove the bonus tracks from their albums so you’d have to buy more stuff. Metallica’s fan base obviously completely changed after the black album, when they switched to hard rock-oriented, mid-tempo ballads that were played at about every Midwestern prom in the mid-90s. What’s strange is that many of the fans of their later AOR bullshit phase still claim allegiance to the early albums, despite the fact that they are two kinds of music. It’s possible that people picked up a copy of Load, liked it so much that Metallica was their new favorite, and then went back to buy up all of their old stuff. Metallica still plays “Seek & Destroy” at their concerts, and people still love it. But it just doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, if you were a fan of Fleetwood Mac at the very peak of their Rumours, Stevie Nicks-with-poofy-hair era, would you seriously go back to their late 60s, blues-oriented records and truly “get” them as much as their sickly-sweet lite-rock radio-friendly stuff?

Okay, so I’ve rambled on too much about the socioeconomic whatsis without even mentioning how the album SOUNDS. First, it’s loud. It’s got this crushing guitar attack that has Marshall amp written all over it, with a chunky rhythm that fits behind these screaming leads. Kirk Hammett’s playing at this point was fast, but almost blues-oriented in his solos. Later, after spending time with Joe Satriani and working on a modal approach to his solos, they went from the screaming blast attacks to a more organized and complex approach, but that’s later. The album doesn’t have the production that the later ones do, but it’s acceptable enough. Cliff Burton’s bass playing is good, although it’s not as present as it could have been. The one obvious exception is “Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth),” a three-and-a-half minute bass solo that pretty much started the notion (at least in the metal world) that a bass player wasn’t just a bar-per-measure guy that sat in the back and did little. Burton, although he was a late addition to the band’s existing lineup, pretty much had the most musical chops in the group, and would show this later as the band wrote more material.

The thing that surprises me about this album is how listenable many of the songs are. Some of them, like “The Four Horsemen” and “Phantom Lord” seem a little goofy after all of these years, like they were trying too hard. But songs like “No Remorse” and “Seek & Destroy” have such perfect riffs, and an incredible wall of sound to them, the chunkiness that makes it possible to put tracks 8 and 9 on repeat for a day at a time with no problems.

I’m going to say something that will piss off all die-hard Metallica fans, and it’s the reason I don’t give this a higher rating, but I think it’s true. Overall, the album is very uneven, which isn’t surprising; half of the tracks were written by Mustaine before he got the boot, and Burton’s genius doesn’t really show up across the whole album. This album is not a start-to-finish player, and what’s weird is, it never was for me. One of the advantages of having the tape way back when is that I always listened to “Whiplash,” then flipped it over, fast-forwarded a bit, and skipped “Phantom Lord.” I also used to hate “Jump in the Fire,” although it grew on me. And I almost always skipped “Metal Militia.” Now, coming back to it, some of the songs are total classics, and a few are a bit goofy. That said, this album is not perfect, but it’s still great.

Rating: 8.5

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After assuring their fans that they were alive and kicking with Jason Newsted on the bass, the remaining three horsemen plus newkid went into the studio with Flemming Rasmussen for the first five months of 1988 to record the successor to Master of Puppets. What came out was something that people either considered a great album, more conceptual and a bit speedier than the prior, or a bloated, badly produced example of a big band getting too big. Either way, it stands as an interesting historical note, because it’s after Cliff Burton, the major driving force of the band’s early career, had died, and it’s right before the band decided to trade in metal for hard rock and go to producer Bob Rock for their self-titled black album, which many new fans consider the real start to their career.

First off, AJFA is long. It’s 65 minutes and only 9 songs, with only two of them being under the six minute mark, and two of them landing just short of the ten minute mark. Everyone’s first comment about this album is that things are just too damn long, and I’d agree. Most of the songs have an extra repetition of the chorus or an extra verse that grates on my nerves, and I think if I had a good copy of the master tapes and Protools, I could probably turn out a 45-minute remix that would be just as strong as the original. But maybe that’s just me.

This album has a really eerie, sinister tone to it. Many think it’s thin, and I guess it is in parts. The biggest thing to me is that Kirk Hammett’s guitar solos and the general composition of most songs show that he’s become a much more modal player, probably based on his training with Joe Satriani. Solos go from sounding vaguely Egyptian to Mid-eastern to minor and eerie, instead of the standard blues-box licks he used on Kill ‘Em All. This trickles down into the songs a bit, changing structures and sound to be much more unique. The guitars in general are also layered and deeper than they were in the early days, and it makes the album more progressive than just straightforward thrash.

The songs on the album mostly have to do with injustice in some way or another. The title cut, which sprawls out to 9:44, talks about the loss of justice in society, in pretty simple terms. Compare that to the opening track, “Blackened,” which describes a biblical end to the world due to man’s woes. With two exceptions, most of the songs are fairly interchangeable in theme. Although they are musically different and offer varying solos, it would have been hard for me, even in 1988, to distinguish between “The Frayed Ends of Sanity” and, say, “Eye of the Beholder” without checking the liner notes first.

As far as those other two songs, one is “To Live Is to Die,” an almost-ten minute instrumental that’s built up upon a little fragment of poetry left behind by Cliff Burton. The song builds up layer after layer of creepy guitar sound by Hammett and Hetfield, with overlays of distortion and signal processing, quickly dropping into clean acoustic in places and then coming back to establish new themes. Halfway through, someone (who? Not sure…) reads the Burton poetry. The song continues on the tradition of “Orion,” an instrumental on their last album, while leaving tribute to Burton. It’s not as good of a number as “Orion,” but it’s still awesome. I remember many a night listening to this in my car alone as I drove through the darkness, and always loved it for the eerie mood it produced.

The big song on this album is “One.” It’s based on the Dalton Trumbo book Johnny Got His Gun, an anti-war novel about a man in World War I who is hit by a shell blast and loses his arms, legs, and all senses. Many people think it’s about Vietnam, and I’m sure there are Metallica fans dumb enough to now think it was written about Iraq, but you should probably hunt down the book and read it at some point. The song starts out slow with clean guitars, then breaks into more of a power ballad, as the soldier pleads for help. Later in the song, as he realizes he’s trapped forever in his comatose body, he wants to die, and the song speeds up to a frenzy of double-bass and shredding guitar solos. It’s an excellent composition, although I’m still unsure as to how it exactly became a big hit. After years of shunning MTV, the band created a video using live performance in a loft-warehouse sort of space intercut with pieces of the movie based on the Trumbo book.

The most interesting thing to me about going back to this album is to reverse-engineer some of what happened. I listen to pieces of “Harvester of Sorrow” and hear that black album, and think that if this was produced just a little bit differently, it would have ended up one of the tracks there. What if Bob Rock had been hired at this point instead of an album later? What would have survived? What would have changed? I also look at something like “To Live Is to Die” and see how much it tries to hang on to the legacy of Cliff Burton. And I try to listen to any bass by pre-Metallica Jason Newsted, and imagine what this album would have been like if he were allowed to actually play. How did this happen? I imagine a weepy Lars Ulrich in the studio, crying “Cliff just died! Dammit, turn down the bass, Flemming!” and the producer just caving in to his demands. “I can’t cut out the 17th chorus-verse-repeat! Cliff died!” And of course, I try to imagine what this album would have been like with Cliff alive, how songs like “One” would have had even more intensity with his bass, and how lamer numbers like “Dyers Eve” would have been more aggressive with his musicwriting behind them.

Overall, this is a decent album. I’m biased because I listened to it so much in 1988 and 1989, so much that my tape of it is completely worn clean of any lettering on either side. But after about 1989, I pretty much completely forgot about this album for 15 years, which should also tell you it’s not a real contender. Maybe with shorter songs… maybe with better production… maybe with more bass… I don’t know. It’s still an interesting look back, and unfortunately, it’s also the last entry for the band before they became hard rock dandy boys.

Rating: 8

This four-song EP was released in 1988 after Satriani’s big breakthrough Surfing With the Alien, and was largely a keep-alive of tracks from the tour, with a single studio number. At only 22 minutes, it’s not a high-value purchase, but it was the first look at Joe’s live work, and has a great new song on it, too.

The live tracks are okay, nothing special. What really got me about that is that I read a review in an issue of Guitar Player or whatever, and Satriani basically admitted that he had no idea how he could take such a crazy studio album on the road. But he got Stu Hamm and Jonathan Mover, and made it happen. “Ice Nine” sounds pretty close to the album, with little trills and frills to keep it interesting. “Memories” starts with a totally solo piece that is very ambient and bluesy, just him noodling around and playing with his tone, before he catches the song by it’s first little riff. The song takes off and seems to have more tempo than the studio version, although everything’s just as precise. At the end of the nine-minute performance, he gets into a jammy little improv breakdown before closing it up, which is pretty sweet. They finish with “Hordes of Locusts,” which is an odd choice for a closer, but it’s cool that they can do something that intricate live.

To me, this album is memorable for a few reasons. One, I had been a fan of Satriani’s since his first album, and I remember getting a flexi-disc (which I still have, somewhere…) that contained a radical arpeggio bit that segued into a song with an absolutely crushing melody played on a chorus pedal. About a year later, I picked up this CD, and found that very same song, “The Crush of Love,” as the first track! The CD sounded much better than the floppy plastic thing did on my cheap turntable, balanced by a bunch of pennies I put on the face to keep the needle from hopping. It’s a very cool little track, and it has no great heroics as far as the fretwork goes, but just a really hip sounding guitar part, the kind of thing I could listen to on repeat for an hour at a time. And that’s what Satriani is all about; a stellar tone, pretty good fingerwork, but just an overall melodic hook that totally brings you in.

Oh yeah, I skipped school the day that album came out. There was a fire drill before first hour, and the firemen were telling everyone to get the fuck out, so I left and didn’t come back. I was going to drive to Chicago and hang out for the day, but I chickened out, went to University Park Mall in South Bend, and picked up the album at the Camelot records. I remember listening to it in awe, maybe three times in a row on my car deck, before I slept in a Sears parking lot for two hours and then went to the crap pizza store in the mall for a slice.

This album is neither a stellar collection of b-side marketing or a formidable live EP, but the one studio song pretty much made the purchase price for me. Call me a sucker, but I really do enjoy this CD.

Rating: 8

When I was in college, I dated a girl who was probably a bigger Queensryche fan than me. And when listening to a snippet of their music, she’d sometimes say things like “Oh, that’s such a Chris song,” and roll her eyes, apparently bemoaning the songwriting ability of guitarist Chris DeGarmo. The habit made me realize that up until that point, I’d never even considered how the power structure within the band operated. Queensryche has two guitar players, who initially formed the band, but they are usually both referred to as “lead/rhythm guitar” and without studying some videos or going to a bunch of live shows, it’s not apparent who’s taking what solos. Contrast that with a band like Guns N’ Roses, where you know Slash plays the lead and Izzy’s on the rhythm guitar. So after almost ten years of not thinking about it, I wondered, who was the driving force behind the band? Who was in charge? Was Geoff Tate the ringleader, or just the guy brought in by the real brains of the band to front them? Who was the John and Paul, and who was the Ringo?

All of that was answered when DeGarmo left the band in 1998. The remaining members jumped from the then-bankrupt EMI to Atlantic, adding Kelly Gray, a former bandmate of Geoff Tate’s from his old band Myth. They quickly went back to the studio for their new release, Q2K. I initially moaned at the news of the new album name, because Dan Quayle used the same slogan for his 2000 Presidential campaign (which, thankfully, died quickly.) And the album title happened during the surge of Y2K paranoia, when every other spam in my mailbox was about Y2K radio flashlights and Y2K survival food and Y2K fallout shelter plans and Y2K asbestos-lined condoms with emergency first-aid instructions written on every package.

I have to say that Q2K is the beginning of the end for me and my love for this band, and I don’t think I’m alone in this conclusion. The band took a serious turn with this mid-paced collection of eleven songs. Prior to this album, every Queensryche album had a mix of songs. For every slow-paced song like “London,” there was a faster-paced rocker, like “NM156.” Making a good album is like making a good can of mixed nuts; if you have no almonds or honey-roasted peanuts, and 90% of the nuts are those crappy tasteless ones they use to pad out the mixed nuts combination to make it cheaper, it’s not any good. And with Q2K, you’ve got a lot of those crappy mixed nuts.

What I mean is, most of the songs sound about the same here. Play a random five seconds of “Beside You” or “One Life” or “When The Rain Comes,” and it’s basically the same mid-paced, contemporary, almost easy-listening smooth rock music. Radio pros used to call this stuff MOR, for Middle of Road, and now I think they call it AAA, or Adult Album Alternative, to basically mean a wussier version of AOR that doesn’t rock and is suitable to play in elevators and dentist’s offices. It’s like it’s aspiring to be the Singles soundtrack. I’m not saying any of these songs are horrible; some of them are vaguely emotional or contain some interesting hooks. It’s just that they all sound roughly the same. WIthout DeGarmo to mix up the writing, it’s a very homogenized approach.

The problem is, there are too many of these mellow songs, and no rockers. They try, with “Burning Man” and “Breakdown,” but both are essentially boring attempts at it. And they put both of these songs back-to-back, which also makes no sense in the dynamics of the thing. “Breakdown” was their attempt at a single and I think it got a video, but it’s pretty flat attempt at a song. This is where the Chris song belonged, and there wasn’t one. And aside from the lack of his writing, there’s no conceptual or story-driven component to the album. That isn’t needed – their last album to do this was Mindcrime, and they had their share of decent albums since then.

The band has an almost-trademark habit of capping the end of an album with a longer, slower, but more powerful number, and they do that here with “The Right Side of My Mind”. It’s got a lot of force wrapped up in a mellower package, and builds and builds before it peaks and concludes the album. This is executed well, which makes me think it’s a Geoff Tate thing, but without an entire album of differing numbers before it, this doesn’t do much good.

I got this album, tried to listen to it for about six months, and then forgot about it entirely. When I switched over to iPod, I don’t even think I added this to iTunes for years, so it sat untouched in my collection of CDs I never used. Despite the fact that this album never spent any extended time in my current play cycle, I have two very distinct memories of it. I’ll mention them both, with the caveat that memories of an album don’t affect my rating as much as the actual contents of an album, something that other reviewers consider in the intrinsic value of an album.

Anyway, the first is that I bought this album the day it came out at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, immediately after I had a job interview in the same building. I interviewed at Juno Online, and ended up getting the job, working in the BMG building for almost two years, and spending many a long lunch hour wandering around the Virgin store, feeding my music addiction. And when I bought the CD that day, Cheap Trick happened to be playing a gig at the bookstore, which was surreal because this band I thought was bigger than life when I was a kid was setting up their amps in a room about as big as my apartment, playing for two dozen people. So there’s a strange connection in that whenever I think back to those two years I worked in Times Square, or any time I returned to that Virgin store (or any Virgin store), I always thought back to this album.

The other memory I have of Q2Kis that I had a job interview the week after I bought it (I think I hadn’t yet got an offer on the Juno thing, and was frantically interviewing at every dot-com-bubble-funded e-sweatshop in the book), and listened to the album three or four times on my Minidisc player on the way there and back. That interview was in the World Trade Center, and was almost exactly a year before 9/11. So that’s a weird connection for me.

Despite those memories, there’s not much I can say about this below-average effort. They’ve done better albums since, but not by much.

Rating: 5

If you’re not up on your extended Frank Zappa lineage, you might not know anything about this Cincinnati-based trio. I’m probably fucking this up, but I think the origins go like this: there was a band called the Raisins, and they recorded an album that was produced by former Zappa guitarrist Adrian Belew. Then they all got together and formed a Chicinatti-based band called The Bears. After two albums and a few years of touring, the band split up and Belew went solo. But the core trio of the band stayed together and called themselves the Psychodots. They also, oddly enough, toured with Belew, both opening for him and serving as his backing band. I saw them on that tour in ’94, and despite the fact that my friend Steve Simms is the biggest Zappa fanatic ever, therefore being huge fans of these guys too, I’d never heard note one of them until this show. I was so blown away, I bought the Blotter CD and then played it 20,000 times over the course of that summer.

First, Blotter is not a real album; it’s a 6-song compilation containing tracks from their first two albums. It’s just a simple clear slipcase with a photocopied track listing in it, nothing fancy there. On the contrary, this music is incredibly clear and present, the kind of production that reminded me of when everyone was analog and then bands like Rush suddenly went digital. Despite the fact that the trio is just a bass-drum-guitar group, there’s a lot of thick sound here. Part of this comes from the fact that vocalist/axeman Rob Fetters uses one of those Roland MIDI pickup systems that drives an external synth. I’d always heard horror stories of these things, but I saw the man do it live, and he effortlessly went from playing keyboard intros to slamming through guitar solos with no problems at all. Also, bassist Bob Nyswonger doesn’t just pluck a note here or there with a pick and then count to four; he plays the bass more like a guitar, even taking solos and pulling out chords when the need arises.

It’s hard to describe ‘Dots music, other than to say it’s not much like the twice-removed math-rock that you’d expect from a distant cousin on the Zappa family tree. It’s much more singer-songwriter oriented, with strong guitar parts, clean synth bits, and a tight sound overall. Songs like the opening “Moaner” are almost straightforward power-pop, while stuff like “Big Love Now” build strong anthems with harmonized and powerful vocals. I remember thinking in 1994 that these songs sounded so NEW, and it’s weird that over a decade later, they still sound fresh. The six-song sampler ends too fast, but I’ve also kept it on repeat a dozen times with no boredom. It’s very catchy stuff from an underappreciated Ohio band. I’ll have to hunt down their other albums and see it they also hold up. They’ve since been active and have some new material too, that I’m downloading from iTunes as we speak…

Rating: 8