Music

Metal Monday: unleaded is not an option

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There ar e quite a few metal bands whose name starts with “l”, but there’s only one band that counts, those archetypical rock dinosaurs: Led Zeppelin. With Black Sabbath and Deep Purple they were one of the founders of hard rock, influencing zillions of bands, if not with their music, then with their lifestyle…

Musically you could say their work falls into two categories: their earlier, blues inspired songs (where “inspired” sometimes meant “shamelessly stolen from”) and the much more bombastic (some would say indulgent) rock songs they performed on their later records. The first video is one example of that style – Kashmir:



Dazed and Confused is a good example of their earlier style:



This song comes from the first Zeppelin album, creatively called Led Zeppelin. I had that and the second album, even more creatively called Led Zeppelin II as a double album and used to play them on Saturday mornings while reading Usenet. Ahh, memories.

Immigrant song was once memorably covered by Joel Veitch’s Viking Kittens. This is the original.



And of course…



Metal Monday: not so special K

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As I think said before, for some reason the groups I follow tend to cluster around certain letters of the alphabet: A-C, I, M and S being the most noticable. Which also means some letters have no representation in my collection whatsoever, like today’s letter: K. In fact, of the seventyfive bands known at the BNR Metal Pages, I only recognise a few and those I do recognise I’ve never really followed, like e.g. King Diamond, which a lot of my fellow metalheads at high school used to like back then. This is Abigail:



Some others are a bit dubious. Take KISS for example. Now the line between rock, hard rock and heavy metal is of course thin and easily crossed, but to me KISS is on the wrong side of the line somebody like Alice Cooper is on the right side off, in my definition of hard rock and metal. Still, there’s at least one classic KISS song everybody, including metalheads like:

KISS – I Was Made for Loving You:



An even more odd band to be represented at the BNR Metal Pages is Killing Joke, the UK post-punk band best known for “Love Like Blood”. As the site puts it, this is one of those “not-really metal bands that kind of sound like metal and that metal fans often like”. Fair enough and it gives me the chance to show two of their best songs.

First up: “Love Like Blood”



Somewhat later and different is the next song, “Democracy”, from the 1996 album of the same name. Somebody wasn’t happy with the state of politics in Britain…



Metal Monday: Unleashed in the East

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Judas Priest. Who could guess the leather daddy lead singer was gay?

For the “J” installment of Metal Monday there’s only one band that can be featured, the lawbreakers themselves: Judas Priest. To me Priest is the perfect link between hard rock and heavy metal, sort of halfway inbetween hard rock pioneers like Sabbath and Deep Purple and NWOBHM bands like Maiden, able to match both. Discovered them sometime in the late eighties, when I found a huge stack of their records on a flea market, for a guilder a piece. Not quite in pristine quality when I got them, played them so much over the years the grooves have worn out — long live MP3s.

Now the least interesting thing about Priest is that their lead singer, Rob Halford, is gay, which he only openly acknowledged in 1998, though it really couldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, considering the outfits he tends to wear. Heavy metal may unironically celebrate the macho leather look, but Halford is a bit over the top even so. Again, it shouldn’t matter and luckily for most fans it didn’t, but it seems still to come as a bit of a surprise to outsiders. Metal has a bit of a reputation as neanderthal music I guess…

The other thing everybody knows about Priest is that they were accused of putting subliminal messages in their songs to get their fans to commit suicide, to which Halford said that would be the dumbest thing a musician could do, kill of their fans and that they’d rather subliminally influence their fans to buy more albums…

Priest’s music has evolved a lot over the years, though the core qualities remain the same. One of their earliest classics is “Diamond and Rust”, a Joan Baez (!) cover from 1974 here in a great recent version:



1980 album British Steal saw this breakthrough hit, complete with naff videoclip:



From 1990 comes Painkiller, which may be one of the few songs in which I prefer the studio version. The quick pounding drums come through much better that way. Especially with the sound turned up to eleven on headphones. Still haven’t lost the buzz…



And of course, no metal band should be without their serial killer shoutout — The Ripper: