Les Sports de Combat

• Judas Priest – Demolition
  Painkiller, Jugulator, ‘98 Live Meltdown are easily top 1990s metal releases.
  Which makes this thing unbearable.
• Bruce Dickinson – Tyranny of Souls
  This album had to be better than The Chemical Wedding – admittedly a Herculean task.  But that’s what you get for putting equally grotesque cover artwork out.  The connection has been made and you’ve dug yourself quite a hole.  It’s not a bad album, but certainly the worst of the Roy Z era Dickinson material.  From what I read of the pre-album leadup, it seems the album was rushed in between Maiden obligations.
• Iron Maiden - Brave New World
  Perhaps this is not surprising, but given the strength of the title track, the rest of the album is meh, save for Dream of Mirrors, Ghost of Navigator and Blood Brothers (the latter 2 tracks are standouts on Rock In Rio).  I think a lot of people, like myself, were expecting Seventh Son of a Seventh Son II.  What we got was a tune-up for the excellent, new-Maiden-era, Dance of Death.
  Attn: Metal Bands,
  switching styles is ok,
  sub-par material is unacceptable
• Lamb of God – Sacrament
  Made the exact same mistake Testament made on Souls of Black.  Exciting new-ish metal band decides to veer away from the course and do classic, plodding metal.  Didn’t work for Testament, but at least Testament put out gems like Absence of Light, Love to Hate and Return to Serenity during their “classic metal” era.   Sacrament begins what Lamb of God will continue on Wrath, inane drum fills, guitar-riffs-by-numbers, and so-so to embarassing vocal melodies.  The one saving grace from this era of Lamb of God is they’ve invented a new style of metal with tracks like “In Your Words” and “Again We Rise”; namely, what L.S.de.C. has dubbed pirate metal.  You can just imagine hoards of lusty pirates singing along to the chorus of these songs in their inimitable style.
  At least I can.
• Testament – Practice What You Preach/Souls of Black
  Practice What You Preach has aged ok, as standout tracks like Perilous Nation, Envy Life, Blessed in Contempt and Sins of Ommission make up for the jarring change in direction.  Souls of Black has little to offer aside from “Absence of Light” and “Love to Hate” and “The Legacy”, though the lyrics in “The Legacy” make me yak.
• Metallica – Garage Inc
  ReLoad, I felt, was forgivable.  From what I remember, it wasn’t marketed anywhere near as heavily as the excellent Load (L.S.de.C readers may disagree with that last part) and them putting Unforgiven II out as a single just reeked of a leftovers compilation.  Garage Inc is where the Titanic sunk and S&M is the bloated carcass (though L.S.de.C is quite fond of the two new songs on S&M, go figure).
• Dokken – Shadow Life
  To be fair, L.S.de.C. has not given this its fair shake.  The few singles that played on HardRadio were so shockingly average we decided to skip right over this one.  The metal community seems to agree with our take, but L.S.de.C. demands of itself a higher standard and will eventually seek this one out.  L.S.de.C. fears that our fears will be fearfully confirmed.  At least the excellent Dysfunctional (why didn’t they throw the ‘k’ in there?) tided us over until the quite good, Reb Beach era, Live at the Sun.

L.S.de.C. feels it may be set against the current of metal-thought by not including generally agreed upon metal atrocities such as Van Halen III (we thought it was ok, certainly better than OU812, and their “metal” status is debatable), or stuff we are just plain unfamiliar with (post-Keeper, Kiske-era Helloween)

I had heard that Aerosmith was using songwriters for their recent stuff. It didn’t stop me from buying their excellent Get A Grip album (used on amazon for $0.01 + $2.98 shipping). I hoped that they hadn’t used songwriters on this album, as I just don’t like the pretense of a “band” using outside help, unless it’s something of a Paul O’Neill/Savatage situation in which they’re so close with the band that they are essentially another member. I feel this is a more acceptable situation than running to someone every 2 years or so when you have to put out a new album.

After scanning the liner notes, what turned out as disappointment (Aerosmith indeed used a plethora of songwriters on this album), made, instead, a really interesting read. I looked up the name of Jim Vallance, a co-writer on Eat The Rich, one of the more enjoyable tracks. What turned up was his excellent website, loaded with stories of all the other bands he’s co-written for (apparently he’s Bryan Adams’ co-writer but the interesting stuff for myself and the L.S.de.C readers include his Ozzy, The Scorpions and Alice Cooper stories).

There’s a blog post that’s been going around that absolutely pastes the Manowar guys.  It’s a little too personal, so I won’t post any links, but here’s my take on Manowar, and I feel that this stuff often gets left out of their careers:

The good:

• Early adopters of mp3 – this was waaaay back in the day when iTunes was just picking up steam, Manowar bucked the trend and chose mp3, and not wimpy 128, but 256!
• Quality dvd releases – haven’t bought one, but I can’t imagine them being much of a disappointment as they clock in awfully close to 400 minutes (that’s well over six hours).  Even quality, lengthy releases like Overkill’s Wrecking Everything and Nevermore’s Year of the Voyager clock in at 2 hours less than some Manowar releases.
• Keepers of power metal – a hugely important genre of metal, and probably the biggest entry point for outside listeners.  They do have some pretty great melodies.

That said, the bad:

• Some of the stuff they talk about in the lyrics are not very inspiring.
• The whole “metal lifestyle” thing they seem to espouse I’m not really down with.
• The volume they’ve been reported playing at during shows is quite unconscionable.
  My take on the whole loud concert thing is similar to a physical trainer for a high school sports team giving his charges steroids.
  Since a lot of the people going to these shows are in high school, they ought to have a responsible choice made for them, and turn the volume down to a reasonable level.  It doesn’t have to be a jazz show, but it doesn’t have to be an airplane engine either.  Starting their ears on the road to ruin is much like a seedy trainer giving players steroids for a few months.  Sure it may not affect anything as it’s only done for a bit, but it can start you down a path.  If kids keep going to loud shows, just like if they continue taking steroids, some damage is likely to happen.  Also I believe a lot of older people would go to metal shows if it wasn’t something that was going to cause irreparable damage if done continually.  I know you can get earplugs (I usually do), but not everyone is going to, so just turn it down a bit, eh?
• They are a tad expensive.  The mp3s I can understand, as they seemed to have had to throw so much money into developing their online system for delivering mp3s, but some of the dvds list for almost $40, and are hard to find for less than $20 (a common price for 2 disc dvd sets).  Again, maybe it’s cuz they throw so much money into making a SIX AND A HALF hour dvd!!, but if you’re gonna charge more for the extra content, you’re doing what everyone else is doing.

The LSdC top 5 metal albums has been a pretty static list until recently.

Recently being the time that Cynic put out Traced in Air.

Here is the LSdC top 5 metal albums (with runoff)

1. Queensryche – Operation Mindcrime
2. Guns N’ Roses – Use Your Illusion I
3. Cynic – Traced in Air
4. Ozzy Osbourne – Tribute
5. Megadeth – Rust in Piece
   
6. Lamb of God – Ashes of the Wake
7. Dark Tranquillity – Damage Done
   
8. Opeth – Ghost Reveries
9. Dokken – Beast From the East
10. Iron Maiden – Powerslave
    
11. Tetstament – The New Order
12. Savatage – Gutter Ballet

… is by Pitchfork Media. Blabbermouth gave the album an 8/10, Rolling Stone a 4/5, LA Times a positive review…. Basically every major media outlet that wants an interview with the band gave them a great review. Wonder if they bothered listening to the album.

My review, after hearing 7 of the tracks is that, except for Broken, Beat & Scattered, the album is about as good a ReLoad, and can easily be lumped in with much of St. Anger, and horrible Garage Inc, and S&M. Load & ReLoad were decent albums, Load especially, but everything since them has been terrible.

What the hell did they bring Rick Rubin in for if they’re just doing more of the same?

A shame too, because Testament just put out a great album, Candlemass had a great record in 2005 and a lot of the 1980’s bands are either continuing their dominance (Testament, Candlemass, Judas Priest) or re-asserting themselves (Machine Head, Iron Maiden, Ozzy) as leaders in modern metal.

My review is: buy Testament’s Formation of Damnation is you want to hear an 80’s metal band putting out classic material these days. If you want to buy the absolute best release of the fall, check out Nevermore’s upcoming The Year of the Voyager 2dvd set.