• Classic Album: The Smiths (1984)

    February 13, 2014 - By 

    Hindsight is a wonderful thing. After 30 years of disappointments, you can look back and see exactly what started it all, throwing all amount of history and emotional baggage on top of it to make some kind of distorted, grotesque picture of what it was like. But when you sit down to listen to The Smiths‘ debut album, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this month, you’d be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. For an album that supposedly changed everything, it’s so damn ordinary. The Smiths’ debut had a tortured genesis, involving betrayal, back room deals, and…

  • Getting re-acquainted: Blue Öyster Cult – (Don’t Fear) The Reaper (1976)

    October 30, 2013 - By 

    A coiling guitar figure wraps itself around your consciousness, drawing tighter and tighter. And then… and then… the cowbell comes in. This, my friends, is as good as it can ever get. Blue Öyster Cult had been a rather gnarly biker-rock band, all greasy hair, leather trousers, and weird, occult imagery. They even had their own runic symbol, man. Their first three albums are packed with post-Altamont death jams, best summed up by the fantastic ‘Career of Evil’ from their third album, Secret Treaties, a song that begins with the lines, “I plot your rubric scarab, I steal your satellite, I…

  • Getting Re-acquainted: ‘Breaking The Law’

    May 31, 2013 - By 

    Part of metal’s appeal is its terminal uncoolness. It can’t be co-opted, it isn’t ‘hip’, and it doesn’t easily translate to a mass audience. Sure, sometimes it has a dalliance with the mainstream, but there are always the hardcore contingent who take it to extremes, and they’re the ones who are still there when it slinks back to the darkness. Metal is, and always will be, outsider music. And if being uncool is what makes metal cool, then Judas Priest must be the coolest band on the planet. Their 1980 single ‘Breaking the Law’ remains their signature tune, and also…

  • The Story Behind: Hüsker Dü (Part II of II)

    May 25, 2013 - By 

    With Husker Du’s drive and aspiration was going to come into conflict with the orthodoxy of hardcore,  for the world at large, their meteoric development was continuing to deliver the goods, and their second album of 1985 would somehow manage to raise the bar even further. Flip Your Wig boasted improved production values, giving the band a sparkling and clean sound for the first time, as well as highlighting the intensely creative and rewarding songwriting rivalry that existed between Bob Mould and Grant Hart. The two men had been peppering the albums with gem after gem, but Flip You Wig…

  • The Story Behind: Hüsker Dü (Part I)

    May 3, 2013 - By 

    The sky is the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel. The ground is muddy and wet, and the detritus from wrecked automobiles are all around. Three figures stand, apart, but somehow together, and the air has the static charge of electricity. This is the Zen Arcade, and anything can happen here. When it was released in 1984, Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade immediately stood out as being something new. Previously, the band had been one of the initial glut of American bands inspired by the thrilling rush of punk, taking the form and making it harder, faster, more aggressive, becoming…