Writer & Editor
With an album as popular as Def Leppard’s Hysteria, the memory of when you first heard it may be overshadowed by the point at which you became sick of it.
As with Def Leppard, so went the fates of pop metal — they reached their height of fame with Hysteria, released in 1987, and it’s arguably one of the last great albums in the genre. The numerous singles released from it kept it on the airwaves for years, and that was part of the problem.
J.R.R. Tolkien may have created a vast fantasy world in which the footsteps of gods and monsters made its history tremble, but when it came down to the works he is best known for, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the choices that carried the most weight were ultimately made by some of the smallest people in it: hobbits.
Although Tolkien began his rich history, cosmology, languages, and geography of Middle-earth in the myths that would be published posthumously as The Silmarillion, he gave special attention when writing The Hobbit to a scene which could have been just one of many episodes in the story.
Composer Howard Shore draws from the themes he created for previous films in Peter Jackson’s adaptations of The Lord of the Rings for The Return of the King, and this score caps the trilogy off superbly.
Given the subtle, moody atmosphere created on the new CD by Swedish publisher Malört förlag, Werewolf Songs, weaving in dark emotions and barely-suppressed savagery, it’s fair to say the Swedish werewolf’s bite is nastier than its bark.
The collection was released as a companion piece to by Malört förlag’s new reissue of ethnologist Ella Odstedt’s Varulven i svensk folktradition (The Werewolf in Swedish Folklore) which was first published in 1943. The songs on the CD, by musicians from Sweden, Finland, Belgium, England, and the United States, are based on the book.
A compilation album may not often make it onto a “best of” list, but I’ll always be biased when it comes to AC/DC’s Who Made Who. It was a Christmas present in 1986 and my gateway album into the world of heavy metal. Once I’d heard it, I never looked back.
Does the world need a hair-metal holiday album? Yes. More to the point, does it need a good one? Even more YES. Because the motley collection We Wish You A Metal Christmas and a Headbanging New Year isn’t it.
Which is a shame because there’s some heavy-metal star power on display here, including Lemmy Kilmister (Motörhead), Alice Cooper, George Lynch (Dokken, Lynch Mob), Bruce Kulick (KISS), Scott Ian (Anthrax) and Geoff Tate (Queensrÿche) to name a few. Sadly, their varied efforts at Christmas classics misfire as often as not.
