Music

Metal Monday: Def Leppard’s Pyromania

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Pyromania (album)

Some may take umbrage at the notion of including Def Leppard in the category “heavy metal,” but for Pyromania, at least, they deserve it. And the genre can thank them for it.

Released in 1983, it was one of a number of albums that pushed heavy metal into the mainstream. Leppard, along with Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, was part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, but while Maiden and Priest had core audiences in the U.K. and scattered across North America, it was Leppard that got Americans and Canadians to wear Union Jacks.

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Metal Monday: Iron Maiden’s Edward the Great

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Note: this review of Iron Maiden’s 2002 greatest hits collection was written before the band’s reemergence as a touring dynamo in the early 21st century (at least in North America; Brazil always seemed to know they put on a great show, as you can hear on Maiden’s live album Rock in Rio.)

What? Don’t these guys know they’re has-beens? Apparently not; or maybe Bruce Dickinson and crew are old enough to know that what goes around, comes around. A greatest hits album for a band never big on hit singles may seem incongruous, but given the road-testing of their material over the years, Iron Maiden and their cheerfully macabre mascot Eddie have put together an astute collection.

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Metal Monday: Ozzy Osbourne’s Live at Budokan

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Cover of "Live At Budokan"

Whether Ozzy will ever be able to top Tribute as his best live album is questionable, but Live at Budokan is a solid entry in the history of Oz.

Unlike some “live” albums of recent memory, this is no mishmash of past performances strung together (Note: by this I meant Mötley Crüe’s disappointing and only technically accurate Live. — DJF), but numbers from one concert, which gives the album a much more organic feel. The Japanese fans sing along on classics like “I Don’t Know” with gusto.

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Metal Monday: Opeth’s Damnation

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Maybe there’s somthing in the Northern character that grasps the grandeur in metal (no longer “heavy,” thereby losing some of its sense of humour) — an example being Finland’s Apocalyptica surprising listeners with cello renditions of Metallica and Faith No More. Remarkably, Sweden’s Opeth have followed up last year’s fairly (sonically) dense Deliverance with an album that can be legitimately called “sublime.”

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Metal Monday: Metallica’s St. Anger

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Cover of "St. Anger"

One of the few eighties metal acts to enjoy success without resorting to a reunion tour, Metallica became the top cover band in the world, whether covering others (as on Garage Inc.) or themselves, with orchestral backup (as on S&M).

Battles with Napster notwithstanding, it almost sounded as if James Hetfield et. al. were starting to have fun with their music. Whence, then, St. Anger?

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Metal Monday: Killer Dwarfs’ Reunion of Scribes Live 2001

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Reunion of Scribes
Reunion of Scribes — Live 2001

The Killer Dwarfs always scored high on self-awareness, never taking themselves or their genre too seriously—something that comes through on their album Reunion of Scribes — Live 2001.

Full of energy, Russ “Dwarf” lets loose his Geddy Lee-esque voice over the heavy three-chord rock. The original lineup is reassembled, though you could be forgiven for asking “when did it change?” (Probably some time after you last heard of them.)

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