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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.
The good news is, Aerosmith’s new album shrugs off decades’ worth of forgettable über-ballads and rediscovers its heavy-blues groove. The bad news is, it’s buried under forgettable über-ballads.
Downloading KISS’s Destroyer (Resurrected) marks the fourth time in my life I’ve paid full price for this album, but the first time I’m not sure it’s worth it.
Destroyer is the album every other studio effort by the band is measured. Given Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley’s penchant for self-hype, it’s become something of a tradition for them to claim about each new album that it’s their “best one since Destroyer.” (I can’t think of a time when that’s been true, though Love Gun certainly comes close.)
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.
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.
