They’re too good to be true (or too awful) and sometimes they’re hilarious because they don’t need to inhabit the real world. Imaginary musicians, faux songs or flat-out spoofs, here are my favourite fake metal bands.
Posts Tagged with heavy metal
Metal Monday: Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City
One of the virtues of Chuck Klosterman’s take on 1980s heavy metal in Fargo Rock City is that, once you’ve read it, you’ll never look at metal the same way again.
Born and raised in Wyndmere, N.D., Klosterman had already covered music for the Fargo Forum and the Akron Beacon Journal before writing it, and has since gone o to write for GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post, as well as a number of bestselling books.
Metal Monday: KISS’s Destroyer (Resurrected)
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.)
Metal Monday: Def Leppard’s Pyromania
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.
Metal Monday: Iron Maiden’s Edward the Great
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.
Metal Monday: Opeth’s Damnation
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.”
