Writer & Editor
Regular visitors to As You Were may have noticed a new badge or two on the site — the ones from Alltop.com. I’m happy to say after seeing Alltop recommended as an aggregator of web content, I submitted As You Were to Alltop’s discerning editors in the categories of “heavy metal” and “werewolves.” They got back to me a number of weeks ago to tell me As You Were had been approved in the “heavy metal” category, and it’s now listed under that topic on their site.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
