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IRON INQUISITIONS: ALBUMS THAT BROKE YOUR HEART?
We all know what day it is, so we thought we’d go with a topical question today – but rather than all this lovey-dovey crap, we want to know about your past heartbreaks.
Now, it’s not your love lives we want to know about. We’re not interested in your fumbled attempts at losing your viginity or the school bully who you had a crush on; no we want something much worse:
Which albums have broken your musical heart?
What we mean by this is records from bands – maybe even your favourite band – that you had been anticipating with such fervour that you were almost crying liquid iron from your eye sockets, such was the metal you thought you were about to receive. We’re talking something so off-form that your obsidian hearts shattered into a tiny thousand pieces and now litter the shale and shingle beaches of the British coastline.
The prime example we can think of is, of course, Metallica‘s St. Anger. When we were preparing our writers for the onslaught of The Monolith, we had them write a positive review of the much maligned album, and we’re not exaggerating (too much) when we say several of them nearly had aneurisms and/or nervous breakdowns.
So come on; out with it. Let’s hear your depressing stories!
For me, the biggest disappointment was also Metallica, but not St. Anger, but their self-titled album. I just didn’t like the sound of it, it was so different from their previous works, commercial is the right word for it. And it killed the band. EVERY album that came after it sucked. I hate that album so much, because I love old Metallica. Kill ‘Em All is awesome, Ride the Lightning is legendary and Master of Puppets alongside …And Justice for All are both great and enjoyable. But then that shit album came out and everything ended. Metallica died. Now they are just a money machine that is feeding on commercial success and they are also part of something called Big Four which is made of thrash metal bands, only thing that doesn’t fit is that Metallica is not thrash metal band for more than 20 years.
Opeth’s “heritage”. Being an Opeth fanboy I assumed I’d love that album. But man oh man…what a godforsaken travesty that album is. They should have just changed the name of the band. I assumed they’d never do any wrong. But Mike’s got his head directly up his ass with that album.
When I was getting really in to music around 2007 I was and am a huge Rush fan so when Snakes & Arrows came out I was understandably excited, and then I was disappointed. Thankfully Clockwork Angels was released and all is forgiven. Another one might be Brutal Truth’s End Time as it lacked the “wow” factor of previous albums. Of course there is the album I have avoided by a certain _____ Angel band for fear that it would sully their rep with me.,,,
It does seem to me that the metal community at large has a really weird relationship with Metallica – I like the black album, but I don’t think they’ve released a good album since then. That was twenty-one years ago. But still people seem to think that they’re somehow going to pull another Master Of Puppets out of their asses. And, indeed, that a bunch of 50 year old men are going to be able to play the ‘Old Shit’ with anywhere near as much vigour as they used to.
By the time St Anger came out, I’d already pretty much stopped caring what they were up to – but it was nevertheless horrifying. The movie went some way towards explaining precisely why. Many great musicians like doing weird shit, and it just happens that the shit they want to do is weird. But, with Lars especially, it has felt to me that he just wants to do weird shit for the sake of it. And it comes across as really awkward and forced, be it mincing about with a feather boa, as he was doing around the time of Load, or picking that almost wilfully retarded snare sound.
One very vivid disappointment was Fishbone’s ‘Chim Chim’s Badass Revenge’ – I’d discovered them with ‘Give A Monkey A Brain….’ and uncovered the gems in their back catalogue, and then they went and released a heap of half-baked dung cookies every bit as embarrassing as that name would imply. That was one of my earliest memories of listening to an album and thinking ‘What the fuck have you DONE’.
The second, maybe slightly more contentious one, is Sikth’s debut ‘The Trees Are Dead….’ which was from the cumulative effect of a number of issues.
Firstly, almost half the album had already been released on demos and EPs, and to add insult to injury, the old rough and ready recordings actually sounded better.
The album versions sounded suffocatingly clean, to the point of sterile. It really sounded like the songs had been picked apart in a laboratory and painstakingly put back together again, whereas the older versions captured rather more of the raw ferocity of six guys going completely fucking mental, as was witnessed at their live shows.
Then of the new tracks, and alarming proportion of them were unutterably self-indulgent pretentious tosh. And you can throw Tupelo on that pile too, even if it had been released before. So really, all I got for my money was three new tracks worth listening to. Which would have been four, if they hadn’t ruined ‘Wait For Something Wild’ with nearly a minute of pointless shrieking tacked on the end.
And the final nail in the coffin was that Gut Records took the dingbat decision with early pressings of the album to put some form of DRM on the disc that prevented it from being copied onto computers. As I was using a Minidisc player at the time, this was tremendously inconvenient.
I definitely remember being utterly crestfallen as I gave that disc its first spin, and stupefied by the fact that these grown men thought that ‘Can’t We All Dream’? was worth sharing with the world.
‘Among Flies’ by an independent band called Last House On the Left. It was still pretty good, but I didn’t think it was nearly as awesome as their previous ep.
For me, it was Illud Divinum Insanus. I waited for 8 years expecting awesome death metal, but instead I got a bunch of shitty songs that rip off Rammstein and Marilyn Manson. You know how Spoony got all angry over Ultima 9 and how he talked about how big of a betrayal it was to him? Illud Divinum Insanus was my Ultima 9.
I’m gonna get laughed at for this, but whatever.
I used to really love Sonata Arctica. (Ah, to be young and stupid again.) Their albums were pretty similar, though they generally avoided becoming stale. Until Unia. It was the most pop-rock, radio-friendly piece of shit I’d ever heard.
That album is probably why I quite listening to power metal. Well, that I started listening to death metal. Which is obviously MUCH better.