Sacred Reich - Ignorance/Surf Nicaragua: 3 Disc Special Edition

Here's one that falls into the category of "knife in the back of Ebay sellers everywhere." You see, the album and EP that make up this set went completely out-of-print somewhere around 2000 or so, and ever since then, copies have been popping up over there, going for anywhere between 20 and 40 dollars, which personally flipped out the former band members so much that things were set in motion to put the two out as one set, with a bunch of bonus tracks and a DVD included. Thing was, their old label from their early-90s flirtation with major-label credibility, Hollywood Records, basically turned into giant, festering douche bags about the whole thing, resulting in a two-year delay that left this a European exclusive, not be released over here, where Hollywood still owns the rights. However, knowing this, Metal Blade Germany priced the thing reasonably as hell, and even with overseas shipping, it can be picked up for a grand total of thirty dollars, ironically enough from Ebay. And hey, thirty for both beats thirty each, especially when a DVD is involved.

Anyway, if you're not familiar with the two main parts of this, they're basically in the category of "legendary recordings that no one's ever heard of," for the most part. Sacred Reich never really did get huge, and outside of a brief clip of the "American Way" video being shown in the Pauly Shore tour de force Encino Man, most regular folks have probably never encountered them in any form. But like I said earlier, Ebay sellers be damned, these two are now readily available for sale, much like those two Exhorder albums that everyone used to trip over themselves to buy for $50 apiece.

But anyway, the full-length album, Ignorance, is old school "see how fast you can move your hand up and down" mid-to-late 80s thrash metal that a million-and-one bands were doing at the time, after the whole Slayer thing took off. And it always seemed weird to me how Sacred Reich wasn't really doing anything all that different than any other band at the time, playing the same "chuggachuggachugga" riffs and singing about the same subjects, like toxic waste, nuclear war, and Freddy Krueger, but somehow, they just seemed better at it than the Sentinel Beasts and Faith or Fears of the world. And that basically describes this album. Raw, primitive, fast thrash metal, without much that's new or original, but with a lot that's awesome.

As the main part of disc 2, there's the Surf Nicaragua EP, a record I liked so much that I named a website after it. There are three new songs here, one cover, and two live Ignorance "bonus tracks," (apparently, they were supposed to be CD-exclusive back in the day, but ended up on the vinyl and cassette versions, too) with the title track being the be-all, end-all perpetual concert-closer of Sacred Reich songs, complete with dated late-80s political lyrics and the infamously awesome "Wipeout" tribute sandwiched between the first two verses and the guitar solo. After that, you've got "Draining You of Life" which I'm pretty sure was written to appear on Ignorance, and "One Nation," which previews the more slowed-down approach they'd take later, providing a nice little transitional piece between Ignorance and 1990's The American Way. Add in a cover of Black Sabbath's War Pigs, and this is pretty much one of the defining moments of their career.

Oh, and then, there are bonus tracks, too. Disc one has "The Big Picture," a cover of the MDC cover of a Subhumans song, originally taken from the "Open Book" radio station promo single, "Sweet Leaf," another Black Sabbath song from a NORML benefit compilation album, and the lone never-before-heard song on here, the Judas Priest cover, "Rapid Fire." This phantom track, whose existence was only hinted to once in a 1999-ish interview I read with Wiley Arnett a while back, is insanely cool, in that it has Rob Halford himself providing the vocals. It's weird that a double-set of their first two releases would include three tracks from the latter period of the band, with Dave McLain on drums, but I don't hear anyone complaining. On disc two, it gets more appropriate, with the entire 1986 Draining You of Life demo tape, as well as the version of "Ignorance" they recorded for an old Metal Massacre compilation album, as well as a version of "Sacred Reich" from the same sessions. These are a little rougher than the album versions, and Phil Rind really didn't seem to have gotten the whole vocalist thing down yet, but it's still neat to hear them as something other than an mp3 file from a millionth-generation cassette.

Oh yeah, speaking of bonus material, there's also a DVD included. Be forewarned, though, this is a European release, so it probably won't work with your DVD player. This is the part where I would go into some technical mumbo-jumbo about PAL and NTSC and all, but you have a computer and this is 2007, so you can just watch it on there, since the disc is region-free. Of course, that cheapo DVD recorder I bought for ninety bucks a few years ago had a built-in PAL converter, so I can watch it on my TV if I want, which is another one of the many ways in which I'm better than you. But anyway, the DVD is split into three sections. First, there's a little interview with the band from 1987, followed by a "video" of the song "Ignorance," which consists of them playing the song live in the place where they did the interview with the audio of the studio version of the song overdubbed. It's weird, but it'll do. After that, there's the band's full set from the 1989 Dynamo Open Air Festival in Eindhoven, Holland, which is the very same show that four songs were taken from for the 1989 Alive at the Dynamo EP. They're in rare form here, and the video quality isn't bad, although there are a few cases where the tracking got all messed up on the master tape. The audio, however is a flawless soundboard recording that makes me wish that the next thing that gets reissued is Alive at the Dynamo, but extended to have the whole show on it, instead of four songs. Finally, there's Just Say Sacred, a short camcorder-shot film by Eric Braverman that includes a few live performances, along with a whole crapload of "backstage" shenanigan" type footage, including a montage of injuries suffered at the show, a meeting with a t-shirt bootlegger, and the first annual "Phil Rind from Sacred Reich Will Draw a Mustache on Your Face" contest. Oddly enough, this is also the place where I learned that Phil Rind's last name is pronounced like "rend," and not like the outside of a cantaloupe. Seriously, in all my years of listening to this band, buying their albums, hunting down bootleg live videos on Ebay, and refusing to wear their shirts in public, because I get sick of having to explain myself to people who see a bald guy in a shirt that says the word "Reich" somewhere on it and assume the worst; after all that, I never knew the proper pronunciation of "Rind." Huh.
But yeah, you should all get this, it's kind of fantastic.

Track Listing:
Disc 1: Ignorance
1. Death Squad
2. Victim of Demise
3. Layed to Rest (Instrumental)
4. Ignorance
5. No Believers
6. Violent Solutions
7. Rest in Peace
8. Sacred Reich
9. Administrative Decisions
(bonus tracks)
10. Rapid Fire (with Rob Halford)
11. The Big Picture
12. Sweet Leaf

Disc 2: Surf Nicaragua
1. Surf Nicaragua
2. One Nation
3. War Pigs
4. Draining You of Life
5. Ignorance (Live)
6. Death Squad (Live)
(bonus tracks)
7. Draining You of Life (demo)
8. Ignorance (from Metal Massacre VIII)
9. No Believers (demo)
10. R.I.P. (demo)
11. Sacred Reich (demo)
12. Sacred Reich (Metal Massacre sessions)

Disc 3: DVD
1. Interview and "Ignorance" video
2. Dynamo Open Air 1989 live set
3. Just Say Sacred

Dear Hank Von Helvete,

Please stop eating. We worry for your health and the safety of your bandmates.

Thanks.

Drive-By Reviewings #1

Going down the list of crap I have in the order of how the titles come up in iTunes, no preparation, just spewing out the first thing that comes to mind and keeping it to one sentence or less. Go!

The Accused - Grinning Like an Undertaker (full review here) - Thinking back to my first experience with this album, when my cousin Hayden bought it on cassette from the Camelot cut-out bin, I'm not sure what it was that led us to believe that Blaine Cook sounded like Mr. Burns from the Simpsons.
The Accused - Martha Splatterhead's Maddest Stories Ever Told (full review) - This really sounds like a title they should have saved for a "greatest hits" compilation, now that I think about it.
The Accused - More Fun Than an Open Casket Funeral (review) - That is easily the best album title in the history of life.
The Accused - The Return of Martha Splatterhead (review) - And they should have saved this album title for after one of the times where they broke up and got back together.
The Accused - Splatter Rock (review) - This is an album title they should have used earlier, like maybe on their first record, instead of one of their latest, shittiest ones.
The Accused - Straight Razor (review) - Not bad, but all it really did was make me more pissed that I couldn't find a copy of "Grinning Like an Undertaker" for sale anywhere.
Adam Sandler - Stan and Judy's Kid - You know, I don't think I've ever actually listened to this all the way through.
Adam Sandler - They're All Gonna Laugh at You! - Maybe the only Adam Sandler album that I can remember more than bits and pieces of, especially to the point of memorization.
Adam Sandler - What the Hell Happened to Me? - Another mostly unmemorable one, except for the way that somehow, "Steve Polychronopolous" was somehow much better as an edited-for-TV version.
Alice in Chains - Dirt - Awesome, but these days, only serves an example of why it's just shocking that Layne Staley didn't croak himself with smack like ten years earlier.
Alice in Chains - Facelift - I can't decide whether Tommy Dreamer ruined this for me or greatly enhanced it.
Alice in Chains - Jar of Flies - "I Stay Away" is forever embedded in my skull from the uncanny way the video was always on TV immediately after I came home from school.
Alice in Chains - Music Bank (boxed set) - Mostly, just a gigantic "best of" set, but it's worth it for the pre-Facelift songs where there are still traces of glam rock visible.
Alice in Chains - Sap - I honestly can't remember anything about this, aside from the one song being in Clerks.
Alice in Chains - Unplugged - Would be worth it just for the neat-sounding drum part at the beginning of "No Excuses."
Anthrax - Among the Living - Anthrax's best album, fuk u if u disagree.
Anthrax - Live: The Island Years - Eliminating the need for dudes to hook their Anthrax home videos to their stereos to record the sound since 1994.
Anthrax - Attack of the Killer B's - Songs like "Dallabnikufesin" and "Startin' Up a Posse" serve as a reminder of why Anthrax is completely awesome and why all the "Metal is serious business to always be taken seriously" douches no longer listen to Anthrax.
Anthrax - Axedream - Neat compilation of Fistful of Metal and Spreading the Disease demos and soundboard live recordings, but I have no idea where they thought up that title.
Anthrax - Ball of Confusion - I bought this radio single on Ebay for two dollars, because I wanted to hear a Bush/Belladonna duet, but didn't want to pay 15 bucks for a bullshit compilation album.
Anthrax - Demo '82 - Dammit, I still want to know why "Hate" never made it to an actual album.
Anthrax - The Extended Versions - Nothing I love more than buying a CD for five bucks, thinking I got a bargain, then realizing that it was just Music of Mass Destruction with the cuss words edited out and a couple songs missing.
Anthrax - Fistful of Metal of Metal/Armed and Dangerous - Two great records, but if I had known Megaforce considered "ripping from older CDs at 64KB/s and adding a pause between even the songs that were supposed to run together" to be "remastering," I wouldn't have bought the piece of shit CD.
Anthrax - The Greater of Two Evils - Goddammit, a CD of Bush singing Belladonna/Turbin-era Anthrax songs was something I had wanted for years, but it should have been a proper studio album, instead of this sloppy-sounding "live in the studio" crap.
Anthrax - Hammersmith Odeon, 11-16-87 (NFV home video) - Man, the version of "Medusa" on here really is that much better than the album version.
Anthrax - I'm the Man - Man, this song suddenly got a lot less amusing once that whole Limp Bizkit thing happened.
Anthrax - Live in Boston - Someone tell me why I ever bothered downloading concerts recorded from the audience again?
Anthrax - Live in Dallas, 1989 - Oh boy, recorded from the sound board, but the sound has been filtered through someone's ass, ruining the otherwise awesome cover of "Living After Midnight," among other stuff.
Anthrax - Live in Milan, 1992 - Decent bootleg, but ruined by mp3 compression, argh.
Anthrax - Live in Montreal 1993 - Actually doesn't sound bad, for a crowd recording.
Anthrax - Live in San Francisco - Joy, crowd recording.
Anthrax - London 1987 - Sounds like an awesome bootleg, but one that was ripped from a ninetieth-generation cassette.
Anthrax - Music of Mass Destruction - Nice live album, but I'm still pissed that I accidentally bought it twice.
Anthrax - Persistence of Time - The second-best Anthrax album, which makes it better than pretty much anything else, ever.
Anthrax - The Sound of White Noise - One one hand, the album where Anthrax finally made a bunch of money for being awesome, but on the other hand, that probably was what led to Benante becoming such a bitch.

Okay, I'm going to bed now. More at a later date.

DVD Review: GWAR - Blood Bath and Beyond

(2006, DRT Entertainment)

You know, this could have been a really good DVD. GWAR has been around for twenty-plus years now, and a video celebrating that fact should be a can't-miss, no-brainer kind of situation, but it seems like all the stars aligned perfectly to prevent that. Ideally, there could have been some huge, all-encompassing retrospective, with all sorts of rare footage, music videos, interviews with past and present members. (and there are a lot of those) There could also be TV appearances, like the band's appearances on the Jerry Springer Show, GWAR being profiled on a VH1 "Where Are They Now?" segment, Danyell Stampe's (better known in her GWAR days as Slymenstra Hymen) post-GWAR appearance on Ripley's Believe it or Not, Oderus Urungus being interviewed by Beth Littleford on The Daily Show, or Oderus and Beefcake showing up on the Joan Rivers Show in 1990. All aspects of the band/traveling circus's screwed-up history could be explored, from their beginnings when punk rock scumbags from the band Death Piggy hooked up with aspiring special effects scumbags Hunter Jackson and Chuck Varga, to their peak in the 1990s, when Beavis and Butthead helped make them almost household names and they were twice nominated for a Grammy Award, to their current exploits making emo kids really nervous on the Sounds of the Underground tour. From Dave "Oderus Urungus" Brockie being threatened with deportation by Charlotte police over the Cuttlefish of Cthulu, (Which for those of you not cultured enough to know, is basically part of Oderus's costume that's used to spray the audience with various liquids that also doubles as a giant fake wang.) to Slymenstra Hymen getting in the Guiness Book of World Records for her fire-breathing exploits, to the original Sexicutioner costume allegedly sinking to the bottom of an angry sea with everything else in Chuck Varga's ill-fated house boat, this is a band with a lot of ground to cover.

The problem is, virtually none of that is on here.

The reasons I can think of are twofold, with the big one being money. Dressing up as a barbarian from space and putting on an ultra violent, borderline pornographic heavy metal show just doesn't pay as much as it used to, and the truth is, it never paid that well to begin with. Even back in the 90s, when their albums regularly sold in the hundreds of thousands, times were lean, with the usual "our label fucked us" story in full effect. At the time, GWAR's album sales were probably second only to maybe Cannibal Corpse's on the Metal Blade roster, and aside from the little bit of Slayer stuff Metal Blade still had the rights to and that one Goo Goo Dolls album, (that Metal Blade head honcho Brian Slagel allegedly kept all the royalties from, as well) those two bands were essentially funding the entire label, from the way Dave Brockie makes it sound. So even with GWAR selling a relative crapload of records, videos and other assorted bits of merchandise, showing up on national TV shows, and being featured in Super Nintendo games, they weren't exactly swimming in Scrooge McDuck's money bin. And once Metal Blade got a clue, decided to not miss the boat like they did with the 90s "nu-metal" thing, and stocked their roster with flavor-of-the-month, generic metalcore/screamo/blah whatever bands who sold CDs like hotcakes to really stupid kids, GWAR's services were no longer needed, and they weren't exactly sad to leave. Thing was, DRT Entertainment hasn't been much better, and according to Don "Sleazy P. Martini" Drakulich, the label currently owes them $12,000 for their most recent album, (Beyond Hell, which wasn't that bad, really) and seems to just be banking on going out of business before someone forces them to pay up. So yeah, acquiring the rights to all that TV footage and getting everything together for the DVD I envisioned a paragraph ago probably just isn't financially feasible with things the way they are.
The second problem is possibly even a bigger one, and it's more of an internal thing, to boot. A few years ago, there was this big blowup within Slave Pit, Inc., (The group of various musical and artistic types that are responsible for GWAR and all related projects) mainly between founding members Dave Brockie (once again, better known as Oderus Urungus, the lead singer/song writer, only remaining original band member, and heavily involved on the artistic side of things) and Hunter Jackson (known on stage as either Techno Destructo or Scroda Moon, depending on the tour, and while he didn't play an instrument and rarely provided vocals, was pretty much the main guy on the artistic/prop-making level) which ended in Jackson getting supremely pissed off and leaving. GWAR continued as always, with Slave Pit behind-the-scenes types Matt Maguire and Bob Gorman picking up his slack, and Don Drakulich returning as a non-touring part-timer, but a pretty major problem arose: You know all that old footage, like some of the unreleased videos and neat, rare, archival crap? Guess who owns the rights to almost all of it: Yup, Hunter Jackson. So when the band's 20th anniversary came around, available source material was on the thin side, to say the least. The result of all this was the Blood Bath and Beyond DVD.

That's not to say that there isn't some cool stuff on here. Just about all the old footage on here either has never been seen before or hasn't been seen in a long time, and the segments in between, with Oderus and Sleazy, in costume and in character, are hilarious. There's footage of an early incarnation of GWAR, with the band basically looking like regular humans in Conan/Mad Max type outfits, terrorizing the streets of Richmond, culminating in Oderus Urungus (who at the time, looked suspiciously like one David Murray Brockie wearing a spiked hockey helmet) essentially cutting a wrestling promo on Cardinal Syn, one of the band's more prominent villains in the band's stage show. From the same time period is some live footage, featuring Oderus on guitar and Joey Slutman (Joe Annaruma, in real life) on vocals, a battle with a giant roach monster, (ending with the introduction of a giant can of Raid, naturally) and the early GWAR being greeted by Sleazy P. Martini (notably missing his giant plastic hair) and given a brief case full of coke. There's also a rundown of the various enemies the band has faced on stage, ranging from Techno Destructo to Cardinal Syn to Edna P. Granbo and the Morality Squad to Gor-Gor, the band's pet T-Rex that has to be put down after Oderus's "watch me put my head in the Tyrannosaurus's mouth" stunt goes horribly awry. Things get ugly fast on a section of the video appropriately called "That's Fucked Up," which explored the more, well... fucked up things GWAR has done on stage to their many foam rubber/latex victims, including Oderus deciding to terminate Slymenstra's pregnancy on stage and Father Bohab having a giant cross used on him in ways that would get me kicked off the internet if I explained them. All of this is done in what would be graphic detail if big hunks of foam rubber being thrown around could really be considered "graphic." These aren't normal people we're dealing with, you know?
And yeah, I guess to the dedicated GWAR fan, (and they do exist, trust me on this one) these are really nice things to have on a DVD, but sometimes, the presentation is lacking. While the live footage is mostly bootleg camcorder stuff, it really doesn't look that bad, but there's the annoying tendency for it to be shown fading from one clip to another in rapid-fire succession, often changing before you catch what was going on in a previous clip, and more often than not, the real audio isn't present. Instead, it seems to be a mix of audio from the official "Live From Mount Fiji" live album, the unofficial "You Are All Worthless and Weak" live album, and the studio versions of the songs involved. The outcome of this is a mix of footage that's hard to pay attention to and music you've already heard, and one would be hard-pressed to say whether or not the end result was worth twenty bucks.
Bonus material is kind of thin as well, but it's not without its moments. On one hand, there's "Captain Pike," which is this weird thing involving Sleazy P. Martini on stage with some sort of robot thing based on the original captain of the Star Trek Enterprise, blinking lights in tune to the Soft Cell version of "Tainted Love," that's funny as hell for like thirty seconds but seems to last eight hours, and "Filthy Chunks," which is this really weird horror movie/simulated porn thing involving Oderus and the Sexicutioner doing more things I can't mention on the internet to people made out of various forms of foam rubber. It clearly falls into the "okay, I really didn't need to see that" category, and even though that might have been the intent, I can't see myself ever watching that again, at least not on purpose. On the other hand, you get "Hell-O Again," which is a recent, really high-quality live video of GWAR doing a medley of almost everything from their first album, which sounds really good and includes inexplicable random footage of the Todd Evans version of Beefcake the Might riding a tiny little motorcycle around, and a pretty much never-before seen music video for "Poor Ole Tom," from the America Must Be Destroyed album, which most still consider to be the band's best work to date. (Honestly, We Kill Everything is my favorite GWAR album, which is kind of funny, considering that even the guys who were in the band and wrote the album think it sucked.)
Overall, this is something that's only for the hardest of the hardcore GWAR fans out there, and if you're only going to own one video release of theirs, this isn't the one to get. Hell, for about ten bucks more, you can get a four-pack with Rendezvous With Ragnarok, Tour De Scum, Dawn of the Day of the Night of the Penguins, and It's Sleazy, and that would be a much better place to start. Or you could, you know, buy one of their CDs, with anything from the 90s (mainly Scumdogs of the Universe, This Toilet Earth, and America Must Be Destroyed) and Beyond Hell all being fine choices. But honestly, unless you just can't live without three minutes of Joey Slutman singing or a rundown of GWAR's opponents in Mid-Galactic Championship Wrestling, you might want to steer clear of this one. And besides, if the things they say about DRT are true, they might not get paid for it, anyway.

HEAVY METAL DUDE WHO LOOKS LIKE HE COULD WHOOP SOME ASS OF THE DAY #4

Heaven and Hell's Ronnie James Dio

Hey, I know what you're thinking. "Dio? He's like a skinny bitch-man." But look at that dude. I've known people that look like him, and if I know anything about folks that look like that is that their fury against the world they got from being all tiny and small led them into childhood karate classes, and other places like that. So while the Paul Speckmanns (Speckmenn?) and Brent Hindses of the world are headbutting people in a drunken rage, the Dios of the world are soberly whooping asses scientifically, which is way more sinister.

HEAVY METAL DUDE WHO LOOKS LIKE HE COULD WHOOP SOME ASS OF THE DAY #3

Mastodon's Brent Hinds:

I think that's all that needs to be said here.

HEAVY METAL DUDE WHO LOOKS LIKE HE COULD WHOOP SOME ASS OF THE DAY #2

Amon Amarth's Johan Hegg


"Their defenses are broken m'lord. Verily, the king's blood shall be upon my axe by the time when the sun comes across the far mountains."

HEAVY METAL DUDE WHO LOOKS LIKE HE COULD WHOOP SOME ASS OF THE DAY #1

Master's Paul Speckmann:

FUCK, IT'S ZAKK WYLDE'S EVIL DAD! RUN!

CONVERSION PROJECT #3 - Sacred Reich - Uncensored Material

(Continued from the other two of these that started on the Main Blog Thingy)

This was some neat possibly rare, yet still monetarily worthless stuff I found at Out of Print Music (it only brings up a 404 error page when I go there now, but it still shows up on a Google search, so it might just be server problems) in like 1999 or so. It's a promotional single they did in 1990 for the The American Way album that basically consists of a few song snippets with spoken word from frontman Phil Rind dropping mad knowledge on censorship in between the music. No new music here or anything, but it's still pretty cool. It was only released on cassette, so there aren't really "tracks," but I managed to split it up at relatively appropriate times. It's short, so I'll give you direct links to each track, instead of a ZIP file. Also, the mp3s are 192Kbps, so it doesn't sound like crap.

1. Part One ("The American Way") - 3:11
2. Part Two ("Who's to Blame?") - 4:16
3. Part Three ("The Way it Is") - 2:10
Front Cover
Back Cover

Jucifer - War Bird

(2004, Velocette Records)
If I had any intention of making this blog thing the least bit relevant to the times, I'd be reviewing If Thine Enemy Hunger, which is the full-length album these guys put out that got a bunch of good reviews and everything last year. But you see, if I'm going to buy a CD by someone not established as someone where I already know for sure what I'm getting into, it has to either be used, an EP, or some other conditions must exist to make it cost five bucks or less. So here's an EP from 2004 that I got used for $4.99.
But anyway, the crazy thing about this band is that it's barely even a band. It's just two people, one chick singing and playing a guitar, and a dude playing drums. That's it. I think there's an overdubbed bassline in a song, but otherwise, just two folks. That's crazy. But anyway, for a one sentence description of this EP, this is basically the kind of stuff people used to listen to while doing heroin in the early-to-mid nineties. Like Jucifer could have gone on tour with Helmet back when Helmet was still worth a crap, Nirvana back before Nirvana was selling out arenas and blowing their own heads off, or maybe the Melvins back before the Melvins did whatever it was that they do these days. Hella-distorted, fuzzy guitars drone along while G. Amber Valentine sings in this really soft, sweet voice and Ed Livengood hammers the shit out of the drums, occasionally resulting in something that's way heavier than any band that's just two people with one of them singing really softly has any right to be.
The two biggest highlights here are probably "Ides of Light," the nearly six-minute EP-opener that's a slow, churning, number where the contrast of soft, ballady vocals over a guitar that sounds de-tuned to the point where the strings hung loose creates an almost menacing sound and "Haute Couture," which is mostly sung in French, and is probably the most upbeat, normal people-friendly song on here. Finishing things off is the giant change-of-pace in the form of "My Stars," that's a banjo-based old-school protest song about growing up in 'Merica and is way better-written than the average "OMG CORPORATIONS WTF" songs that most hack bands who actually make a living off songs like that tend to write.
On a goofy side note, while this is a six-song EP, it still manages to clock in at over an hour. The reason? The last track on the album is like 45 minutes of what sounds like someone just leaving a microphone out in a heavily insect-infested back yard for a while. What the hell.
Overall, this is good, bordering on brilliant at times, but it's probably not for everybody. If you like your heavy-type music to be of the fast, aggressive variety, you might want to think twice about this one. On the other hand, if you're into slow, grindy stuff that sounds like some huge thing rolling up real slow-like to crush you and your house, look no further. Or if you like banjo protest songs and long tracks of bug noises. Or maybe if you're from the early 90s, and the smack hasn't killed you yet. Whatever floats your boat, kid.

Track Listing:
1. Ides of Light
2. Day Breaks on the Field of Battle
3. Seth
4. Haute Couture
5. The Shape of Texas
6. My Stars
7. (untitled, unlisted track)

Iron Maiden - A Matter of Life and Death

(Sanctuary Records, 2006)

This was the first time I had high hopes (or honestly, any hopes whatsoever) for an Iron Maiden album in a long time. Their previous one (Dance of Death) actually had a few decent moments, there was a lot of "hey, it's their big return to form" hype surrounding this one, and while it wasn't done by Derek Riggs, they actually got Iron Maiden level cover art for this one. (Even though the little logo that's all over this album with Eddie's head and the two rifles crossed is incorrect, since I've never seen an M-16 with the clip toward the end of the barrel...) I know better than to buy into "comeback album" hype, though, after St. Anger and the last four or five "comeback albums" Megadeth has pooped out, and if cool cover art made an album any good, I'd actually listen to more than two of those Slayer CDs collecting dust over there, so I remained cautiously optimistic.
And well... They almost had a really good album here. On some level, there's probably not an outright bad song on here, maybe even a few classics, but it's as though the writing process involved a lot of, "hey, that song we just finished is really great, but imagine how great it would be if it was TWICE AS LONG?" Of the ten tracks here, six clock in at over seven minutes, with two of those going over nine. And while Maiden has showed an aptitude for that kind of thing in the past, (I'm still amazed they could keep my interest for thirteen on "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" back in the day) they fall into a very Metallica-like habit here of repetition and bridge/chorus parts that would last as long as an entire song for a hardcore band. After a while, this can suck the life out of even a really good song, and for all I know, there could be the ultimate Iron Maiden classic song toward the end of this, but by that point, everything has started to run together, to the point where I've just kind of tuned it out as background noise. Not helping matters is the overuse of the exact same "Bruce singing softly over quiet guitars" intro on half the songs here. I'm with them through the first five songs (which are all really good, for the record) but the second half just completely falls flat. (And that includes the plodding "The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg," which might be the most questionable choice of a first single/video that I've ever seen a band make. "Different World" was RIGHT THERE, man.)
And while we're nitpicking for things to complain about, the usual "co-produced by Steve Harris" thing is way too evident here. This is a band with three lead guitar players, but they're buried so far in the mix under the bass that it sounds like they don't even have two. Also, Bruce Dickinson's vocals, while still better than basically anyone else ever, sound weak as hell by his standards here, almost wheezy at points.
In conclusion, with a little less self-indulgence and a little more restraint, this could have been up there with Powerslave and Somewhere in Time, but they just didn't know when to quit. Still, while it's not the "OMG COMEBACK ALBUM!!!" that was marketed to us, I probably have been a little harsh here, since even with all its flaws, it's still not bad, and if I still made mixed tapes, there would still be maybe four or five songs which could possibly qualify to be put on one. Not bad, but not the legendary album they built it up to be.
Oh, and if you're not so cheap that you can't spend an extra three bucks or so, you get a DVD, too. (And at least a Best Buy, the DVD version is actually cheaper than the regular one) It's got a kinda cool thirty-minute "Making Of" documentary, with a rundown of what each song is about and what the process was to make it, along with a photo gallery and videos for "Different World" and "The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg." Nothing to make up your mind on buying it, if you were on the fence, but still a fun way to blow 45 minutes or so.

Track Listing:

1. Different World
2. These Colours Don't Run
3. Brighter Than a Thousand Suns
4. The Pilgrim
5. The Longest Day
6. Out of the Shadows
7. The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg
8. For the Greater Good of God
9. Lord of Light
10. The Legacy