Borrowing heavily from Marc Bolan’s glam rock and the future shock of A Clockwork Orange, David Bowie reached back to the heavy rock of The Man Who Sold the World for The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. Constructed as a loose concept album about an androgynous alien rock star named Ziggy Stardust, the story falls apart quickly, yet Bowie’s fractured, paranoid lyrics are evocative of a decadent, decaying future, and the music echoes an apocalyptic, nuclear dread. Fleshing out the off-kilter metallic mix with fatter guitars, genuine pop songs, string sections, keyboards, and a cinematic flourish, Ziggy Stardust is a glitzy array of riffs, hooks, melodrama, and style and the logical culmination of glam. Mick Ronson plays with a maverick flair that invigorates rockers like “Suffragette City,” “Moonage Daydream,” and “Hang Onto Yourself,” while “Lady Stardust,” “Five Years,” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” have a grand sense of staged drama previously unheard of in rock & roll. And that self-conscious sense of theater is part of the reason why Ziggy Stardust sounds so foreign. Bowie succeeds not in spite of his pretensions but because of them, and Ziggy Stardust — familiar in structure, but alien in performance — is the first time his vision and execution met in such a grand, sweeping fashion.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/tyz526
Recorded in London following an attempt on his life, Exodus shows Bob Marley mellowing a bit. Despite some powerful political tracks, Marley adopts a less fiery, more reflective approach than his previous outings. Still, it’s hard to find reggae as good as this. Exodus has all one would expect from a Bob Marley album: rumbling statements like “Exodus” and “The Heathen” as well as poetic love songs like “Turn Your Lights Down Low.” Considering how good these tracks are, Exodus does not stop here. Marley also unleashed the huge international hits “Jamming,” “Waiting in Vain,” and “One Love/People Get Ready.” These inspired tracks, perhaps more than any others, came to define Marley around the world. They are irresistible no matter how many times they are played. Never one to dodge innovation, “Exodus” hints that Marley was taking cues from the emerging dub scene. Exodus, even though it contains some of Marley’s best work, has an underlying nostalgic feel to it, hinting that Marley was getting a little formulaic.
Since Swagger, Flogging Molly have continued being the best at blending punk, pub-rock, and Irish influences. Even though they have released 3 more full-lengths, Swagger is essential for fans of their later albums, or fans of similar bands like Dropkick Murphys, the Scotch Greens, and Street Dogs. The raucous “Selfish Man”, “Black Friday Rule”, and “Devil’s Dance Floor” are combined with ballads such as “Grace of God Go I” and “The Ol’ Beggars Bush” to create the perfect album worthy of any barroom brawl.
As Deep Purple’sRoger Glover once said, “Heavy isn’t about volume, it’s about attitude.” And no band better illustrates this statement than England’s Electric Wizard — the reputed heaviest band in the universe — whose every album has managed to push the boundaries of down-tuned, grinding, monolithic doom metal to unprecedented depths. Sure, they pack plenty of volume as well, but none of it could possibly work without the band’s uncompromising worship of weed and all things gothic and malevolent. After a long hiatus (during which they were no doubt traveling the cosmos without ever leaving their parent’s basements or putting down their bongs), Electric Wizard finally returned to action in the year 2000. The resulting dirge masterpiece, Dopethrone, delivers walls of sound so dense that at first they seem too big to fit into your ears. At a paltry three minutes, the opener “Vinum Sabbathi” may be the Wizards‘ first true candidate for an actual “single,” but it really serves as a teaser for what’s to come. Introduced by short spoken intros taken from B-movies a la White Zombie, extended riff-monsters like “Funeralopolis,” “I, the Witchfinder,” and the three-part colossus “Weird Tales” are vintage Electric Wizard. Though they never exceed a snail’s pace, they somehow manage to build in intensity, from single note guitar lines to huge power chords with deliberate, maddening certainty. First-time listeners will find it easier to cope with more compact offerings like “Barbarian” and “We Hate You,” but with time, they’ll see the light and embrace the obscenely heavy title track, with its patented “Iron Man” oscillating riff. In short, with Dopethrone, Electric Wizard has raised the bar for doom metal achievement in the new millennium — good luck to the competition.
Jack and Meg White, the members of possibly the most famous and most successful Detroit garage rock duo return with the new release, Icky Thump. The album continues the White Stripes tradition of simple garage rock with the addition of synthesizers, a country feel on a couple of tracks, and softer vocals. The album continues like this until the bizarre “Conquest”. It sounds like the White Stripes making a foray into ska, which is very unusual, but somehow, it works. The next track is a typical White Stripes track, but then, “Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn” is possibly as strange as “Conquest”. It is all thumping bass drum, clapping and and sounds like a pub drinking song, especially when, what sounds like bagpipes, come in. Continuing down this bizarre path is the short and strange “St. Andrew (The Battle is In the Air)”. All it is, is a woman speaking over some of the strangest music I’ve ever heard. Two tracks later, “Rag & Bone” makes the White Stripes sound like they would if they were covering a ZZ Top song. The last four tracks are all still strange, just not as much as the others. All in all, this is definitely the most sonically adventurous White Stripes album. Despite it’s obvious differences from other Stripe’s albums like White Blood Cells, Elephant, and even Get Behind Me Satan, it works for them.
Canadian power-metal sextet Three Inches of Blood returns with a blistering new release Fire Up the Blades. Thrash-fest from start to finish, Three Inches of Blood comes even closer to perfecting that 80’s metal sound. Produced by Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison, the album makes the band sound like direct descendents of Slayer, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, etc. Fans of the band will be very pleased with this release, and metal newcomers are in for a brutal thrashing.
