The song pick this week is a track from Sammy Hagar’s fourth solo album Street Machine. This album hit in 1979 and was kind of a lull in Hagar’s career – he wouldn’t see true solo success until 1982 and Standing Hampton. But there were still plenty of worthy songs early on in Sammy’s first solo outing and today’s track is one of those.
This Planet’s On Fire (Burn In Hell) did get a singles release in the UK though it didn’t set the UK charts on fire. It would feature over 40 times in live setlists through the early 1980’s before Sammy joined Van Halen and ran off to mega-stardom. He does not appear to have played it since, though such setlist aggregation sites aren’t always accurate so I don’t know.
Today’s song is one of Sammy’s heavy metal-leaning tracks that he was very fond of doing. He had tried to keep Montrose in a metal direction in the early 1970’s, which led to his exit from that group. While Sammy often plied his trade in rock, he could be found exploring the emerging world of metal from time to time.
The standout part of this song is, of course, that riff. It is a roller coaster ride up and down the fretboard on this one. It will get a person to take notice, that’s for sure. There is also plenty of soloing in the wordless moments to keep the guitar lesson going. Hagar would revisit this style of running riff a few years down the line with the song I Don’t Need Love from Three Lock Box.
Lyrically the song is pretty easy to figure out – everything is messed up and everyone has punched their ticket to H-E-double hockey sticks. It doesn’t sound like a bad thing in this case – as with a lot of Sammy at his best, it’s a party all the way to the bottom. It’s not the same kind of Hell as in a preacher’s sermon or as depicted by about 666,666 black metal bands. Maybe it’s really more like Heck, I don’t know.
This song has kind of hung out in the lower rung of Sammy Hagar’s catalog. His time in Van Halen will always be the topic of discussion, and his solo stuff includes his big hit I Can’t Drive 55 and his more modern incarnation as a hard rock Jimmy Buffet. His brief stint with Montrose might garner more attention than a lot of his early solo career before ’82, even.
But Hagar’s early stuff has gained some notice. I know I was one of many to gravitate to this song the first time I heard it way back when. And I wasn’t the only one – in 2022, Dave Mustaine and Megadeth cut a cover version of it for certain versions of their album The Sick, They Dying … And The Dead! The cover featured vocals from Hagar as well.
This Planet’s On Fire may not have set the world on fire, but this is still top-notch stuff from the Red Rocker. It doesn’t get much better than this trip straight to Hell.
In 2004, one of Sweden’s leading purveyors of death and thrash hooked back up with an old flame, threw a few new bits into their metal, and had a day with the response.
The Haunted – Revolver
Released October 18, 2004 via Century Media Records
My Favorite Tracks – Who Will Decide, Abysmal, Sabotage
The Haunted have a curious history, having been formed in 1996. The band was formed by 3/5 of the former lineup of Swedish death legends At The Gates, who had broken up one day prior to The Haunted’s founding. The band was founded by brothers Jonas (bass) and Anders Björler (guitar) and Adrian Erlandsson (drums), all former members of ATG. They were initially joined by vocalist Peter Dolving and guitarist Patrik Jensen. Dolving and Erlandsson would leave The Haunted after the band’s first album, to be replaced by Marco Aro and Per Möller Jensen.
The Haunted gained acclaim on their next two albums with a pretty straightforward Swedish thrash sound. Marco Aro left the band somewhat suddenly in 2003, which led to the group seeking a reunion with original vocalist Peter Dolving and the release of this album.
The album’s name was styled as rEVOLVEr, which was meant as an indication that The Haunted’s music was evolving from its entrenched roots in Swedish thrash. Though for the sake of clarity I will style the album’s name as Revolver in this post, maybe someone will get confused and think I’m talking about The Beatles. A few seconds of riffs from The Haunted album will likely correct any confusion.
Revolver is a hefty slab of music, no matter which configuration it comes in. The standard edition features 11 tracks at 47 minutes, while the red-covered deluxe edition offers 2 bonus tracks. And as usual, the Japanese version has its own bonus track and keeps another track from the deluxe set. For brevity’s sake I will go over the standard tracklist though I have always had the deluxe version. Here is the standard album’s tracklist:
No Compromise
99
Abysmal
Sabotage
All Against All
Sweet Relief
Burnt To A Shell
Who Will Decide
Nothing Right
Liquid Burns
My Shadow
The album opens with a pair of songs that are pretty standard fare for The Haunted – brutal, fast and loud. No Compromise and 99 both come in hard and stay that way. No Compromise is one of a few songs on the album that isn’t woefully negative in its outlook, it is more of a rallying cry for the outcasts. 99 is a very bleak look at the state of the system and doesn’t offer much in the way of hope, something that isn’t to be found on this album hardly at all.
Abysmal starts off as something quite unexpected – this is, in many respects, a ballad. It starts off very quiet, with Peter Dolving almost speaking the lines, until the song suddenly gets much heavier though keeps its dirge-like pace. The song lives up to it’s title, this is as dark as it gets with no way out and no light at the end of any tunnel.
Up next is Sabotage, which is a full-tilt delivery that is like punk on steroids. It’s followed by All Against All, a more mid-paced track that is a very harsh look at an ended relationship. This one has the “feel” of a hardcore song though still bringing its thrash underpinnings. The Swedish thrash and death sound was a huge influence on the metalcore scene and here we have one of the Swedish bands putting it all together.
If you were hoping that Sweet Relief would bring you respite from the bone-crunching riffs and stark lyrical themes, well your hope was misplaced, as the song slams in and keeps the metal flowing. The next song might be the one you’re really looking for – Burnt To A Shellis another quasi-ballad and this one is also not negative to the point of being psychologically disturbing. It does offer some of that bleak imagery but also gives a fair respite from it in the chorus.
Up next is Who Will Decide. This is another hard one and also features guest vocals from Sick Of It All frontman Lou Keller. This song really exposes the true problems with the system and why things never really seem to get truly better. And this was recorded in 2004, this one is even more relevant 19 years later.
The album heads into the home stretch with Nothing Right, another hard hitter that spells out exactly what the title says. Liquid Burns comes in next and is a very messed up look at some crazy relationship and abuse stuff, as well as the influence of alcohol and its numbing effects on the ills of society. The album closes with My Shadow, this being a full-on “ballad” and also the bleakest of the bleak in terms of theme. This conclusion is the most desperate and hopeless song of them all, just totally giving up and being nothing.
Revolver was a remarkable moment in The Haunted’s career. The album served to both honor the musical legacy of the band as well as update the sound a bit and it slotted in nicely alongside the emerging metalcore movement of the early 00’s. If The Haunted were living somewhat in the shadow of At The Gates, Revolver saw them cast off that legacy completely and fully flesh out their own identity.
It isn’t a huge secret that the lyrical themes of extreme metal tend to dwell on the negative side, but on this album the lyrics truly are dynamically written to be as hopeless as possible in many cases. It’s not like a lot of metalheads even really take in the lyrics on a lot of death or black metal – the voice is often just another instrument. But with this album Dolving’s vocal delivery is comprehensible and the words truly stand out in their desperation when they’re taken in.
The Haunted would continue course with Peter Dolving for three more albums before he departed the group in 2012. The band would also contend with double duty, as At The Gates reformed in 2008. The band nearly split up but would reconvene with singer Marco Aro and release yet more vital music in the 2010’s.
For all of the band’s history in the hallowed Swedish metal scene, Revolver might be the most unique and dynamic moment of The Haunted’s catalog. The songwriting featured variety and dynamics and the lyrical content went to a place far scarier than the imagined hells of most metal albums – the cold, stark facts of reality for many hopeless souls.
I borrowed the title from a UFO album and song not because I want to talk about UFO today, but because it fits the topic at hand. UFO is one of those bands I need to sit down with and check out more, I am woefully uneducated on them. This is a pretty cool track, I’ll say that.
Anyway – I had a whole week of posts planned. I got to all of one of them, the Album of the Week. As anyone can clearly tell, I haven’t posted since then, despite all these big plans which included celebrating the two-year anniversary of this site, which was on Wednesday the 2nd. I also haven’t read anyone else’s posts this week much at all.
So what happened? Well, the title should give you an idea. On Sunday night just before midnight, a very gnarly storm rolled through my area. A very large tree fell from my neighbor’s yard and the impact of that messed up my electric meter and knocked my power out. The damage from the storm was the most severe that area power crews have seen in at least a decade. I was without power from that point Sunday night until late morning Wednesday. And it’s been over 90 degrees outside during that time (about 32 for those of you who use that). And to top it all off, the power outage caused my job to get backed up and I had a few 12 hour or so shifts in that time I also didn’t have power at my house. It was not a pleasant week in the first half.
And yeah, in a way it’s relevant to the music interests I discuss here – of anything I own, the “pride and joy” would be my vinyl collection, which isn’t the world’s biggest but is a bit pricey in spots. That was sitting in a house without A/C in that kind of heat for roughly 60 hours. In fairness, the nights cooled off enough to be tolerable and the records are in a room with several windows so there is good airflow. Everything turned out ok, at least as far as the stuff I spot-checked so far, but I was getting close to the point where I would have to get everything out of the house if the power didn’t come back on soon. That is a relevant factor for any vinyl collector to consider – of course records can survive power outages in winter weather, but in the dead ass heat of the summer, they are sitting ducks in any kind of extended outage.
All’s well that ends well I guess, and now the week is about over, I’m back in the sweet embrace of my true love in life, air conditioning, and my records are seemingly safe from damage. All this really means for the site is that I’ll push the posts from this week to next. Most everything is 90% ready, I’ve been using that method to write lately and I get a lot more done as opposed to trying to finish everything in one go. I usually only schedule the post the day before it goes live so I wasn’t prepared to have content flowing out in the event of something like this. But I’m sure I, everyone reading and everything else will be fine.
I guess that covers it for the mysterious absence this week. Next week I’ll kick out what I intended to do this week and everything should get rolling normal again, and also the week after next I’m off work with not a whole hell of a lot to do, so the site should be firing off posts pretty regularly. See you all then.
The Crooked Wanderer 