Month: July 2024

Grave Digger – Heavy Metal Breakdown

On By bigbadburchIn Album of the Week3 Comments

When you have 22 albums in the course of a music career, you have to start somewhere with number 1. For German metal titans Grave Digger, that first album came in the hallowed metal year of 1984.

Grave Digger – Heavy Metal Breakdown

Released April 7, 1984 via Noise Records (European release)

Grave Digger formed in 1980 and spent a few years on the live circuit before stepping into recorded music. The band was comprised of Chris Boltendahl on vocals, Peter Masson on guitar, Willi Lackman on bass and Albert Eckardt on drums. Boltendahl remains as the lone original member of the band and even by 1984 the group had replaced a few members.

All music on Heavy Metal Breakdown is credited to Grave Digger as a collective, while all lyrics were credited to Boltendahl. (with two exceptions noted below) This was due to legal reasons, as the band only had the money to register one person with Germany’s publishing rights group. The album was produced by Grave Digger and Karl-Ulrich Walterbach, the head of Noise Records. Harris Johns engineered the album, he would also produce many of the essential Noise Records releases.

This album exists in several versions with different tracklists and sequencing. I will be covering the original European release as that’s the LP I have in my collection. The US version was released a bit later in the year and has an extra song and also omits a cover song. Several reissues of this album also exists with plenty of bonus tracks, but again I’m sticking with the original today.

Headbanging Man

The opener is a barn-burning speed metal outburst. Boltendahl establishes his trademark snarl on vocals right off the bat while the song bashes through in heavy as hell fashion. No deeper meaning to dig into here – this song is an ode to the now-established metalhead, the headbanging man. The song is quite simple but it’s also very nice and gets the ball rolling well. Grade: A-

Heavy Metal Breakdown

The title track does not veer too far off of the tone set in the opener. It’s another burst of fury paying homage to the headbanger. It’s easy to laugh at a lyric like “we come to shake your hands and legs as fast as we can do,” but the song rises above any simplicity and offers up a heavy metal triumph. Even in a career spanning 22 albums, this one stands out as the band’s signature song. Grade: A+

Back From The War

This one starts off with a very cool, ominous intro and first verse passage before kicking into a more thrashy passage that remains through the rest of the song. The song recounts the horrors of war, a tried and true subject within metal. It also has a very long fade-out at the end, which has next to nothing to do with anything, I just wanted to bring it up. Grade: B+

Yesterday

Grave Digger decided to switch things up here and offer up something that could be considered a ballad. The song writing here is credited to Beate Marquardt, who I am totally unfamiliar with. It’s not an outright, sap on sap 80’s ballad but it’s a bit of a curveball for the record. It has a few quiet passages in the beginning and middle, but does thrash it up a little bit for the song’s very few lyrics. This one is fine to listen to but also doesn’t really move me all that much. Grade: C

We Wanna Rock You

We are back to the main point of the album, which is headbanging. This is another meat and potatoes metal song about heavy metal. Sure it’s basic, but this is the kind of stuff kids lived for in the 1980’s. Another finely done slab of headbanging. Grade: A

Legion Of The Lost

There’s an acoustic intro here that transitions into a mournful first verse passage, then the speed metal comes back a few minutes in and takes us to the end. This song really goes for the throat and slams the heavy metal home. Grade: A

Tyrant

In shocking news, it’s another crisp headbanging track. Boltendahl gets some screams going here and this one is heavy and also showcasing dynamics. Groovy guitar solo in this one, too. Grade: A-

2000 Light Years From Home

On the original version of the album we get this cover of the 1967 Rolling Stones song. This cover does not resemble the original song in any way, shape or form – rather than implementing the psychedelia of the Stones song, Grave Digger pound their way through this one in the same fashion they’ve done the rest of this album.

The production here is pretty rough, this sounds like it was taken from a different session than the other songs. It is a decently done cover song and it’s interesting how Grave Digger twisted the song up to fit their sound, but this is really more of a trivia piece than anything. Grade: C+

Heart Attack

The closer gets going right away and goes all out, it’s an extra bit of speed on top and this is honestly an outright thrash song. It’s just the right kick in the ass to end the album with, even if the lyrics themselves have absolutely nothing to do with a heart attack. Grade: B+

Heavy Metal Breakdown was a loud and noisy debut for Grave Digger. Like most Noise Records albums, this one did not chart on release. Like many of the Noise releases, this one would spread around the tape traders and heavy metal parking lots of the day as Grave Digger slowly built their name. Separately, Grave Digger didn’t seem to chart at all until 2010, though I can’t totally verify that information.

And it would be quite awhile for Grave Digger to get their notoriety – the band scratched through the rest of the 80’s without any real breakthrough. They even shortened their name to Digger and tried to emulate the sounds of the day for a bit. The band then went on hiatus for several years, returning in the early 90’s with a sound somewhere between speed and power metal that Grave Digger would then run with for the ensuing decades.

It was quite the long road for Grave Digger to get where they were going, but it started in grand fashion with the release of this killer debut album. The production was a tad rough around the edges but the album is still perfectly listenable, and there is no doubt this a heavy metal loving band.

Album Grade: A-

We have plenty of esteemed and celebrated heavy metal albums from 1984, and while Grave Digger never earned the profile of the likes of Maiden or Priest, this band still offered up a fine slab of metal to headbang along with. Germany is one of heavy metal’s most prolific nations and Grave Digger are without a doubt a highlight of that country’s pantheon.

To see the details of my grading system, head here.

For questions, comments or concerns, use the comment form below or head to my contact page.

Oasis – Live Forever

On By bigbadburchIn Song Of The Week3 Comments

Today I keep rolling with my mini-concept of visiting a song from the years ending in 4. Today I head back to 1994 and I’m finally going to address a song I’ve been dying to write about for awhile now. This was the song from the debut album that really got the ball rolling for England’s revered (and reviled) Oasis.

Live Forever was the third single from the 1994 debut Definitely Maybe. The album is cited for selling over 8 million copies, though no telling how much of that was the white-hot success of the follow-up record. The single did great business, earning Oasis their first UK top 10 hit and also placing at number 2 on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart, as well as 10 on the Mainstream Rock chart in the US. The single is double platinum in the UK for sales of 1.2 million.

This song is a bright, positive one with a simple beat and riff that keeps things moving along. The lyrics visit the concept of wanting to shed a mundane life and finding happiness with a close friend or family member. It doesn’t wallow in the angst of being downtrodden, rather the song embraces reality and hopes for something better, coupled with the bond of friendship. While a lot of Oasis songs have lyrics that mean absolutely nothing, the words to Live Forever have a simple yet very powerful meaning to them.

This was one of the first songs Noel Gallagher started putting together, and it was the one that made him and the other members of Oasis realize they had something special. It was also the song that helped push Oasis over the edge when being offered a record deal by Creation Records. When it was released as a single just in advance of the album, music critics found something a bit more special than the average band in this song.

There a few bits of trivia here. One is that the vocal melody in the beginning was inspired by the Rolling Stones song Shine A Light. It’s not a rip off or anything like that, but there’s a link there for sure between the chorus of the Stones’ song and the opening line of this one.

Also, Noel Gallagher was inspired in part by Nirvana to write this song. Not due to any similarity in sound, it was Nirvana and grunge’s bleak outlook that caused Noel ire. Noel heard the Nirvana track I Hate Myself And Want To Die and wound up completing Live Forever. Gallagher was not offering a direct response to the down and out grunge tune – rather he fashioned an antidote.

Live Forever was played 570 times during Oasis’ run, making it their third most played song. It has also been aired out 72 times by Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds since Oasis ended. That is nearly doubled by brother Liam, who has played it out 139 times as a solo artist.

I do hold Live Forever in high regard – awhile back when I ranked my 20 favorite Oasis tracks, this clocked in at third place. It’s a beautiful song that’s honestly perfect for just about any occasion. Feeling bad? Put it on and feel better. Feeling good? Put it on and keep feeling good. It can fit weddings, funerals, celebrations and tragedies of about any kind. Maybe the biggest shame of Live Forever is that Oasis kind of outdid themselves with another song on the next album that fills a similar purpose, though there’s nothing wrong with having both this song and Don’t Look Back In Anger around.

That about covers it for today. I will be giving Definitely Maybe another look on its 30th anniversary date near the end of August. I covered it in one of my first posts on this site and only three people ever read it so I guess repeating myself is ok in this case. Tomorrow I’ll be back with a song from 2004 and on that is much, much less positive and upbeat than this one. Look forward to it!

Iron Maiden – 2 Minutes To Midnight

On By bigbadburchIn Song Of The Week6 Comments

Let’s kick off a short run through songs from “The 4’s” and start with the feature year of my site this year, 1984. In shocking news, it’s a song from my favorite band and also just happens to be my favorite song from them.

1984 would be Iron Maiden’s banner year – with the release of Powerslave and the subsequent world tour that went on forever, Maiden were at the forefront of heavy metal during its boom period. The album would go on to pop platinum and gold awards around the world, and todays’ song hit number 11 on the UK charts as the lead single from the album.

And yes, before I go on, I have discussed this song a bit previously as part of the singles series I did. Oh well, gonna do it again.

2 Minutes To Midnight is a fast, hard hitting song that keeps it basic. It’s meat and potatoes metal, which Maiden execute well despite being known for their more epic fare. We do get a soaring chorus and a nice guitar solo section, but this tune written by Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson does generally plunge straight ahead.

The theme here is how the powers that be perpetuate a state of war to keep raking in the money from selling instruments of war. It was a common and corrupt practice through the 1980’s and hasn’t really gone away today. The rank and file people suffer while corporations and politicians feed at the trough, it’s a well-worn theme that hasn’t gotten any better over the past 40 years.

The song’s title is a reference to the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic device issued by a group of scientists to gauge how close civilization is to a global catastrophe. This classicly meant nuclear war but can also refer to other wild disasters and non-nuclear war threats. 2 minutes was the closest the clock had ever been to midnight, this was set in 1953 during the build-up of the Cold War. Iron Maiden used it as a symbol of world destruction to set with their song about warmongering, a fair pairing if there ever was one.

The only issue is that the Doomsday Clock has now moved closer than 2 minutes – in 2023 it was set to 90 seconds to midnight, and remains there as of mid-2024. We are setting records, baby!

2 Minutes To Midnight has been one of Maiden’s more recognizable tracks over the years. It’s not quite at the same level as stuff like The Trooper or Hallowed Be Thy Name but the song does qualify as a “greatest hit.” It has been played nearly 1,400 times live, good for 6th-most in the Maiden live pantheon.

The song’s main riff has been the subject of some funny speculation. The riff is a very generic one that’s easy to play and also can be found all throughout rock history. There’s no telling where it actually first came from – my rough guess is Ritchie Blackmore but I’m honestly not sure about that, it could go back even farther. But some astute listeners picked up on a 1980 song by British group White Spirit, fittingly called Midnight Chaser, with a guitar run that sounds suspiciously familiar to this song. I’ll post the song below so everyone can do their own comparisons if they wish.

In and of itself this isn’t a huge deal – one, this riff is very stock and I would hesitate to think it could even be copyrighted or whatever. Two, Iron Maiden have “borrowed” from more obscure British acts from time to time, usually with proper settlements in place (depending on who you ask).

But there is a hilarious coincidence here, and that revolves around White Spirit’s guitar player. He was none other than Janick Gers. Six years after the release of the Iron Maiden song, Janick would find himself in Iron Maiden, replacing Adrian Smith and remaining with the band even when Smith returned in 1999. So maybe, not really but it’s funny to say anyway, maybe Iron Maiden ripped off their future guitar player’s super generic riff. I don’t know.

As I said above, this is my favorite Iron Maiden song. Yes, I do mean of all their catalog. People do sometimes look at me weird when I tell them that – this one is usually held in high regard but not on the same degree as other songs. And some fans do feel it’s too basic. But it all struck the right chords with me, and I’ve always been a fan of “brink of nuclear disaster” kind of stuff so this checked that box. It was also featured in my favorite video game of all time, the often-mentioned Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, with how much I’ve played it I’ve easily heard this Maiden song more times than any other.

That’s about all I have to go over today. As part of my 1984 celebration and my perpetual Iron Maiden celebration, I will be giving Powerslave a second look and a proper grading on its 40th anniversary date of September 3rd. The day before will be the normal Album of the Week slot and I’ll have a Maiden double feature then – another Maiden album released on September 3rd will get a reassessment and grading on the 2nd. But we have two months to worry about all of that.