Angry Metal Guy

“Seven deadly sins, seven ways to win, seven holy paths to hell and your trip begins.  Seven downward slopes, seven bloodied hopes, seven are your burning fires.  Seven your desires…” Cue the keyboards and the power chords.  Anyone who knows this album and loves it knows exactly what I’m talking about.  Possibly the coolest album intro of all time, to the best heavy metal record ever written: Iron Maiden – Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.

Of course, Maiden makes it onto everyone’s lists when you do those all encompassing lists that metalheads and music geeks are obsessed with.  But it’s always Number of the Beast or Powerslave and everyone seems so content to just let that go.  I guess if you were 16 or 17 at the time and these were your first Maiden records, that probably explains it.  But as a huge Maiden fan who has extensively listened to every single one of their records hundreds of times (including the Blaze Bayley records), I have to report to you: Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is easily the best Iron Maiden album and, in this Angry Metal Guy’s angry, and not-even-remotely-humble opinion, the best heavy metal record ever written.

I’m actually not exaggerating.  I really do believe that Seventh Son is the best album ever.  And let me tell you why: first, these guys hit their musical peak with this album.  Every Maiden album has filler, tracks which didn’t live up to the standard of the album they were on.  The song “Quest for Fire” mars an otherwise amazing album in Piece of Mind.  I find “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” to be absolutely tedious, and “22 Acacia Avenue” makes baby Jesus cry.  And let’s not even talk about after Adrian left the band.  But not on Seventh Son.  Every single track on this album is amazing, and the one song I don’t think is just totally stellar was actually a hit single throughout the world (“Can I Play with Madness”)!

But whether or not these songs were hits or not, the composition on this album is perfect.  Dickinson’s vocal performance is unparalleled (a rare feat in the early days), the writing was unique and amazingly layered and in-depth, and the concept seems to hold the album together thematically.  Even the artwork is a step above the other stuff: grotesque, but not cheesy. That’s without having mentioned that this is the last album that Harris plays his unique lead-style of bass and shortly hereafter Adrian left, depriving the following albums of his textured, beautiful leads.  But herein, everything came together  into the perfect blend of musical virtuosity, pop sensibility and heavy, intelligent music.

Of course, everyone has different tracks that they think really embody the band, but I think for me that it’s “The Prophecy” that embodies what I love about Iron Maiden.  It starts slowly, delicate and beautiful, and then builds.  The guitar tone is very 80s, but very excellent before pounding into a fantastic syncopated riff, which may be one of the most powerful that was ever written for the band.  Dickinson nails the vocals, which are layered and have amazing lyrics.. and the leads are tremendous.  But what seals the deal for me is the final moments—the fading guitars and the beautiful acoustics that blended over top to the end.  This kind of musical diversity and intelligence just doesn’t exist on Maiden’s other albums.  This kind of perfection just doesn’t exist on any other record that I’ve ever listened to.

Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is truly a classic and if you don’t own it you are depriving yourself of the best heavy metal album ever written.

OK, so the first album that I did in my “classic albums” section was Type O Negative, which of course, was one of my favorite bands at the time. But they also turned me onto Roadrunner Records, which for those of you too young to remember, was kind of one of the few places even putting out metal in the US during the 1990s. Sure, in retrospect, a lot of that stuff wasn’t that great. But there were a few bands on that label that put out some good records. Sepultura had Chaos AD which I loved, and one band that stands out for me to this day, and that I really loved as an angsty teenager, was Life of Agony.

Life of Agony was one of those precursors to nu-metal that should have implied the trend was on the move, but still were a lot heavier and better musicians than any of the bands that followed them. While they weren’t exactly the worlds best musicians, they were able to make a really groovy album that spoke to everything that pissed me off as a kid. Singing along to choruses like “You got time but you ain’t got time for me! Got time but you ain’t got time for me!” and empathizing with the main character in the whole story whose life just sucks.

The whole band was perfect for the moment, and really Life of Agony never put out a good record after River Runs Red. But this album is a classic, in my book. Sure, your average death metal guy probably wouldn’t be big into it, but if you like doom metal at all. Or groovy metal with clean vocals, this record is fantastic. The vocals are deep and powerful, the lyrics are dark and anguished and the groove is so thick you could cut it with a knife. In many ways, these guys had a similar sound to Type O, but they took themselves a lot more seriously and weren’t funny or tongue in cheek at all. On the contrary, they were serious dudes producing a serious album that seriously kicked ass.

Listening to the album again, the only thing on here that I don’t really like now are the story pieces with the bitchy lady screaming and the fighting. The dude killing himself at the end is a little bit more painful to listen to now then it was then. But, the music stands the test of time in my opinion. Its down-tuned hooks still grab me, and the lack of solos doesn’t bother me, and I still love the vocals and lyrics. Incidentally, I also have always been a huge fan of concept albums, and this one was no different. Apparently something about a story in the music just grabs me and pulls me in.

Of course, one man’s nostalgia is another man’s pain (See: Queensryche). There’s no guarantee that anyone who didn’t grow up on that record would really dig it. But if you want to get an idea of what metal was like in the US before nu-metal hit, before bands like At The Gates broke the ocean barrier and blew young death metal fans away and before a lot of the labels that are huge today started really setting down their roots (Century Media, for example), then take a listen to Life of Agony. Let the groove and teen angst wash over you.

It’s been a long time since I’ve taken time to go back and listen to classic albums that totally influenced me and lead me down The Path that Rocks! (As opposed to the Path of Righteousness.)  But it’s something that I should do more often, and it started today when a buddy of mine over at the WMA Forums posted his now playing: Type O Negative – Bloody Kisses.  I was suddenly overcome with a compulsion to go back and listen to this masterpiece of metal from when metal wasn’t even remotely cool, from a period where having long black hair and digging Iron Maiden meant sort of living in the closet–well, at least if you were a middle-school kid in the Midwest, anyway.

Despite that, however, Type O Negative managed to write one of the most compelling, irreverent and awesome records ever written.  I’ve never been a huge fan of doom metal, and yet somehow this album totally has managed to stick with me through everything.  Many of the bands that I really idolized from the time period are bands that I don’t listen to anymore at all (Biohazard, Agnostic Front, Sepultura, Korn [at least I'm a big enough man to admit it]) and even have a serious distaste for–yet somehow I go back and listen to Bloody Kisses and all I want to do is scream along with every note, bang my head and I have trouble not laughing my ass off thinking of the antics of these dudes.  I remember watching the After Dark DVD, for example and nearly laughing until I was crying through a lot of it (it got even better with the DVD commentary, some will remember–“jackass!”–including much discussion of Peter Steele’s “Ladder Rung o’ Love“).

Bloody Kisses, and even to some extent October Rust, were classic and influential albums in my life (I also was quite fond of Origin of the Feces).  For one, it made me think that low vocals were awesome, and it kind of taught me that bands can be awesome without guitar solos–something a lot of new bands could probably learn from, given this focus on the modern guitar hero, despite it being really just boring half the time now.  But not only that, these guys just didn’t ever really take themselves seriously.  They never got into the rockstar bullshit in the same way other bands did, and I think that shows through their diverse influences in their music, their ability to make jokes about themselves (“Do not mistake lack of talent for genius”) and the reason that this record feels so fresh all these years later.

I’m particularly fond of this record–but I’m especially fond of the second half of the record.  From “We Hate Everyone” onwards is still what does the most for me.  Going from the joking, impertinent nature of that song all the way to the very serious, doomy “Blood and Fire” and “Can’t Lose You,” the album had a feel that cannot be reproduced–and never has been.  And that in spite of the record being 73 minutes long!  How many bands can produce a 73 minute record these days that a person honestly wants to listen all the way through these days?

In sum, I’d say that this album, while not my favorite album ever, is definitely still deserving of the first spot in my Classics section because apparently 16 years later, I’m still not over it.