“Every once in awhile it’s fun to shuffle through the promo pile in search of an album that explores the good ole days of rock—and by “good ole days,” I mean old-man Steely D days. Even when it’s done shittily, the outcome triggers special memories of sitting around listening to the godfathers of heavy metal and hard rock on shiny black “frisbees” (as we use to call them).” The olde ways are back in vogue (not vogueing though).
“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.
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.
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.
