The Benja-man Is Verbose

Past exposure to this band/record :  One of my Pandora stations back in the day would sometimes play HammerFall.  I usually enjoyed it whenever "The Unforgiving Blade" came on.  As far as this record goes, I've definitely heard "Hammerfall" (the song) before. I had an interesting thought early into my first listen to "I Believe" - "I don't trust this."  Seemed worth unpacking, right?  What exactly is it that I don't trust?  Why would I choose that particular phrase? "I Believe," and really most of of this record, don't convince me.  This particular song is power ballad 101 stuff, with downtuned chords coming in over the chorus exactly where one expects them to, over a song whose chorus centers on "pain."  I feel like I've heard this tune before done better, I feel like I've heard this basic vocal performance done better.  Oh, look, it's a painfully generic guitar solo coming in exactly where I expec...

Still on the tail end of the peak commercial era that really only lasted three records.  Again with big noisy production, again with five thousand guest musicians from the bigger L.A. scene that Zevon moved through.  Depending on perspective, Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School is either a minor commercial success befitting a niche artist who's carved out his place, or it's a fall from the highs of the massive third album that basically cemented Zevon as a flash in the pan about to be left behind, mainstream-wise, with the rest of the '70s. Divorced from that context, how does it sound now? Track One:  "Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School" Sometimes it's just how something sounds, a principle that applies to lyric writing just like anything else.  I don't care and, until recently, didn't know what the neologism "bad luck streak in dancing school" is supposed to mean. *   But how great does it sound rolling off its singer's tongue ...

I'm trying not to constantly apologize for not knowing the accepted classics because, well, the whole goddamn point of this little project is for me to understand power metal better.  My ability to comment is inherently a tad limited by my relative lack of familiarity with how the style got started; I think that's inevitable.  How else I am going to learn what exactly power metal is and whether I can love it without listening?  Take this band, Running Wild.  Coming in, I had an idea of the things I find distancing about my concept of euro-power, especially the '80s stuff, that I've heard.  In my head, euro-power has too much screaming relative to grit.  Too much bombast and guitar wankery relative to content.  Too much cheesiness in a way that's fundamentally wrapped up in the '80s.  That's why Death Or Glory seemed like a bit of a revelation on first few spins.  Now, with more listening I can draw a clearer through-line to their successors, ...

Past exposure to this band/record :  None beyond seeing the band's name over and over, both in lists of best power metal records and in primers about PM.  So I come in with the basic understanding that Running Wild are one of the institutions of europower, one of the defining bands from the Hamburg scene.  My understanding is that doing any kind of survey of PM without knowing anything about Running Wild would be almost as bad as doing so without knowing Helloween, hence this pick for the project.  And also that apparently they were doing the "pirate metal" thing before it was cool.     Well, let's get one thing out of the way first: whatever else one may say about the unimaginatively titled * Death Or Glory , it rocks. I don't actually have much else negative to say about it.  I was expecting things to maybe be a little basic, a little knuckle dragging.  Instead, principal impression here is that Death Or Glory is polished in a good way.  I...

Flying stark in the face of my late-career loving ways, commercially speaking Zevon peaked early.  He got some attention with the self-titled, then Excitable Boy was the big smash, then   Excitable would persist as the high, the proverbial dragon that he'd spend the rest of his career chasing.  "Early" is relative, though, when one considers how long WZ spent bumming around trying to make the music career happen.  The actual recording of that first record that nobody wants to talk about happened a full nine years before "Werewolves Of London" blew up.  By this point he'd paid his dues, and it was about time to land something that'd keep him eating - or at least, less likely to run out of money - over the next few decades of following his muse. Excitable is one of only three non-compilation Zevon records that I owned on CD back when that was a thing, when I was making my first attempt to get into him.  It's interesting going back to hear t...

I know music is a business and that it couldn't work this way... but I kinda wish there were a way to guarantee everyone two chances.  Sure, some artists have one great record in them and then are done ever being interesting once they're tasked with cranking out more on short notice, but so many others have the raw materials without the seasoning that they'd need to make a masterpiece.  Many of my favorites didn't hit their stride until record #2, or #3, or even later.  It usually takes time and experience to develop a signature sound and/or sort out what exactly it is that you're good at and/or cultivate a fanbase.  I love having access to first efforts by future legends, watching them figure it out.  In my perfect fantasy world, there'd be some mechanism for those who're interesting to get multiple shots to find an audience. * In the actual world, you get artists like Adramelch releasing a record that's weird, a little different, and if the...

The National's annoying refusal to release many official live recordings means that last year's Rome is the first traditional "live album" from them, taken from, as the title suggests, a portion of a 2024 gig in Genoa. *   Obviously YouTube and the like exist, but sticking with official releases, it's been slim pickings until now. The National did do an NPR "Tiny Desk Concert" in 2013 - not on-brand for them at all, right? - playing acoustic versions of a few songs from the then newly-released Trouble Will Find Me . Setlist 1)  This Is The Last Time 2)  I Need My Girl 3)  Pink Rabbits 4)  Sea Of Love This format is a good showcase for Matt leaning into the role as frontman because so much of what they can do comes down to the volume and inflection of the singer; his range goes from wispy whimsical indie stuff to a gritty, bluesy delivery that reminds me a little of Ben Ottewell. **   Without meticulous studio editing, how do the National sound as ...

Past exposure to this band/record :  None at all.  The reason I know about Irae Melanox is because in my perfunctory scans of the review scene, the few people who knew Irae at all really liked it and couldn't stop going on about how singular a record it is compared to anything else.  Sounded like a good fit for this project... I pay a lot of attention to how a record chooses to introduce itself.  In this case, that would be "Fearful Visions."  Creepy choral opening full of organs yields a rather frenetic chromatic guitar scale, until that settles into a doomy groove, until the guitars take over into more of a standard metal groove, until we get a singer whose vocal delivery I don't know if I can describe.  First he's reeling off heavily accented poetry with a mouth full of marbles, then he's screaming out the pre-chorus more in a manner more typical of a European gent fronting a power metal band.  And that's all in the first three minutes of...