The Benja-man Is Verbose

New format!  Shortly after I decided to start my explorations of power metal and had started blogging about power metal, after months of wishing there were a conveniently explained "starter pack" of bands or records to check out, I came across a list at metalstorm.com  created by writer "ScreamingSteelUS," that I've been low-key obsessed with ever since.  A collection of power metal records that uses a very big-tent definition of the subgenre for maximum diversity?  Sounds like what I wanted.  Kept to a convenient number - ten per decade - in perfect chronological order?  I feel seen.  With explanations as to what exactly each record represents and what aspects of PM it can highlight?  Yes, please.   Sure, one can critique.  With the biggest critique being that it's just one guy's list and is prone to the quirks inherent to that.  Of note, ScreamingSteelUS goes out of his way to frame it as "potential starting points"...

Previous exposure to this artist/album :  Half-listened to a song once on YouTube, had to hear more. None of us multitask as well as we imagine we do.  I know for a fact that my retention of music is basically zero unless I'm devoting time to listen to it.  Yet I do imagine that half-listening to something during work is a useful "initial screen" to decide if something's worth devoting actual music time to.  That's where I kinda fell in love with the  idea  of Paladin.  I was sampling one of their songs, can't remember which one, and was struck immediately by the immediately catchy heft that, as half of my brain told me, so neatly balanced power metal and death metal.  There have of course been loads of power/death bands and that crossover started way before 2019, but how often does a song catch the aesthetics of both equally convincingly, with its two singers playing off each other?  Hearing that Paladin only had managed ...

In my personal imagined Zevon career arc, the  Mutineer/Life'll Kill Ya  duology was always the glorious return to form, perfectly setting up the swan song of  The Wind .  And then  My Ride's Here  was kinda... there, in between the two records, interfering with the narrative.  So, I've listened to the record before, but really only a few times, mostly in passing.  It was fun to finally dive deep into it, in context. Track One:  "Sacrificial Lambs" I think on some level Zevon was keen to show that he was still a rock and roll singer who could make music with a bigger rock feel.  Not that "Sacrificial Lambs" is a super heavy song or anything, * just that it returns to the rollicking full-band feel that was once Zevon's stock in trade but was less pronounced on the records that lead up to  Ride .  Very straight-ahead song with a vocal melody that sounds, well, like most of the other Zevon openers.  P...

Now that I've had some time to sit with Awakening From Abyss , you know what I notice more than any individual element?  Well, in other entries in this series, I've frequently brought up the vaguely described feeling that some songs' disparate elements don't come together.  I don't always have the right words to "prove" anything, but I frequently try to evaluate whether or not something has that coherence that makes the difference between a great song and a song that has a bunch of cool elements haphazardly mixed together.   Artists with grand musical visions, musical virtuosity, or both, are prone to the latter.  I've even floated my little unfounded pet theories that certain bands with multiple hands in the songwriting had different members trying to write different albums and were thus, musically speaking, at war with each other, whether they knew it or not.   Lovebites' debut stands out to me as the antithesis of that.  Whet...

I've mentioned that I'm already quite familiar with  Life'll Kill Ya , but it's been long enough that I can hear it with fresh ears, and now in context of the whole career. Track One:  "I Was In The House When The House Burned Down" Until this relisten, I always thought it was kinda of a shame to me that this one is sorta Kill Ya's ambassador to the world, the lead single at the time and today probably the one that the casual Zevon listener knows.  Not because I didn't like it, but because there are others on the record that're less repetitious and speak to me more.  I can't deny the appeal, though.  A simple strummed guitar part and a simple insistent drum pattern set the stage for what  the listened can expect from this collection - direct to the point of being painful.  And hey, harmonica fits in great.  Lyrically we get Zevon's scope of debaunchery and poetry, naturally making "I had the shit 'til it all got smoked...

Previous exposure to this artist/album:   Just a few listens to a few songs in the background.  They sounded pretty cool.  Note:  Just to avoid eyesore, LOVEBITES shall hereafter be known as Lovebites, and other bands that I mention in posts about them will have their names written normally rather than in ALL CAPS. I've mentioned a few times my approach to diving into the well of new music by deciding on a listen by listen basis whether or not to listen to each record three times, and then to decide from there whether it gets thrown into my running list of candidates to consider further for the year-end top-fifteen.  Minus the annual list, my approach to listening to older music is pretty similar.  It's a moot point when I'm reviewing something to write about, because of course I'm going to be listening to it a lot.  But if I were just checking out this band in my free time, would  Awakening From Abyss  get a listen #3 based on how I felt aft...