The Benja-man Is Verbose

I thought of copying and pasting all of the "things I learned about..." sections at the end of each post, but that seemed a little annoying given that there are sixteen of those posts. *   Nonetheless, I've spent a lot of time thinking about power metal and occasionally even listening to it over the past year-plus of the "?Classics? of power metal" project.  And yeah, I do flatter myself into thinking that I've learned a few things. 1)  I like power metal The starting premise was that I liked the idea of the genre more than I liked actually listening to it.  I was struggling to reconcile why I, a listener who likes things too heavy to be a serious pop fan ** and too melodic to do anything but gravitate to the hookier side of metal, couldn't seem to connect with power, do more than appreciate it from a distance.  I think I was reacting to its roots in '80s metal.  Something about European men shrieking about wizards in a way that reminded me in their...

Past exposure to this artist/album:   I am already familiar with  Under The Veil Of Madness .     I got confused back in 2023 when I first heard this record.  I did know that I was impressed.  This was before I was a blogger, but I did do annual rankings for friends, and I ended up ranking it as my #10 record of the year.  The thing that threw me was that my first impression was the record's heft.  Veil  seemed like serious big kid metal, heavyweight stuff.  Yet, when I read reviews, even those who liked it a lot tended to emphasize, often in a positive tone, the cheesiness.  The excesses.  The melodrama.  The, well, power-metaliness of the whole thing.   Listening with that in mind, I could hear it, and get why others might consider Ascension cheesy.  My ears don't, and never have, heard them that way.  Why was power metal such silly shit, but this power metal not, to Benjamin?  You could say...

In my runthrough screening of '70s records that influenced power metal, I ended up picking Fröm The Fjörds (hereafter  Fjords  so I don't have to do those damn ironic umlauts), the sole release from the American band Legend, for further study.  I loved the frenetic energy of the bass in the songs I sampled, the whimsical sense of storytelling, and the way the record so interestingly anticipated at least certain strains of power metal, especially the early form of so called "epic metal" embodied by Manilla Road's "Manilla Four" group of mid-'80s releases (of which I've personally only really sat down with two... so far).  I've decided that my picks from the speed dating pool merit a really deep dive.  Like, track by track.   Fjords  seems to generally be viewed as one of those interesting little curios that delights the relative few who get delighted in the sense of having discovered an obscure gem, whilst also having a vocal minorit...

I've mentioned the impossibility of separating reactions to Zevon's last few records with knowing his eventual fate.  For  The Wind , one doesn't need to bother.  This was always going to the be the last album, and was always going to be the one in which everyone recording it and every last listener would be fully aware of the mesothelioma thing.  In his non recording artist life, it sounds like our man was full of the usual contradictions - the pain and wasting away, obviously, but it sounds like a relapse on alcohol and a lot of solitude, with a mix of self-pity and cheerful indifference depending on the day.  Still, Zevon wasn't alone -alone at the end.  He had a professional best friend to the end in Jorge Calderón - whose rare absence from a Zevon album I probably should have noted on  My Ride's Here  - as his musical comrade in arms, performing on every song and cowriting most of them.  Zevon had both of his adult k...