Al Jourgensen is pissed off with Donald Trump. Really pissed off. So pissed off that he’s dragged the latest incarnation of mighty industrial metal originators Ministry back into the studio for the first time since 2012’s Relapse to produce an album made up solely of songs of resistance against the 45th President of the USA and his alt-right junta.
Without further ado, let’s cut straight to it. Below theartsdesk on Vinyl offers over 30 records reviewed, running the gamut from Adult Orientated Rock to steel-hard techno via the sweetest, liveliest pop. Dive in!
VINYL OF THE MONTH 1
Zoë Mc Pherson String Figures (SVS)
Many hard rock aficionados say that Motörhead’s greatest work was all with the “classic” line-up of Lemmy, drummer Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor and guitarist “Fast” Eddie Clarke (who died last week aged only 67 - this review was written before that news came through). While there’s no denying their 1976-82 output was storming, Motörhead’s later career contained multitudes of gems that were its match. The band’s guitarist for this period, for 31 years from 1984 until Lemmy’s death, was Phil Campbell. He now releases the debut album by a band he formed with his three sons shortly after his legendary frontman’s passing.
So where was Campbell to go next? Judging from The Age of Absurdity, a return to the classic rock template, but fuelled with Motörhead’s desire for high velocity impact. Campbell is staunchly Welsh, a taciturn individual (I interviewed him once: polite, dryly funny, but making him say anything of consequence was blood-from-stone stuff). He’s also an amazing guitarist, able to inject squiggly blues-lickin’ solos with a furious zest. His sons Todd, Dane and Tyla are up to the task of surrounding him, while Neil Starr, once singer for Welsh rockers Attack! Attack!, is on vocals. They go at it with vim. There’s enough juice to make this more than a post-glory novelty.
They’re at their best on raging rock-punk assaults, somewhere between The Ramones and early Lostprophets, with numbers such as “Skin and Bones”, “Gypsy Kiss” and “Step Into the Fire” roaring out of the speakers. Campbell’s impeccable guitar work provides the centrepiece of some songs – the single “Ringleader” and the tasty harmonica-led blues jam “Dark Days” – while those looking for Motörhead-alike kicks should turn to the rock’n’rollin’ “Dropping the Needle”. Quibbles: too much filler, and sometimes I found myself wishing Starr had a more characterful, less mainstream rock voice (but then sometimes he comes into his own, notably on the epic six-and-a-half minute closer “Into the Dark”).
There’s a straightforward rerun of Hawkwind’s “Silver Machine”, featuring that band’s leader Dave Brock, as a bonus track. It’s OK, but probably more fun live, which is where I suspect this lot come into their own. In the meantime, their debut album is feisty hard rock worth cherry-picking.
Overleaf: Watch the video for "Ringleader" by Phil Campbell and the Bastard Sons
As well as creating a true American musical phenomenon, led by from the front by Nirvana, the early-to-mid-Nineties grunge explosion opened a window of opportunity for multitudes of bands on its furthest fringes. South Carolina punk-metallers Corrosion of Conformity hit a career peak at the time, mingling an old-school hard rock sound with something bluesier and spacier, the whole thing marinated in the guitar and vocals of Pepper Keenan. He left to concentrate on his role in metal supergroup Down, featuring members of Pantera and others, but now returns for his first album since 2005 with the band that made his name.
The good news is that, after a patchy couple of albums without Keenan, Corrosion of Conformity’s 10th is an atmospheric beast, with an undertow of southern boogie, southern gothic and, as per its title and moody downtempo title track, a certain southern focus on religion. It also contains a decent selection of rolling riff-monsters, notably the slow-starting but epic “Nothing Left to Say”, the sludgy six-minute closer “A Quest to Believe (A Call to the Void)” and the hefty “Old Disaster”.
The showcase guitar work is also a treat. Corrosion of Conformity don’t go in for hyperspeed shredding, and give their fret-wrangling room to breathe. The stoned jam interlude on “Wolf Named Crow”, a song about Keenan’s dog, is especially rich in this vein. Unlike many metal outings, No Cross No Crown paces itself, dropping in occasional short instrumental interludes between tracks, and the band is happily not afraid of a proper tune either, with songs such as “Forgive Me” boasting an unlikely catchiness among the blues-squall assault absorbed on first listening.
To non-metallers, the cover art and nomenclature may be off-putting but Corrosion of Confomity’s latest demonstrates there’s fierce, authentic and enjoyable hard rocking to be had with this band.
Overleaf: Watch the video for "Wolf Named Crow" by Corrosion of Conformity
The music business is about to disappear on holiday wholesale and we won’t see hide nor hair of it until mid-January. There’s just time for one last 2017 vinyl celebration. Regular readers should be warned that theartsdesk on Vinyl becomes rather easy-going at this time of year – must be all the Baileys – and prone to making allowances for the odd sliver of cheese and office-party silliness.
With December upon us theartsdesk on Vinyl has been kept busy with sacks full of fantastic plastic, so much so that we’re saving the poppier stuff for a pre-Christmas blow-out in a week’s time, so watch out for that.
Evanescence have been away for a while, and fans looking for a whole album of new material will be disappointed. There are only two proper new songs on Synthesis (plus a couple of instrumental interludes). Instead, it’s an album of operatically-inclined orchestral interpretations of music from the band’s previous three albums, tinted with a light touch of Gary Numan-esque gothic electronica. If you like the idea of Finnish symphonic metallers Nightwish having it out with Canadian mezzo-soprano balladeer Sarah McLachlan, then, hey, Synthesis is for you. Everyone else should stay well away.
Evanescence has long been the vehicle for lead singer Amy Lee, but she’s been off doing solo stuff, TV and film soundtracks, etc, since the band’s last tour finished five years ago. She does not, after all, need to work if she doesn’t want to. Evanescence’s 2003 debut sold enough to provide for her over the course of four or five lifetimes (or more!). So Synthesis is a labour of love, it’s Lee finally embracing her middle-of-the-road aspirations, assisted by Hollywood composer/arranger David Campbell. The tone has more in common with Celine Dion than her stated heroes such as Björk and the like. It’s the bombast of Sarah Brightman attached to the template of goth-pop hits such as Evanescence's globe-dominating chart-topper “Bring Me to Life”.
There’s something stentorian about it, headache-inducing, and not in that good ol’ heavy metal way, just in the sense that it’s teeth-jarringly histrionic. Take “The End of the Dream”, originally on their last eponymous album: it starts out moody and intriguing, Lee’s plaintive vocal emoting over a grumbling electronic tone and some bells but, about two minutes in it explodes into a dirge that then, in turn, blows up into truly preposterous Wagnerian pomp. Of the new tracks “Hi-Lo” and “Imperfection”, the former is forgettable but the latter has a certain gothic electro-pop bounce before it goes completely OTT like all the rest.
There’s a market for this kind of music, a big one, which is great news for Evanescence, but not for music lovers the world over.
Overleaf: watch the video for "Imperfection" by Evanescence
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.
SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017
Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★ The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary things
Marilyn Manson, the man and the band, have maintained impressive global success for over two decades. Their albums – this is the band’s 10th - continue to shift by the bucket-load, and they can still sell out a worldwide stadium tour. Partly, their appeal is tribal. In the age of the beige hoodie and jeans, they don’t kowtow but continue to offer a studded, debauched black-splatter of Hollywoodised punk-goth kitsch. In recent years they’ve also undergone something of a musical renaissance. This continues on Heaven Upside Down.
As with 2015’s The Pale Emperor, film composer Tyler Bates is co-producer. Bates’s sense of drama and the epic, honed on Zack Snyder’s films and the Guardians of the Galaxy series, fits well with Marilyn Manson’s OTT sensibilities. This time round, though, after the bluesy theatre of their previous album, the band return to the attack of earlier works, but with the wannabe-Nine Inch Nails traits polished into something slicker and larger.
It doesn’t always work but there’s plenty to enjoy for both fans and newbies. “WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE” has a doom-funk pulse that propels its hammy punk fury along, “Saturnalia” contains guitar work that truly sneers, as well as a cracking chorus, and the closing slow-stomper “Threats of Romance” sounds like something The Sweet might have written for a musical, which turns out to be no bad thing.
The band’s eponymous singer-lyricist still has a way with words, ever-ready to kick up a stink, notably with the catchy “KILL4ME” and its chorus “Would you kill, kill, kill for me?”. However satirically this is intended, it’s bound to cause raised eyebrows, appearing so soon after the Las Vegas massacre. Manson has, after all, been blamed by tabloid fools for gun atrocities before. More entertaining are the opening lines of “JE$U$ CRI$IS” where he claims he writes songs to fuck and fight to, then offers the listener out for both.
Entertaining is the word. Marilyn Manson still deliver on the promise of their look and attitude. Heaven Upside Down is not quite in the league of its surprise swamp-rockin’ predecessor, but the best of it belts out of the traps with a pop-industrial panache that’s unarguable.
Overleaf: Watch the video for Marilyn Manson "WE KNOW WHERE YOU FUCKING LIVE"
Immediately before recording their first album in 1977, Motörhead were on their last legs. They went into the studio after playing what was initially conceived as their farewell show. Appropriately, no one then could have predicted that the band formed by Hawkwind’s former bass player in 1975 would become integral to rock’s rich tapestry. It wasn’t even their first attempt to make an album: one begun in 1975 had been shelved.