This is more Rolling Stones and the follow up to Hot Rocks which I listened to a lot. This one, less so.
Monty Python Sings – Monty Python
You know we need humour in our lives. I know Monty Python more from the albums and audio than I do the TV shows. I have seen the vision versions but I haven’t watched as much as I should. I have listened to these albums over and over, especially Live At Drury Lane. This album contains all the studio versions of the greatest Python songs.
Buy it. Listen to it. Research the times and history to get an idea of what goes on in the world, the song “Henry Kissinger” testifies to this fact of satire and humour being used to “take it to the man”.
Metallica – Metallica
This is known as the black album by most fans I think and it is the first Metallica album I bought straight from release rather than playing catch up with their discography. There is one good song on here and one semi-good song. The rest I would not play.
Sad But True – this is a pretty heavy amazing song, although slow. It crunches through you, especially live.
Enter Sandman – this is designed to be a single and went massive. It’s an OK song.
The rest of the album I could not tell you about from memory. This is interesting as when I saw Metallica at Donington in 1991 these were the only two songs that they played from this album, even though it had just come out.
I bought this on tape and I’ve just checked the NAS drive and amusingly I haven’t even updated my collection of this album to a complete digital version. I only have three songs from this album in digital. I also have Wherever I May Roam, but let’s face it, that’s a shit song.
This album marked a major decline in my appreciation of Metallica. There was a slight decline after “Justice”, but this one hastened the break up. Metallica went massive after this album and became mainstream. That’s when I stopped liking them. I’m not sure which way around the causation goes, whether their music changed and I stopped liking them or whether they became mainstream and so I stopped liking the music.
I did go to see Metallica play in Earls Court in about 1995 [just checked and it was October 12, 1996] and it was quite good but the new songs are shit and I really struggle to get past that. The show was filmed as the DVD Cunning Stunts. In that DVD one of the stuntmen is described as the “burning man”, not by his name by the band. This guy set himself alight over the complete tour every night and yet the band didn’t know his name. I guess that’s how it goes being a rock star but I didn’t like that.
Hellboy
Yesterday I went to the cinema to watch Hellboy. I pretty much went just to spend a couple of hours being entertained as I had some spare time. Of course, I noted the state of the tide and it was low.
From the picture you can see the mud flats or banks of the river closest to the camera and these are normally hidden at high tide. Also, on the very left you can see a barge just sticking out and the is one of two which live in a freshly dredged area of the mud bank. Even more exciting is the existence of cranes on boats. Seriously, there are cranes that work from boats, how amazing is that?
I should probably explain a little about the film now. I rated the film on IMDB and tweeted my result. There’s a communication here explaining the rating system.
I rated Hellboy (2019) 4/10 #IMDb https://t.co/4fppvES82I
— Ian Parish (@iparish) April 16, 2019
This film was pretty poor. I’m not sure what it was about really. Something to do with the rightful heir of the UK I think. The film starts at Pendle Hill in Lancashire and something to do with witches and King Arthur [who most definitely wasn’t a real person, like Robin Hood wasn’t]. Then we head to Mexico to see a vampire, which is fine.
Over the course of the movie London is laid to waste and that seems a reasonable metaphor for the current state of politics. There was some fighting stuff and a man who can change into a killer leopard at a whim, but who takes drugs to stave off the change, but manages to change back to human without any trouble. I don’t know. This film was pretty shit.
I did like Hellboy’s crown of flames hovering above his head in the last fifteen minutes of the film, that was pretty cool.
Mechanical Resonance – Tesla
I bloody love this album. It’s proper 80s cock rock and it’s amazing. I had this on tape for many years and oddly the music cassette is still in a cupboard in the kitchen ready to be played on a non-existent cassette player. Years ago I would have had a CD/Cassette/Radio in the kitchen. I mentioned Tesla in this communication years ago! Also, in March 2014 I noticed the tape in the cupboard and wrote about it within this communication. It is still there:
I still don’t have the heart to remove the tape and put it somewhere else. All my music cassettes are in the loft and this one is now a memorial to that portable format.
So, this album is playing while I type and it is brilliant. Lots of excellent choruses along with memorable hooks. It’s very much like a Bon Jovi album [one of the good ones] but slightly less commercial. I have enjoyed playing this album for over thirty years and I think it will continue. Well done Tesla.
Mechanical Animals – Marylin Manson
You know what? Marylin Manson makes some pretty good rock music and I’d be keen to see him play somewhere.
I’ve been aware of Manson for quite a while but he came to the forefront when his music was blamed for the massacre at Columbine High School. He wasn’t at all to blame but the people wanted an easy answer, they wanted a quick thing to blame. He copped the worst of it and struggled after that. His name is still associated with the massacre and I guess I am perpetuating the myth here just by mentioning it.
There are always going to be people who don’t fit into the societal norms. People who need help and protection for themselves and to protect others from them. It’s how society copes with that which is important. I remember two massacres when I was young, Hungerford and Dumblane. The governments of the time banned certain types of guns. This seemed to be a perfectly rational response because it’s easier to get rid of guns than it is to psychologically screen everyone who wants to buy guns.
Just because I’m fine today doesn’t mean I could be fucked in the nut tomorrow and become completely unhinged from what is considered normalcy. Remove the guns from society. This is why modern terrorism tends to be other methods of mass murder. Ramming crowds with trucks and using knives. These methods require very little training and you can pretty much get anyone motivated enough to use them. Bombs are hard work and guns hard to get. What’s important is how the government and therefore society reacts to these attacks and how we go about trying to stop them in the future.
I suspect there are always going to be people unhappy with the current format of society and so there will always be threats to the “state”. The vast majority of people will act on their displeasure when they come to vote next time or join a march for some reason. There will always be a few people who think they can force change, for what they think is the better, using violent means. I also suspect they are largely correct. Violence tends to work in the long run as it forces governments to listen and change, but shhhhh, don’t say that loudly.
This album is playing right now as I type and I’m reminded that I was going to write about how I first heard Manson stuff. It was the Resident Evil soundtrack that allowed me to hear this chap for the first time and it was good. This album is perfectly acceptable rock.
Master Of The Rings – Helloween
I don’t remember getting this but I did listen to it the other day and it’s pretty good German speedmetal. It’s not one that’s stuck in my head because I prefer Keeper Of The Seven Keys. I am an old man and new songs just don’t stick like they used to. Memory cares less about new things as you get older and I don’t have the time to invest in learning new words and songs.
Under Siege
I found this communication in my drafts and I hadn’t written any of the text in it, however you can see it was drafted in January 2017.
[Correction – WordPress has published this as 2019, however when I found it in my drafts it was listed in the 2017 section of the website
The picture shows that my first draft was January 6th 2017]
I seem to remember wanting to write a film review about the film Under Siege when I watched it in 2017 but I never did. It is now April 2019 and I have just re-discovered this draft.
I’m curious because two days ago I watched Under Siege again and I still thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience. So much so that I write about it in a film review I did for Pet Sematary. When I publish this communication I think it will appear in the Jan 2017 block. This means that I am writing this in April 2019 as though I had traveled back in time to 2017 whereas in reality the time travel has been the other way around!
Master Of Reality – Black Sabbath
I bought this album probably because it was cheap. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to it.
Master Of Puppets – Metallica
It’s hard to write about an album which affected me so much. There are a few that have had that effect and the first three Metallica albums definitely gave me something new from music. This was a new style for me, I expect I listened to this in the late 80s after getting into Iron Maiden and AC/DC. The sounds of this album and the thematic experience were beyond my then understanding of what heavy metal was.
I used to think that Metallica took the “chug” sound and made it into a note. They took melody and turned that into rhythm. It felt like a whole new way of writing music and it shook me [but not all night long].
For music to be where it is today you have to have all the bands who now bore me. You have to have the big four. Without them music would be different. Although someone else would have got there, I’m not obsessive enough to think that the creativity of humans is so poor that only a few people are capable of changing the world. If not Metallica then another band. If not Picasso then another artist. That seems quite logical to me.
Every song on this album is an artwork. It is a classic. This is an album that should be owned and played by all. It’s stunning. Yet, now, it bores me. My music has moved on and while I can appreciate this album for the genius that it is I rarely play it and consider it almost a part of history. I would rarely seek this album out. I still play AC/DC and some other bands so I’m not sure what it is about this that does that.
If you asked me to list the top ten metal albums I don’t think this one would make it for me. I’d rather have the first Metallica album. I understand that is a controversial choice and I also understand why but the first album is raw. This album is somewhat polished and I’m not so keen on that sound. Which is ironic given my current propensity for electronic industrial music!
Go listen to this. It’s a classic. It’s just history now.