Metallica, Ty Segall, and hot-take paradoxes

No. 1379: Metallica - Ride the Lightning

The Metallica paradox: Everyone has a hot take about Metallica, and therefore no takes are hot. I’ve heard just about all of them: Load is good. Lulu is good. The Black Album is their best album. St. Anger is good. Death Mag… well, you can see how most of them skew in one direction. And I can respect most of them. Except generally anything positive about Lulu. I can see the concept of a good album being in there, except in execution they’re still playing Metallica-by-numbers underneath Lou Reed’s bonkers but at least going-for-it vocals.

But the thing about all these takes is that everyone has one like it. And from the other end of the spectrum, the intense fans, the metalheads since Metal Massacre, it’s illegal to call anything other than Master of Puppets the best Metallica album. They’ll send you to thrash jail where you have to listen to the snare ping from Death Magnetic over and over again.

So this, as you might imagine, is where I offer my own hot take: Master of Puppets isn’t the best Metallica album. It’s good! But Ride the Lightning is the best. (My homie Langdon will back me up on this too.) Part of what brings me back to this is that this feels like a genuine breakthrough, that the blast of Kill ‘em All (which I also love) gives way to a more sophisticated and progressive approach, the songs are stronger and more complex, there’s more exploration. Instrumentals! Even kind of a ballad!

I say this not to slight Puppets, but to suggest that hey, maybe there’s room for some differing opinions. But I should at least hope that the metal cops would respect that I’m not picking something like Load. Or god forbid, Lulu.

As if to prove my point, I’ve bought this album on vinyl twice. The primary reason for that is the first copy I bought sounded terrible, because Metallica’s the kind of band whose music is released over and over again in different formats, some of them dogshit. So I got a replacement that sounded better. Worth the investment. Because nothing turns the best album to the worst album quite like a lousy pressing. Rating: 10.0

Listen: “Creeping Death”

No. 1380: Ty Segall - Manipulator

The peril of being as prolific as Ty Segall is that you run the risk of overwhelming your audience. It happened to me! The first Ty Segall album I got into was Goodbye Bread, which I liked well enough but wasn’t a revelation or anything, but then in the next year he released three full-length records, which is the point where I kinda had trouble catching up. And in 2012 I was listening to Baroness’ Yellow and Green more than anything else. (And a fellow you might have heard of named Kendrick…) 

So gradually over time I caught up, first acknowledging that Slaughterhouse is an absolute motherfucker of an album and then later coming to recognize that Manipulator, though not the all-out bonkers chaos that Slaughterhouse is, is indeed Segall’s best album. Which if memory serves is what the critical consensus was in time.

It boils down to something pretty simple: These are Segall’s best songs. To some degree he’s still in Thee Ohsees-style (Osees? Whatever) psych rock, but by and large he’s borrowing more heavily from T. Rex and Bowie, and the results are glorious. He pushes his vocals into stunning falsetto range on “The Singer,” for instance, glamming it up with an elaborate streak of orchestral grandeur. When he doubles down on heavy rock on a standout like “The Hand,” it’s just as rewarding, bolstering some of his best melodies with a heavy dose of muscle. And the brightness of the title opener sets this doublewide up for a thrilling ride. 

I haven’t picked up the whole Segall catalog or anything—he has a ton of records and some of them are merely pretty decent as opposed to the revelation that Manipulator is. But I did, nonetheless, buy several more. I’ll repeat what I said last time: As far as dude rock rock dudes go, this dude rocks. Rating: 9.3

Listen: “The Singer”

No. 1381: The New York Dolls - The New York Dolls

Well, how fortuitous is it that I’m writing about the album that features “Frankenstein” on Halloween week? Love a coincidence like that. (Note: Whoops that was two weeks ago)

Of all the major glam rock bands to come out of the 1970s, the New York Dolls aren’t necessarily at the top of my list—my reverence for Roxy Music is hard to top, and Bowie transcends the whole thing altogether. But damned if I don’t love this record. It’s also really the only record I own that any of these musicians released; I never really got too into Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, and while I like the first David Johansen solo record, I never really investigated further. (My wife never hesitates to point out how bad “King of Babylon,” as performed on a Drug Boat in Miami Vice, is.)

But this record? Good lord it rocks. The New York Dolls are often cited as one of the progenitors of punk rock as we know it, and it’s true. There’s a direct line between this album and Never Mind the Bollocks, only this record is leagues better. Maybe because it’s sassier, more colorful, there’s saxophone, etc. And it has “Frankenstein,” which should be on everyone’s Halloween playlist. 

Lastly, RIP to David Johansen, the last surviving original member of the New York Dolls, who passed away earlier this year. Rating: 9.3

Listen: “Frankenstein”

No. 1382: Joni Haastrup - Wake Up Your Mind

When I started to look beyond Fela Kuti in search of a deeper bench of Afrobeat and Afro-funk — and mind you, there’s a ton of Fela Kuti to listen to, so no rush — Joni Haastrup was one of the first names I sought out. I got some recommendations from friends and peers who’d done some deeper crate digs; Marijata for instance, and at the time William Onyeabor was starting to get more recognition due to Luaka Bop’s reissues. 

But Joni Haastrup might have left the biggest impression. There’s a little more disco in his Afrobeat, a little more bounce to his funk. You still get the big horn sections and deep basslines, you still get the cries of protest, but you also get music that feels made for dancing. To hear the title track, a cry for social consciousness, is to witness a seamless meeting of message and medium. 

This record, like Jorge Ben’s Africa Brasil, likewise has a great song paying tribute to soccer players in “Champions and Superstars,” which while slightly corny is still better than most FIFA-sanctioned World Cup anthems. As far as I can tell, this is the sum total of his output, but he sure made it count. Rating: 9.2

Listen: “Wake Up Your Mind”

No. 1383: Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill

For the first five or six months of pandemic lockdown, everyone was getting into ambient music. We were all anxious as hell, and meditative music would, certainly, help with that. But I kind of got restless and needed to listen to a bunch of metal by about July or so. That year began my obsession with The Armed, which pretty much continues to this day.

But I did get into Grouper in a bigger way than I had before. Grouper’s Liz Harris creates music that walks the line between ambient and folk, song-based but floating in space. I had already liked her music, but I found myself drawn to it during the pandemic and to an even greater degree when we moved to Richmond. Part of it was that she had a new album on the way, Shade, which is excellent, by the way.

While my favorite remains AIA: Alien Observer, for how eerie and peculiar it is, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill is generally the best starting place for anyone interested in getting into the music of Grouper and associated side projects. (I wrote a Beginner’s Guide a while back for anyone interested in following that thread.) As if to prove that this is the popular favorite, it was out of print on vinyl for a while, so I had to wait until Kranky restocked, but eventually it found its way onto my porch. So what makes it the most popular Grouper release? It was kind of a critical breakthrough for her, the first major release with wider distribution (she released it on Type, at the time) and it garnered widespread positive critical attention. It’s also just beautiful and strange in a way that few things were at the time, hazy and hypnotic and a far cry from what was generally a kind of trashy decade for music. (I’m not necessarily complaining.) 

There are highlights here, but it feels almost beside the point to single out any particular song. You want to know Grouper? Wait until it’s dark, maybe even after midnight when everything around you is still and quiet, and put this on. It’s a feeling like no other. Rating: 9.1

Listen: “Fishing Bird”

No. 1384: Revelators Sound System - Revelators

I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the passage of time these days, in large part because every day feels like a month. (Maybe that’s why the last few entries of this blog/newsletter have been weeks apart.) I’m not even going to bother going into detail about why that is because we all know why that is, and there’s a million reasons for it, but it still doesn’t really need explanation. But still, I can listen to this record by Revelators Sound System, an album that was timely in 2022 because it features an elegy for George Floyd called “George,” and even though his death, and the protests that occurred in its aftermath, was two years earlier, it still felt both current and urgent.

Now that feels like it was a million years ago. But it’s still a beautiful and mesmerizing record. A fairly difficult to categorize record, Revelators Sound System is a kinda-sorta Richmond record in that one half of the collaboration is Cameron Ralston, of the Spacebomb Records House Band. The other half is M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger (and for those who remember way back when, Court and Spark). It’s a blend of ambient and jazz-fusion that grooves surprisingly hard given its inspirations. You wouldn’t think a song called “Grieving” would go so hard. You’d be wrong!

It all flows together seamlessly in spite of how all over the map it is, but that’s part of what makes it so interesting, and part of what drew me in in the first place. A great set of jazz fusion is going to get my interest regardless, but there’s an emotional resonance to this that groove alone can’t account for. Rating: 8.9

Listen: “Grieving”

No. 1385: Black Breath - Sentenced to Life

I’d be very surprised if any fan of death metal or crusty hardcore in the 2000s and 2010s didn’t listen to a whole grip of Southern Lord releases in that time. I certainly did—between, say, 2008 and 2013 (right around the time that Power Trip became one of their biggest bands), Southern Lord was just stacking one record after another loaded with HM-2 distortion and buzzsaw riffs, all of them a venn diagram of Discharge and Entombed, though with varying degrees of overlap. The label, founded by Sunn O)))’s Greg Anderson (who has played some gnarly stuff in his time though obviously nothing like the music I’m describing of late), had some pretty major flagship bands in the ‘00s renaissance: Boris, Wolves in the Throne Room, and of course, Sunn O))). But eventually they went in a particular and very specific direction that was all pretty gnarly, raw, but razor sharp: Martyrdöd, The Secret, All Pigs Must Die, Baptists—some of which featured members of Converge, and seemingly all of them were produced by Kurt Ballou, also of Converge.

Black Breath might have been the best of the bunch, a Seattle group that rode their classic death metal worship to glory. Their first album, Heavy Breathing, was a bit shorter, maybe even a bit more hardcore in its aesthetic, but it ripped. Their sophomore album, Sentenced to Life, brought more dimension and more diversity to their raw riff barrage, but it still kicks ass. When it goes, like on opener “Feast of the Damned,” it GOES. When it grooves, like on “Home of the Grave” (great title), it grooves. And there’s not a moment here that isn’t thrillingly evil in all the best ways. A few years ago, their bassist Elijah Nelson passed away, but the band never officially broke up to my knowledge. I’d love to hear another record from them, even if it has been a decade since they’ve released any new music. In metal, it’s been known to happen after even longer periods of time.

On a similar note, around the pandemic, Southern Lord slowed down considerably, so I wasn’t sure if they were winding down operations. But then this year, they put out one of my favorite metal records. That’s not a no, necessarily, but hey, they’re making it count. Rating: 9.1

Listen: “Home of the Grave”