Pedro Timóteo | The Music in my Life

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Black Sabbath - "Black Sabbath"

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7 months, 4 weeks ago

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blacksabbath-blacksabbath And now for the second Black Sabbath album to deserve a post here. This time it’s the very first Sabbath album, released in 1968 (6 years before I was born, incidentally), simply titled "Black Sabbath".

If you are only aware of later Sabbath — even still with Ozzy Osbourne as vocalist, in the 70s, or in their relatively recent reunion tours –, it’s likely that this album will surprise you — even if you already know half the songs, such as "Black Sabbath" or "N.I.B.". And why is that? It’s partly because of they way they’re played here, as opposed to how the same band plays them decades later — here they were raw, full of energy and creativity. Here, they were not famous — it was their first album ever, after all –, so they didn’t have fans not to disappoint. Here, they were not an "institution", they didn’t have an established genre. They were not even "heavy metal", since the genre didn’t exist at the time (indeed, to many, including myself, this is the very first metal album ever). They could do whatever they wanted, write the music they felt like playing.

Think you know Sabbath? Then listen to songs from this album such as "Behind the Wall of Sleep", "The Wizard", and, especially, "Warning" (a cover, but whose original version is long forgotten). The latter deserves special attention — mostly instrumental, at times more blues than metal or rock, lasting more than 10 minutes, it includes some of the best jamming by Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward, and best solos by Iommi, ever recorded, in their more than 30-year career. And that was on their first album. It’s a song that you never get tired of listening to, which you can easily show to a non-metal fan and, unless they’re completely obtuse and believe all music should be simple, radio-friendly, and existing just for dancing to in nightclubs.

This is where metal began — though they didn’t know it at the time.

Oh, and one curiosity: Ozzy’s voice sounds (to my tastes) much better here than on any of his later albums (both with Sabbath and solo). His voice here is intense, powerful and emotional, without any trace of the "whininess" found (sorry, people) in his later works. Did his voice change for the worse after 1968? Did he choose to sing more nasally and at a higher pitch after this album? Questions, questions…

Iced Earth - "Something Wicked This Way Comes"

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Pedro Timóteo

8 months ago

in 90s music and Heavy Metal

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Yes, there’s still life in this blog.

Iced Earth - Something Wicked This Way Comes Going back (I reviewed The Dark Saga before) to one of my favorite metal bands (and one of my favorite bands, period), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1998) was the first Iced Earth album I ever bought, back in 1998. At the time, I knew nothing about IE, but the album cover (by Greg Capullo, the main artist on Todd McFarlane’s Spawn comic for years) intrigued me, and at the time I mostly had money to burn, so… why not?

Needless to say, I didn’t ever regret it — both for the band in general, and for that very album, the penultimate (excluding live albums, tributes and compilations) with singer Matt Barlow — that is, until the forthcoming Something Wicked pt. 2 (more on that later).

Like most IE albums, SWTWC is a brilliantly written, very emotional album, with an incredible rhythm guitarist and a fantastic singer (let’s admit it, they never had a bad singer except for the first one). Lyrical themes, oweing to Jon Schaffer’s fascination with history and the dark side of religion, include the Inquisition, pedophile priests ("Father in black, black as sin / Pure hypocrisy to no end"), integrity and independence of thought, a dedication to a friend of Schaffer’s who died in an accident, and a heartfelt "thank you" to the fans. But the best is yet to come…

… it’s the Something Wicked trilogy at the end of the album. A prelude to the Something Wicked pair of albums (yes, it gets a bit confusing), the three songs at the end are, quite possibly (to me, at least), the best thing Schaffer ever wrote (perhaps along with the Gettysburg trilogy a few albums later). The riffs are fast, brutal, and yet complex and perfectly played, Matt Barlow sounds better than ever, and the songwriting is pure brilliance, with middle eastern influences (more pronouned in the later re-recording in the Overture of the Wicked EP, though I prefer the original versions here). The lyrics themselves tell the beginning of a story lasting 10.000 years, which Schaffer had obviously put a lot of thought into, even at the time (years before the Framing Armageddon - Something Wicked pt. 1 album).

If you like epic, dark, emotional metal at all, buy this. Really. It’s Iced Earth at their best (while I still love the more recent albums, and I intend to review them here in the future, I think that the songwriting has lost some complexity and intensity, which this album from 10 years ago had in spades.)

Bruce Dickinson - "Accident of Birth"

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Pedro Timóteo

1 year, 10 months ago

in 90s music and Heavy Metal

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First, sorry for the longish delay in posting. With that out of the way…

This album, which I’m listening to right now (I’ve never mentioned it before, but all of these posts are written while listening to the album in question, and the present case is no exception), you may be surprised to know, isn’t my favorite album with Bruce Dickinson (here, counting the Iron Maiden ones). It isn’t even my favorite Bruce Dickinson solo album (I’d say The Chemical Wedding is even better). It is, however, simply damn good.

A bit of history: in 1997, when this album was released, Bruce had left Maiden, which had gone on with Blaze Bayley, and its latest albums weren’t very well received. At the time, most people blamed Blaze, though, in my opinion, when he left and Dickinson came back, they went on making exactly the same kind of music as in The X-Factor and Virtual XI. I still like the new Maiden, but their newer albums sound too similar and “muddy” to me. The Number of the Beast, they aren’t.

Meanwhile, Bruce released a couple of strange albums, which, although they had some great songs here and there, revealed a guy who was trying as hard as he could to prove (perhaps most of all to himself?) that he wasn’t “just about metal”. Yes, it’s exactly what Rob Halford did after he left Priest.

Accident of Birth is when Bruce Dickinson stopped pretending to be something he wasn’t. (Hmm, much like Halford’s Resurrection…). When he admitted that, after all, he did love metal, soaring voices, screaming guitars, pounding drums, and all that.

And he joined with two brilliant guitarists: Roy Z (hey, he produced Halford’s Resurrection as well… is this a conspiracy? :)), and Adrian Smith, formerly (and, now, again) of Maiden. The result is this masterpiece.

This is what Maiden would sound like now, if they hadn’t stopped growing musically around 1988. If they still had the passion they had on their first albums. If the albums’ production didn’t drown the vocals like it does (compare Bruce’s voice here to Brave New World, for instance… it almost sounds like a different guy). If Maiden wasn’t an establishment like it is. (Don’t get me wrong, I still love Maiden and buy all their new albums; it’s still great music, but something is gone, IMO.)

The album itself is fantastic. No song begs “skip me”. Nowhere is Bruce’s voice less than perfect, less than passionate, emotional, powerful. Both music and lyrics are brilliant (to be topped only by The Chemical Wedding, in my opinion). This is pure metal without gimmicks: not black, not death, not power, not (yuck) nu. Just metal. What Maiden should be now, and aren’t (even with Dickinson back).

Listen to it as a piece of perfection, and as evidence of what a man can do when he stops trying to run away from himself.

Death - "The Sound of Perseverance"

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Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 7 months ago

in 90s music and Heavy Metal

. 2 Comments

If you’re a real metal fan, few events were sadder than the death of Chuck Shuldiner in 2001. The singer, guitarist and main songwriter of Death, he is responsible, among others, for 1998’s The Sound of Perseverance, an album I bought that year, and which I simply can’t get tired of. An album that has helped me through some pretty bad times in my life, too - its themes, lyrics, intensity and sheer passion have a way of doing that.

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Pink Floyd - "The Wall"

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Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 8 months ago

in 70s music and Rock

. 6 Comments

After this one, you may be thinking that I have “a thing” for concept albums. And you’d be right, I do - both because I like albums that tell me something, rather than just being “pleasant to listen to”, but also because concept albums tend to come from a single vision, being more “personal”. This is certainly the case here.

What more can anyone add about “The Wall” after all these decades? There are thousands and thousands of reviews out there, some of them brilliant (and some of them even on Amazon.com). Unless you think the album, or Floyd in general, are “pretentious” (a term which I’ve found usually means “too intense” or “too good” - how many times have you seen it applied to, say, Dream Theater?), if you know the album, you probably consider it a masterpiece.

So, were I doing a review, I wouldn’t have much to add. Fortunately, this is not a reviews site.

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Blind Guardian - "Nightfall in Middle-Earth"

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Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 8 months ago

in 90s music and Heavy Metal

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If you know me in person, it’s quite likely that you’ve hear me rave about this album at least once. If you don’t… tough, unless you stop reading NOW, you’re going to suffer the same fate.

I love heavy metal, as any reader of this blog will probably have figured out by now. I also love epic stuff. And I love Tolkien’s books, especially “Lord of the Rings”… and “The Silmarillion” (which was edited by his son, from Tolkien’s notes). Blind Guardian’s 1998 album, “Nightfall in Middle-Earth”, is all of those put together… and the result is a masterpiece that both metal fans and Tolkien fans should worship.

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Black Sabbath - "Dehumanizer"

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Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 8 months ago

in 90s music and Heavy Metal

. 12 Comments

Those who know me from somewhere are, surely, aware that I have used, on the Net, the alias “Dehumanizer” for some years now. Ever wondered why?

It’s because of this 1992 album, from Black Sabbath.

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Ehren Starks - "The Depths of a Year"

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Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 8 months ago

in 2000s music, Classical, Jazz and New Age

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Variety is the spice of life, it is said. After several metal albums, now comes a very different one: an instrumental album, with only piano (by Ehren Starks) and cello (by Kate Gurba).

And what an album it is.

According to Ehren Starks, the album depicts a relationship, which in a way can be seen from the track names, as well as the music itself. Sometimes sad, sometimes joyful, sometimes melancholic. I have to admit my ignorance here, and say that the simple piano/cello combination was completely new to me, and it certainly works very well - I have other albums with just the piano, and it always seems like it’s “missing” something.

I won’t say much more about this album for the moment, other than that I love listening to it, for one reason: it’s not from any mainstream recording company, but from Magnatune, which not only sells albums in a digital format (and, optionally, on CDs) very cheaply, and in normal MP3 or OGG files (that is, no DRM (Digital Rights Management, or, more correctly, Digital Restrictions Management)), but also allows you to listen to all its albums online, through streaming. So you can simply go to its page for The Depths of a Year” and listen to the entire album, to see if it is to your liking. Me, I bought it after I listened to half of it, and it was money very well spent.

By the way, this is one of the few albums I have at work that I can play whenever I want, and nobody complains.

Blaze - "Blood and Belief"

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Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 8 months ago

in 2000s music and Heavy Metal

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Usually, I don’t like sad, “depressive” lyrics. Mostly because I believe in the heroic, not in the usual obsession with pain, suffering and weakness. But also because, in most mainstream music, the lyrics are little more than “poor little me, I suffer so much, I can’t do anything about it, I won’t even try to do something about it, the world is so unfair, blah blah blah”.

That just doesn’t appeal to me - sounds too much like nagging, complaining, and putting suffering and weakness in a pedestal. I like my lyrics to be inspiring, thoughtful, intelligent.

Then, why do I like Blaze’s Blood and Belief, from 2004, so much - as it is, certainly, a sad album?

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Virgin Steele - "Invictus"

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Pedro Timóteo

2 years, 9 months ago

in 90s music and Heavy Metal

. 1 Comment

In 1998, on a mailing list, I heard about a band, Virgin Steele, and an album, “Invictus”, which was supposed to be very good. “Fine,” I thought, “let’s hear it”.

Years later, I have all of Virgin Steele’s discography, it’s one of my favorite bands, and David DeFeis is, in my opinion, one of the best singers out there - certainly my favorite among the 10 in “Avantasia”. Initially, I thought VS sounded like Manowar… but they’re different, very different. Much more epic, with huge classical influences, and with a lot more keyboards, too. Oh, and thoughtful lyrics, some concept albums, and a passion for Greek mythology. What’s not to love?