Clang & Clatter

It’s Friday, so it’s time once again to hit shuffle in iTunes and play the Friday Five game at IckMusic. Here’s my contribution for this week:

Rough Cutt - “Black Widow” (Rough Cutt, 1985)
Slow-ish, ballad-y, over-reverb-y fare from one of the second-tier revolving-door-roster L.A. metal bands (Ozzy guitarist Jake E. Lee being one of a few notable big-name players). This particular band had the advantage of having Ronnie James Dio’s wife Wendy as a manager, thus garnering quite a bit of attention and direction from the man himself, but even that (and soulful vocalist Paul Shortino) couldn’t save Rough Cutt from a life of relative obscurity outside the Sunset Strip scene. Overall, this eponymous debut album was quite good at the time, but unfortunately it hasn’t aged as well as others from the same era.

The Damnwells - “God Bless America” (Air Stereo, 2006)
My introduction to The Damnwells was “I Am A Leaver,” a much better track from this same album. This track could have been made much better by removing the unnecessary drum noise opening and the incessant sizzling cymbal that plays through to the second verse. Then there’s the whole middle part that makes absolutely no sense in the context of the song and the noisy feedback-laden outro that fades into a completely different musical theme. Probably not the strongest song to have ended the album on. But then again, band leader Alex Dezen has never been one to follow convention.

Megadeth - “Good Mourning/Black Friday” (Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying?, 1986)
This song opens with the sweet arpeggiated “Good Mourning” instrumental before taking a more sinister direction into the sneering and snarling we have come to expect from Mustaine. The song changes tempo several times, gaining speed with each change, before finally heading off the tracks amid the chants of “Black Friday.” Good stuff.

At The Drive-In - “Ursa Minor” (Vaya, 1999)
I have basically given up trying to describe At The Drive-In to other folks. If you haven’t heard them before, you really need to take a listen and make up your own mind about them. This one comes from the 7-track EP released less than a year before the band’s swan song Relationship of Command, which in my opinion should be mandatory listening. Vaya represents a more put-together and polished version of a band that essentially started life alot closer to its hardcore origins than it ended up, and one that will always be an example where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (Jim Ward with Sparta, Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López with The Mars Volta).

King’s X - “67” (Ear Candy, 1996)
Low, rumbling, groovy ode to channel surfing. I love guitarist Ty Tabor’s super-saturated distortion on this track, and like everything off Ear Candy, “67” contains lots of instrumental and vocal embellishments that you usually only pick up on when wearing headphones.