A few of you have guessed this correctly, so let's get week #7 started early doors.
@Onholiday(somemightsay) posted me his selection a few days ago, and it's Rage Against The Machine's self-titled 1992 debut album. I present his words exactly as they were sent to me.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
View attachment 29579
So here we go - I was still noodling on what I would pick (I didn't want to pick anything too prevalent from the
@BlueHammer85 Top thousand list that we have been working through but was surprised by how low this one featured so here goes).
* My 2 year old has just been sick, it's 3:26am so instead of going straight back to sleep I am working on this and the deciding factor on this particular album was this post below by
@FogBlueInSanFran in the Top thousand thread (cheers matey). *
The bit in bold is generally a statement I would agree with possibly this one exception;
1."Bombtrack"4:02
2."Killing in the Name"5:14
3."Take the Power Back"5:36
4."Settle for Nothing"4:49
5."Bullet in the Head"5:08
6."Know Your Enemy" (featuring Maynard James Keenan)4:57
7."Wake Up"6:06
8."Fistful of Steel"5:32
9."Township Rebellion"5:22
10."Freedom"6:06
Total length:52:55 (Pulled from wiki)
I can immediately hone in on when I first heard parts of this album, I'm at my
mates house and I'm probably about 12 years old. I have highlighted the above term as in fact he was (probably still is) an absolute twat with ginger hair - anyway, I digress.
The music doesn't work for me.
Why's he shouting all the time?
Where are the nicer / brighter sounding guitars?
Why aren't the riffs more melodic?
Why does someone have to be on fire on the cover?
Why is someone trying to fuse rap and metal?
(And I now have a negative association with the person who introduced me to them)
From this point on, this band were completely disregarded by me, wouldn't entertain them, they were radioactive to my ears until I was probably about 23ish where my sister's fella at the time (now husband) pulled me up on my assertion that they were shite and explained what they were singing about.
This conversation had probably been in my head for a few months until I spotted it on sale (most likely in HMV) and I bought for about a fiver).
I am now experiencing the album properly for the first time, still initially a bit heavy for my usual taste but I can immediately recognise that my previous assertions were way off the mark.
** Sorry guys another break from writing, 3:53am and we have just been sick again, and we appear to have traces of undigested fish - try not to be
too jealous of my rock and roll living.
So now we have, good riffs, a tight band and they are really singing about something - They have a voice!
I like this snippet that I came across whilst just googling to ensure that I am slightly on point (I'm pretty fucking tired);
'It was 1990, and Tom Morello was a struggling rock guitarist in Los Angeles, with a Harvard degree in social studies. He had a vision to funnel the unrest of the day—the Gulf War, the prospective end of apartheid, the collapse of the Soviet Union—and his galvanizing experiences as a Kenyan-American kid in suburban Illinois into a group that synthesized rock and rap into something inherently rebellious. Or, as he put it in a want ad, he required “a socialist frontman who likes Black Sabbath and Public Enemy'.
These will certainly devide opinion, people may not like their music, people may not agree with their politics etc but they do seem to become more and more relevant the older their music gets.
This isn't the great in depth review that others have provided (some of them have been absolutely terrific to be fair), and I'm not going to give them the big sell, give the album a couple of listens and see where you get.
Anyway, as we started off, this is yet another story of where Onholiday(somemightsay) was wrong.............. ;-)
*** Back to bed now, let's see how much shut eye we get before we are up for the day. Over and out at 4:47am.
Edit: I have self redacted elements of this post as some of it was meandering into American politics which to be fair not only am I not best placed to comment on it, it would most likely de-rail the thread.
Enjoy (hopefully slightly more than Def Leopard)
