TOP TEN METAL ALBUMS OF THE '80s

TOP TEN METAL ALBUMS OF THE '80s

Sylvie Simmons

The '70s just ran out without leaving a forwarding address. It’s probably sitting right now in some centrally-heated airconditioned little house in the suburbs searching for its pud beneath a mound of flabby flesh. It started off so well; it finished off so dull. And metal was limp, damp, pathetic.

1980 was the year Motorhead released Ace Of Spades, Plasmatics released New Hope For The Wretched; it wasn't a bad year at all, a good start to a decade that’s seen metal come back into its own as nasty, offensive, scurrilous and fun.

Not that by any means it's been totally grand. The '80s is the decade Billy Joel started wearing leather. The '80s is the decade Steve Perry made a solo album. The '80s is the decade Styx said they’d save rock ’n’ roll. The '80s is the decade Duran Duran put on S&M outfits and did “Wild Boys’’ or whatever it's called. A lot of HM bands still sound too much like Def Leppard; a lot of them still go with the boring big-name producer and the boring bigsound ballad, but a lot more don't. This decade there's been a glut of bands with truly unacceptable images—chainsaw codpieces, fake blood, handcuffs, studs, chains, showmanship—and truly wonderful album covers—away with the girl-inminiskirt, on with the rams ’ heads, gore, winged monsters and skeletons. Some say the '80s is the HM decade of the Devil. More like the decade of devilment. Certainly the decade of the video, so there's been better-looking, younger-looking HM bands than there's been in ages. With sillier hairdos.

No great ground-breaking music in the '80s—the '70s, the late '60s, are still the big influences: Zeppelin, Purple, Sweet, Slade, Sabbath, Queen, Priest, Kiss; some of the best of the '70s bands have made it even bigger this decade (Ozzy, Kiss, Queen, Slade; Purple have just made a comeback).

But hell, we're not even halfway through. Things are looking up. Of the different types of metal around, these are among the best so far.

MOTORHEAD

Ace Of Spades

(PolyGram)

1980

It strode into 1980 like Moses coming down from the Mountain brandishing twelve stone tablets as heavenly choirs gargled behind black, booming clouds: Ace Of Spades, Motorhead’s best album ever—no, let’s not mince words here, the best album of the ’80s, one of the best HM albums of all time! The one with the trinity, Lemmy, Phil and Eddie, low-slung and leathered and cowboy-hatted in a sandpit on the front cover, like Clint Eastwood’s blackhead ripe for squeezing, and cool and proud and intense on the back cover, and inside, on the plastic, in the grooves—ah me! Sleaze, speed, filth, dementia, bombast, cartoon, concussion, adrenalin, music with teethmarks, music with warts, music that spurts and roars and rushes from Olympian heights to wash over you like a mescal waterfall without the worm. So furious you need two Valiums and a three-month course in deep-breathing to get the nerve to face it. So fast you need a shot to calm you down when it’s over. Music that takes a cheesegrater to your brain and a foodprocessor to your guts and feeds them back to you in 12 instant, tasty hors d’oeuvres. Unlike Kevin DuBrow’s head, there are no bald patches on this album.

Motorhead, middle-aged but still perverted, the band that put the tack in attack, are true champions of the garbagetruck chord—in the back, chew it up with metal teeth, burp it into a corner all mashed and hot and messy. Some people have complained you can’t hear their lyrics; some people want to bring prayers back to public schools. The titles tell you all you want to know: “Love Me Like A Reptile’’ (no supporters of the No Newts campaign are Motorhead!) “Jailbait,” “Bite The Bullet,” “The Hammer,” “Shoot You In The Back,” you get the idea, bloodshot rpck of the first order. Which is best? It’s like asking you if you prefer your left hand’s index finger to the big toe on your right foot—they’ve all got their own little place in your nervous system. But, like Dennis DeYoung’s brain, I have got a soft spot—for the title track, “Ace Of Spades,” a passionate, powerful showcase for the loud, violent drums, the iron, wipe-out bass, the steaming, shattering guitar, and Lemmy’s leather lungs, a voice that sounds like battered baby Steve Perries, killer vocals—if Khadafy had them, he’d have no need of hit squads—working together like orange and Smirnoff; honest, sincere and funny.

And nostalgic. Fast Eddie left an album later, Philthy Phil’s since followed, leaving Lemmy to battle on with new musicians, a four-piece these days, a calmer Lemmy by all accounts. Still, they did release their last album in a real black leather sleeve; still, they did release a single, “Killed By Death,” by far the fabbest record of 1984. When British metal output’s getting so thin you can only measure it on a micrometer, Motorhead albums still tattoo JOY and GLORY right down your spine. I love the sound of dying lawns...

THE LORDS OF THE NEW CHURCH

The Lords Of The New Church

(I.R.S.) 1982

The songs on this album wriggle, writhe and jerk off of the plastic like napalmed worms, mesmerizingly cool, colossally majestic, subversive, compulsive, cruel and so groovy and it’s not metal? Who said that? You want subcategories? Will that make your little psyches happier? Okay, metallic punk. Punk metal. Baroque and roll. Leather Gothic Oi Boys in a metal album sleeve. The Lords Of The New Church are the dixie cups that people can spurt into in the porn theatre of life. This is their first album and it doesn’t come quietly.

Stiv Bator(s), former Dead Boy, is the frontispiece of this whole different religion. He’s a trash-rocker who loves harmonies, a pop-fan who likes weird shit, an extrovert who wants to be introspective, and a True Star. He growls, yells, manacles the lyrics and rips at their armpits with his teeth, leaping on top for a black-leather hump, unwholesome, delinquent, makes your blood run cold. Sometimes it rambles, sometimes there’s glimpses of Jesus, brilliant stuff, ranging from junk to stomp to Gregorian chant, from psychedelica cha-cha to strippeddown blackest metal. A mighty hell-fire with Iggy, the Dolls, Jagger and the Doors bopping up and down in the flames.

“Livin’ On Livin’ ” sounds like Jim Morrison doing “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone” on hallucinogenics, “Russian Roulette” sounds like drugged and tortured Monkees, “Open Your Eyes" has an intense, solemn urgency, “Eat Your Heart Out” sounds mean, “Apocalypso” sounds meaningful, “L’il Boys Play With Dolls” is as raw and nasty as early Sabbath would have ever wanted to be.

Wailing, feverish decay wafts off the plastic; the music’s as clangy and echoey and black as music can get. The Lords got voted number one band of the year in Finland last year, and if they can break through the saunas and reindeer to leave a burning palmprint over there, they’ve got to be degenerate. Altar be a law.

ZZ TOP

Eliminator

(Warner Bros.) 1983 What’s the difference between a buffalo and a bison? You can’t wash your hands in a buffalo! What’s the difference between a buffalo and ZZ Top? Not much, except Dusty, Frank and Billy’s got more balls and bourbon coursing through their veins. ZZ Top kick like a mule, roar like a big bull rolling on its belly, play songs like a springy mattress bouncing with drunken fleas, a real menagerie a trois, rocking and stomping and raunchy and steaming and funny and downright exalted. It’s the way they’ve always been: I haven’t sobered up since I heard ZZ Top's First Album, I haven’t shaved since I heard Fandango, I haven’t stopped smiling since I got Tres Hombres, their greasy, glorious best. But that was ’70s and this is ’80s—and Eliminator, if not their best, is their biggest-seller, megabillions sold, a bit cleaner and more commercialsounding. But can you really clean a pigsty? Can you really tame a skunk? Their feet are still firmly planted in mule manure while their heads are in the clouds. There isn’t a track on Eliminator that isn’t witty and dirty and fun, and if that isn’t enough to get it up there in the ’80s top ten, then the videos they did from it—ZZ are personally responsible for saving MTV from drowning in thick, bland, white snotmost definitely are.

“Legs,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” “TV Dinners,” “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” are tough rock still firmly rooted in stomping, slinky blues. As the blurb on their first album put it, they “capture the abstract blues from within and combine it with the ability to feel and play good hard rock without losing their communication.” It’s what they do, it’s what they do, as you all know anyway since the ticker-tape just told me that 20 trillion copies of Eliminator have now been sold. The ZZs play their music lovingly with a sense of humor and a true frontier spirit, Billy and Dusty’s voices growl together like tomcats gargling whisky, Frank Beard pounds out a thudding, boozy beat, there's slide guitar and hard guitar and a cheeky rhythmic shuffle like live barbecue meat skipping on to a smiling, open bun, and it’s very good indeed. ZZ Top have been around forever—time flies when you’re having fun—and with albums like this will be around for ever more. While bands like Quiet Riot couldn’t sound this lively if they had cactuses shoved up their collective asses, the fuzz-face boys make it sound soooo easy.

AC/DC

Back In Black

(Atlantic) 1980

An album that made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I first heard it and which even now, four-anda-half years on, never fails to grab my entrails and knit them into a large throw-rug with GLORY embroidered across. It was Bon Scott’s swift elevator-ride to Heaven—never seen without the spirit in one hand, the beer in the other, the parrot-voiced vocalist choked on his vomit and passed on, leaving the brilliant Let There Be Rock, If You Want Blood and Highway To Hell albums as signposts to the good bits of the scabrous ’70s—that inspired this memorial album, wrapped in mournful black, AC/DC’s best album of the ’80s by far.

AC/DC, the band whose lobotomy riffs made the Ramones look like Brian Eno, were an exuberant, raw, abrasive, gloriously-good-time band, who’d written some good, simple songs and stomped the shit out of them. But as the ’80s ticked around, people shook their heads, writing them off as dead and gone. When they introduced their new singer—exGeordie Brian Johnson, king of the working-class rhino stomp and possessor of Drano-gargling vocal cords eerily like the late Bon’s—in the spring of 1980, the heads slowed down a bit. When they came out with Back In Black in the summer of that year, heads changed direction and started banging. There was that less ragged, more polished sound, the kind they had on their first lookingtowards-the-U.S. album, Highway To Hell, but there was also a power, an intensity, an exuberance. The album drips sweat. It’s high-voltage stuff, back to some serious stomping—belching riffs, all-out boogie, aggressive without being nasty, abrasive without drawing blood. And totally, completely infectious. “Hell’s Bells,” with the big clanger tolling for Bon, the title track and “You Shook Me All Night Long” are some of the best straightforward, non-sense heavy rock numbers in the history of mankind. Relentless. Bon would have approved. They’re still true to their roots.

ACCEPT

Balls To The Wall

(Epic) 1984

If Freddie Mercury saw this album sleeve, the hairs on his chest would curl like little Shirley Temple’s, his teeth would wrap around the ends of his moustache and do a little tango. Hell, if Freddie saw this album cover he’d put on his best leather skirt and—he did? On the “I Want To Break Free” video? Then he must have seen it! And anything that’s good enough for the finest frontman of the finest pomprock outfit in the universe is good enough for me!

Accept are mannish boys. If you don’t know what that is, you’ll see on the sleeve—all S&M tough-chap hot-andsweaty leather, and there’s more raw meat panting inside. Energy, strength, muscles and balls. The title track’s one of the most barely-restrained bludgeoning-riffola masterpieces to goose-step out of the Vaterland. Yup, this is Scorpions country, only Accept, at least so far, don’t seem as willing to lie on their backs for the American dollars. (Some would disagree. Accept have had four LPs of molten metal in their long and much-ignored career, and now they’ve got the Major Deal they’ve cleaned off a lot of the mucous, scraped off the filth on “Restless And Wild” and “Breaker,” and there’s even, choke, a Scorps-ish ballad here, wimp-titled “Winter Dreams.” But it’s powerful, my puppies, it’s powerful and I like the tunes a whole lot too.)

They’re mad-dog rock ’n’ rollers, these Krauts, a total Teutonic attack, with megamighty riffs, sensurround beat, wild dual guitar attacks, and Udo Dirkschneider’s vocals that roar and swoop like Luftwaffe, screech like Rob Halford in thumbscrews, subtle as a chainsaw, powerful as a Mack truck, higher than the highest highs—Lord knows what he’ll be like when his voice breaks! Crashing chords, loud and splendid, all boldness and heaviness and excessive volume. Most of the songs are about sex. The rest are about toughness (except the ballad which we’ll ignore though it isn’t, I confess, half bad). It’s heads-down, all-boys-together stuff, big and strong like Wagner, riff riff riff. And it doesn’t even hurt. In the '80s, Accept are going to take over from Abba as the Euroband to have us slavering in puddles of drool.

HANOI ROCKS

Back To Mystery City

(PVC) 1983

Talking about Abba, Hanoi Rocks tottered out of Scandinavia on their stiletto heels five albums ago, five oh-so-pretty wasted boys fronted by the Most Beautiful Person In Metal, Mike Monroe; the man whose sultry sneer makes Billy Idol’s lipcurl look like a cold-sore twitch; the man who sings how Billy Idol would sing if he wasn’t such a twerp. We’re talking Teenage Wasteland, self-abusive trashiness and class, poesy wasted glam, adolescent debauchery, live-fast-dieyoung-have-a-good-looking-corpse, wreck ’n’ roll, all the cliches re-vamped into one mighty, glorious band. Hanoi Rocks are as seductive as a James Dean stroke-mag. Hanoi Rocks put out a live album called All Those Wasted Years. Hanoi Rocks are Alice and Iggy and Mott updated and shot-up. Back To Mystery City's their best album, one of the best albums of ’83, junky, brash and arrogant, a must for headbangers, hairdo addicts and punks alike, and produced by Mott The Hoople’s Watts & Griffin. And produced well. Their live LP, which wasn’t, is messier than a baby with sick bowels; their live shows, usually, are no different, they’re often too out-of-it to play. But this album is hard, fast and gorgeous. They’ve got style, they’ve got attitude, and they’ve got magnificent tunes.

The heaviest stuff’s on the first side, the less painful stuff on the flip. It starts with the self-explanatory “Strange Boys Play Weird Openings,” Andy McCoy’s degenerate, knife-edged, glinty guitar, then it’s onto “Malibu Beach," the joys of pills, the glory of self-desecration! Glam-rock more stripped down than Bo Derek’s movie career, speedy, dirty, loud and ridiculously adolescent. There’s a lovely love song on side two, creeps and smoulders painfully and poignantly. Then more trash metal. One of the the big differences between the HM bands of the ’80s and the 70s is that, for the most part, the ’80s bands are more calculated, more contrived, less hedonistic and selfdestructive. ’Cept no one told Hanoi Rocks the news.

VENOM

Black Metal

(Neat Records) 1982 The following could have just as easily got this spot—Iron Maiden, Ozzy, WASP, Great White, Scorpions, Van Halen, Queen, Kiss—but I gave it to Venom because Black Metal has been springing up like herpes in the '80s, and if you want to scratch the scab and see what’s throbbing underneath you might as well go with one of the first (not counting Sabbath) and the rottenest and the best.

Venom—three Brits who call themselves Cronos, Mantas and Abaddon—came out from the bottomless pit of the universe (Newcastle) with an album Welcome To Hell on the independent Neat Records. Ragged and gruesome they were, obnoxious and noisy, dark and Poe-faced doomy monsters, offering up an extremely burnt offering from Hell’s kitchen. Thunder cracked, the earth split open, out out spurted eensy-weensy creepy-crawlies like a child’s impression of Bosch, vileness supreme: heavy, dramatic, gothic beat with spat-out werewolf vocalism a bit like Lemmy getting fried in hellfires, singing in the rain. They didn’t so much play their instruments as torture the shit out of them—but hell, it was fab. Extreme metal monstrousness.

And they kept on getting deadlier and blacker, more diabolical and more disgusting. By Black Metal they were the Thesaurus of the genre—virgins get the axe, bodies get dismembered, fists get clenched, leather gets studded, Satan get the glory, and women get such silly schoolboy treament you’ll lose it, I swear you'll lose it! Dry ice positively ejaculates out of the hole in the middle, it’s all broody, graveyard atmosphere, elemental, extravagant and totally over-the-top, except somehow they’ve got the music and the dynamics more in control this time around.

“Countess Bathory’’ is the old searchfor-lost-youth saga, the tale of a hag who bathes in virgins’ blood like it was Oil Of Olay. But the classic’s “Buried Alive”— you hear the vicar, the mourners, the earth plopping onto the wooden coffin lid, and the sounds of a man smothering sixfeet under, trying to claw his way out. Like “Black Sabbath," it brings tears to the eyes. Histrionic, stormy, evocative stuff. The only waste of time is “Teacher’s Pet,” a pointless, puerile, fantasy wank tune.

It’s furious, devilish stuff, not so much composed as decomposed. But I like it, what can I say? I like it.

PLASMATICS

New Hope For the Wretched

(Stiff) 1980

The Plasmatics are dead and gone now—Wendy O. Williams, after dabbling with Lemmy and a Tammy Wynette tune, has gone totally solo; Gene Simmons produced—but thanks for the mammaries. Like New Hope, the one with the lovely cover: Wendy with pink-and-yellow hair, leopard legs and big red boots and gaffer tape on her nipples, like Nancy Sinatra after a night of sex with an electrician in an ice-cream van; Ritchie Stotts in tutu with his Flying V and blue mohawk, like a voodoo Bendy-toy; the other three looking suitably demented—and the titles, like “Butcher Baby,” “Squirm,” “Living Dead,” “Test-Tube Babies,” glorious paeans to the two greatest things on earth, B-movies and the Weekly World News, and the hysterical blurb on the back saying “during the instrumental portion the musicians were isolated from one another so that they could not see or hear what each other were playing” on the oldie “Dream Lover,” when the entire 12-inches sounds like it was made that way! Like their shows, this album is tacky and excessive and gaudy and useless and painful and mighty and essential and wonderfully entertaining. Like W.O.W.’s top half, it stands up on its own, as one of the greatest trash metal albums of all time. Spot-on, witty, brilliant, squirming, jiggling, tacky, inspired—the TV dinner of metal.

“Squirm” sounds creepy, real great. “Butcher Baby” is lobotomized thrash of the highest order with its dumb, garbled “oh yeah, oh nooo’’ chant, and “Sometimes I” is fab indeed.

Instruments credited include machinegun, sax and chainsaw. The Plasmatics were fine with me.

TWISTED SISTER

You Can’t Stop Rock ’n’ Roll

(Atlantic) 1983

Difference between ’70s and ’80s metal is now things are more contrived, as in you’ve got to have the package— the ballad, the vid, the look. Twisted Sister have got the ballad, they’ve got the vid, and they’ve even got the look (normally a sort of S&M Christmas tree) if you look at them in Braille. There’s the trash-glam hairdo, the garish metal mascara, there’s the low-cut tops and the tight-cut bottoms—but they’re gargoyles, gloriousbleeding-gargoyles, fronted by the genetically-perfect Dee Snider who looks like an inflated Mae West and David Lee Roth foetus dipped headfirst into a makeup bag. A bit like the Tubes before they got flabby and boring. Glam-trash metal with Judas Priest leanings if you can think on that without drooling. Wonderfully unwholesome and truly unacceptable. Twisted Sister are cool. Have been since Motley Crue were knee-high. Menopausal but still abnormal. Any wonder they were big in Britain but were ignored—or confused with Sister Sledge—in their homeland for years? In the U.S. they played cover tunes in New Jersey, in Britain they headlined huge halls. Those against them were known as “tourists”; those for deemed to be “sick mother fuckers.” It wasn’t until You Can’t Stop Rock ’n’ Roll, admittedly a cleanersounding album (and don’t forget the obligatory ballad) that the sick mfs started coming out of American closets, giving them a hit and opening the doors to the charts for other nasty, molesting, gloriously raw and heavy, gross, delightful, blistering HM bands. Instead of the slime that s oozed and whimpered out of the radio and the TV set (anyone seen the Dennis DeYoung video? Anyone want to chip in for a hit-man?) we get catchy, strutting anthems, biker hymns like “Ride To Live, Live To Ride” and other raving leather singalongaDee stuff. They’ve made rawer, more vital albums (Under The Blade on Secret is fab) but never written better songs. After all those years of doing top 40 covers, it probably took some practice.

MOTLEY CRUE

Too Fast For Love

(Elektra)

They tottered out of Los Angeles a couple of years ago, feet stilettoed, legs leathered, T-shirts slashed to the bellybutton, shagdos haloing around pale and perfect faces like Mexican postcards of the blessed saints themselves: a giant phallus shaped like a bourbon bottle that turned the entire United States into a drunken wet T-shirt contest. And the Word was the Riff and the Riff was all.

Motley Crue make tarty riff-metal supreme, very hooky, very delinquent, tacky, flashy street-music. Not Sabbathinfluenced like so many new HM bands, this lot turned to Sweet, Mott The Hoople, Alice Cooper and Kiss as the true masters of rock, coming out with catchy and disarming metal that’s got as much to do with bubblegum as with thrash.

Their first album initially came out on their own independent label, Leathur— something a lot of the early ’80 metal bands were doing, getting a grass-roots following first, like the punk and new wave outfits before them, before milking the majors for money—which pressed 900 copies, featuring singer Vince on the cover in a ridiculous beehive wig. The second pressing—15,000 in all—had a wigless Vince. When the lot sold out, Elektra signed them (started a flood of HM record contracts in L.A. then all across the States) Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker cleaned them up, and the fine piece of plastic left home for good.

There’s a track on the Leathur record that didn’t make it onto the Elektra one, “Stick To Your Guns,” and I prefer the raggedy feel of the former, but it’s still whatever shape or form a bloody great popmetal LP, exaggerated, adolescent and anti-everything, powerfully played and all about sex (except the last track which is about death and overdosing— but it’s mostly about sex).

They’ve since undergone the package treatment a bit—the futurist clothes, the neatly-applied make-up, the professional hairdos, the Escape From New York backdrop—and Shout At The Devil, though rightly a big success, sounds a bit too clean, but they’re still the bad-living, outrageous, manly rockers they always were. Not to mention the reluctant fathers of lookalike, soundalike spawn all across the country.