Writer & Editor
If you want to understand why glam metal was so popular in the late ’80s, you should listen to a band that had more bite than Poison and better sense of the absurd than Cinderella, which is to say: Faster Pussycat.
Named for the Russ Meyer movie Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill! the band was just as ludicrous and awesome as its namesake. On its debut album, the band is rough, cocky and a hell of a lot of fun, whether their lyrics are making sense or not.
Okay, this isn’t a new song, but it is Christmas, and it’s miles better than just about everything on the last heavy metal Christmas CD I listened to. I present The Darkness with “Christmas Time (Don’t Let the Bells End).”
If you’re not a fan of The Darkness (recently reunited with a new album out… which is on my Christmas list), then please, click on, click away, hit your back button, or read what I’ve been saying about hobbits.
But, if you’re tired of sappy-sweet Christmas tunes (and as much as I love some of them, you do reach the point of total saturation), here’s something nonsensical, melancholy, loud, and more than a bit goofy.
With an album as popular as Def Leppard’s Hysteria, the memory of when you first heard it may be overshadowed by the point at which you became sick of it.
As with Def Leppard, so went the fates of pop metal — they reached their height of fame with Hysteria, released in 1987, and it’s arguably one of the last great albums in the genre. The numerous singles released from it kept it on the airwaves for years, and that was part of the problem.
Composer Howard Shore draws from the themes he created for previous films in Peter Jackson’s adaptations of The Lord of the Rings for The Return of the King, and this score caps the trilogy off superbly.
A compilation album may not often make it onto a “best of” list, but I’ll always be biased when it comes to AC/DC’s Who Made Who. It was a Christmas present in 1986 and my gateway album into the world of heavy metal. Once I’d heard it, I never looked back.
The good news is, Aerosmith’s new album shrugs off decades’ worth of forgettable über-ballads and rediscovers its heavy-blues groove. The bad news is, it’s buried under forgettable über-ballads.
