Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Unknown Soldier · 11-02-2015, 03:57 AM

The Live Album Section 1985

Iron Miaden Live After Death 1985 (EMI)

When you’re the biggest heavy metal band in the world, it makes sense to then go out and record a live double album and that is exactly what Iron Maiden did in 1985. Live After Death would be a whopping almost two hours long and would be garnered from the band’s highly touted ‘World Slavery Tour’ which the band had undertaken after their acclaimed Powerslave album had rocked the top of metaldon. The tour would also be one of the longest and most extensive undertaken by a rock band, which in turn gave the band little chance of recording a studio album in 1985. The sets for the tour would be lavished with the Powerslave theme, which would be Egyptian sarcophagi and hieroglyphs and the sections for the live album would be taken from the Long Beach and Hammersmith Odeon legs of the tour. The album is noted for avoiding overdubs that were often be used on a number of live albums and bassist Steve Harris stated that the band were strongly against this from the beginning anyway and were dedicated to putting out a completely and truly live experience. Side by side with the album a live video of the experience was also recorded by director Jim Yukich and would include 14 tracks. After the opening ‘Churchill’s Speech’ and the customary “Aces High” the first half of the album is dominated by tracks from both the Powerslave and Piece of Mind albums. The second half of the album would be dominated by The Number of the Beast and the Paul D’Anno era albums Iron Maiden and Killers. As always with live albums there is some debate over the choice of material but for me the choices are pretty good and mostly obvious. Some negative reviews of the album complain about Bruce Dickinson’s voice as being off on a couple of tracks but personally I think he does ok here, especially on the Paul D’Anno tracks, which was always going to be a contention anyway between Paul v Bruce lovers of the band. Kerrang! would describe the album as being ‘The nearest that any person could get to being on an Iron Maiden world tour without actually leaving town’ and the album would be regarded as one of the great live albums of the decade. The 1970s may well have been the era of the live album but throughout the 1980s monster live albums like Live After Death would still continue to enhance the live genre.

Bruce Dickinson- Vocals
Dave Murray- Guitar
Adrian Smith- Guitar
Steve Harris- Bass
Nicko McBain- Drums

Production- Martin Birch
Long Beach 1985
Hammersmith Odeon 1985

Unknown Soldier · 11-06-2015, 03:43 PM

1986

1986 as a year is pretty much synonymous with two of the biggest and most important metal albums ever recorded in Master of Puppets and Reign in Blood, two albums that rank amongst the pinnacle of metal releases and two albums that every metal collection should have. The year wouldn’t be just about those two albums though, as great albums also arrived from a fired up Megadeth with their second album, the legendary doom debut from Candlemass a real fav of mine and finally from Iron Maiden who carried the weight of expectation after the resounding success of Powerslave two years earlier, did they deliver…… well just wait and see! The bulk of the albums on this year’s list would again be from the extreme metal genre, which as a major force in 1986 meant thrash metal (its muscular arm) but instead of just being an American product, it now showed that Europeans and especially Germans could do it just as well, as great albums arrived from bands like Destruction and the highly rated Kreator. Glam metal still the main commercial outlet for metal, refused to die after a lacklustre year in terms of quality throughout 1985 and it now injected itself with a number of new bands like Poison, Cinderella and Stryper, all bands that would form the ‘second wave of glam metal’ and despite being popular sellers and darlings of the ever expanding MTV, most of these bands just never had the quality of its first wave acts like Motley Crue, Twisted Sister or the criminally underrated Icon. 1986 would also be a great year for mainstream/power metal as metal giants like Iron Maiden were joined by other ‘luxury sounding metal bands’ like Queensryche, Virgin Steele, Crimson Glory and the little known Fifth Angel, in releasing albums that fell into the middle ground between the excesses of thrash and the glitz of glam metal to promote a more power/progressive metal sound overall. The mighty Van Halen now minus David Lee Roth found themselves back on the radar in 1986 with the addition of hard rocker Sammy Hagar who had been pedalling away as a solo artist. Their polished synth-layered pop metal sound would find the perfect listening market, as they along with most of the glam metal bands, would capitalize on the fall of AOR as a major commercial giant, to release singles and albums that were guaranteed to sell regardless of the quality of their product (see glam metal comment above) List absentees would include previous giants like Accept who were totally unfocused on Russian Roulette, Motorhead had some severe production problems on Orgasmatron, Judas Priest got bogged down with their synthesizers on Turbo and a large number of glam metal albums missed the list as they simply just weren’t good enough, despite the fact that the listening public were still lapping up these albums by the bucketload. Whilst at the the other end of the spectrum, Brazilian band Sepultura released one of the most primitive sounding debuts ever, an album which revealed that they still had some work to do. Overall 1986 has proved to be one of the most interesting years I’ve listened to so far, for the simple reason its top end is chocca full of great metal albums, while its bottom has some great albums of quality that are really liked by metal lovers across the world and there’s plenty of material here that is considered cult stuff as well.