Various Artists Scrap Metal: Excavated Heavy Metal From The Era Of Excess RIDINGEASY
Cheesy rock’n’roll music – don’tcha just love it?! Whether it’s Edamn, Mosharella, Massacrepone, Riffotta, Rockfort, Swiss Cheese (i.e. Krokus) or just plain Emmetal, there’s nothing like the sound of a band putting the cheddar to the shredder. If you’re the kinda person who enjoys waking up to the sound of Munich mayhem merchants Railway’s signature shriek-athon Lick It, Stick It and then, later, going to bed to the howlings of Japanese insane-iacs Hellhound’s Tokyo Flying-V Massacre (the entire album, nothing else will do), then this Scrap Metal compilation will fill the void in between.
So… here be Rox. Here be Silverwing. Here be Steeler. Here be Exciter. Here be a tasty truckle of endearing 1980s obscurities, played in the breathlessly naive – or, as disparagers might say, and with a degree of justification, inept – style of the aforementioned leg-ends. It’s no exaggeration to say that each of the 10 rare tracks exhumed for this collection make Metallica’s No Life Til Leather demo sound like Bohemian Rhapsody.
kicks off, with pleasing inevitability, with a track titled , by Rapid Tears, a genius work full of stumbling riffs, toy-shop drums and the neck-snapping mantra: ‘’ What’s not to love? Remarkably, it gets better. Air Raid’s is akin to a glammy early Iron Maiden, the song echoing Sammy Hagar’s sentiment . Resless (sic) deliver a chunky thrasher titled that appears to include the lyrics: ‘.’ (Further investigation reveals, sadly, that the last word is actually ‘hands’.) The Beast’s , plainly a tribute to the DC comics character, German fighter pilot Hans von Hammer, rattles your cage like a cloud-busting Stuka, and even name-checks the jet-powered Me 262 Von Hammer flew in World War II. – a misnomer if there ever was one – evoke the spirit of Ted Nugent (Derek St. Holmes era) on the raw ’n’ rampant . Czar take whammy-bar guitar solos to the edge of insanity on the politically charged . Contrastingly, the six-string sounds on Real Steel’s resemble a succession of empty dustbins tumbling down a fire escape.
