This week, I heard that long-time survivor of the Dave Mustaine revolving door membership programme known as Megadeth but now former bassist of the band, David Ellefson, had joined Metal Church.
I’ve long since given up trying to keep on top of new releases and doing my ‘Best of the Year’ posts.
It’s always good to discover new music, particularly when it belongs to a genre you don’t listen to that often. But wait, I might be getting ahead of myself a little here.
I used to often do one of those ‘My Top 20 Albums of the Year’ posts, but in recent years I’ve struggled to be inspired by any new releases and I actually don’t even keep on top of release dates anymore. I saw a post the other day where someone was sharing their Top 200 new albums of the year. How is that even possible? Firstly, they must have an incredibly varied taste in music and secondly, four new albums a week? How does anyone find enough time to even listen to that much new music?
I’ve seen a few articles online recently where an artist or band’s entire discography is ranked from worst to best. It is something that can lead to great discussion and argument because the writer is invariably “wrong”.
This blog has been sadly neglected for a long time, so it’s time to blow the dust off it and crack on.
The other day I remembered an utter shit of a man I used to work for. I was a kind of odd job man for him, even though that wasn’t what I was really employed for, but that’s got nothing to do with this story. He would sit in his “office” which was actually his spare bedroom where there was just enough room for him to sit at his computer due to the piles of utter tat and rubbish he had piled up to the ceiling. He would play music very loudly through some quite decent speakers while I painted his stairwell or cleaned his bathroom or grouted some tiles or took the rubbish out to provide entertainment in between bouts of screaming at me for doing everything wrong.
When S&M came out, I was in my 20s, I worked in a pub and I still had a reasonably full head of hair. I wondered why they chose the title at the time. Was it because James Hetfield liked to dress up in leather and smack a heavily restrained and ball gag-wearing Lars Ulrich across the buttocks with a plank of wood with a nail sticking out of it while yelling “FIRE WO-MAN!” at the top of his voice? Or was it just short for Symphony and Metallica? Probably the second. Or at least, something close to that.
