Lightning to the Nations

This album right here suffers from a fairly unique problem. It's nothing to do with the music, or at least it's not directly responsible for the problem- the songs here are of a pretty excellent quality. I'll just be frank and say that before (a long time before) I bought this album, I had already heard most of these songs done a good deal tighter, faster and sounding a lot heavier. The problem is that someone has already played these songs a good deal better, and since I heard the covers first it's hard to really get into this.

Sure, it's a bit unfair to say "I don't like this album as much as I should because Metallica made these songs a good deal better", but that's the plain out truth to it. And it's a shame, because if I hadn't heard these songs before then chances are I'd be raving about how damn excellent this thing is. Instead, I'm sitting here thinking "man this sounds like a sloppy english version of Garage Inc."

But anyway, the songs. Well, they are pretty good. Very good, really. Diamond Head traffic in a fairly complex, progressive-ish sort of NWOBHM, but not really knowing anything about that genre I'd say it sounds like a lot of early thrash/speed stuff, just in a much looser, less aggressive style- it seems that perhaps at this point metal was still somewhat enamoured with Led Zeppelin and those other late 60's/early 70's proto metal bands. These somewhat unfortunate remnants of earlier music styles cause this thing to suffer a little bit- certainly a bit more distortion, a tighter approach, a bit less "groove", as it were would be nice- but overall this is surprisingly heavy. Am I Evil is an absolute brute of a song- I dare say the bridge riffs in this tune are so heavy that light can't escape from it. You could do a 50's crooner cover of this tune and it would still be super heavy.

The album doesn't quite continue on at that level, but there's still plenty of big riffs- Helpless kicks along with a ton of power and quite a few excellent, speedy riffs, Sucking My Love's man-sodomy (double tracking orgasm noises is never a good idea) is made up for by a really sweet main/verse riff that sounds like some particularly upbeat Sabbath outtake, and while Sweet and Innocent seems to get a bit of a bad rap for being quite rocky and less metal it's still got some rather nice riffs. Reminds me of a heavier Thin Lizzy- (although I imagine people who listen to more trad metal/hard rock would probably laugh at that), it's a pretty nice tune- catchy, not overlong - and it goes extremely well with beer. While It's Electric does sound a little bit prissy and fey at times, that's the production more then anything. It's still a pretty cool hard rock tune. Yeah, overall there's a lot of good things to say about this album.

Nonetheless this album comes off as less then the sum of its' parts. The vocals are probably the main reason why this just isn't as good as it should be. It's never the classiest insult to use, but damn, does Sean Harris sound like a poof/fag/man with gender/sexuality issues. Mariah Carey's vocals are manlier. I guess a basic summary of his style would be "weak and wailing" and/or "faggy". It sounds terrible and it makes everything sound a good deal less heavy.

And the second reason that this just isn't as good as it should be is, well, Metallica. I find this record really hard to listen to... why play this stuff when I've got better versions of these songs? I understand that these guys wrote these songs first and that's cool, but just as the 486 has been superseded, so these songs have been. There are better versions of these tunes out there, that have better vocals, better guitars, with everything much tighter, heavier, and produced better. Why would I want to listen to a fruitier (seriously, they use major chords at the start of Am I Evil? wtf?), weaker sounding version of the same tunes?

I know it's a bit unfair- this album was a real influential one, the songwriting's great, etc etc. These versions of the songs just aren't as good as the ones I'm used to, that's all. I'd recommend it, but if you really want to hear some good Diamond Head, buy this album then download Garage Inc. and listen to those versions instead.