Books you can judge by their covers.

Scorpions - "Blackout"

So there I was sat here in the realm of Eminent Silence on a rare week off work, flicking through some album cover artbooks and internet sites and "ping", an idea formed.  There are lots of great album covers out there in the history of music that artists have (quite rightly) received accolades and praise for.  However, the thing I always hated as a kid was picking up a record and it's cover art promised the sound of hell opening or orcs fighting dragons in a fiery pit of damnation, only to find once I got home that the bulk of the songs were about broken hearts and endless tears, instead of broken swords and endless rivers of blood!

So, as part of a new series on my still fledgling blog I am going to champion the albums whose content was every bit as good as the artwork suggested, whose cover image was representative of what lay inside.  The series will start with Scorpions and "Blackout".

Lets look at what we have here.  A screaming man (not unlike Rudolf Schenker himself) with forks bent over his eyes with a head bandage on - possibly the source of his scream?? - shattering a pane of glass with the sheer intensity of his cries.  When you put this album on that's what you want the songs to do, come screaming out of your speakers like a creature in pain and shatter every window in the house.  Straight away you get the title track racing out at you like a horse on fire thinking the other side of the speakers is a lake and this pace keeps up throughout the record - especially on tracks "Now!" and "Dynamite".  The album is perfectly weighted as by the time you get to closing track "When The Smoke Is Going Down" you get a genuine sense that the pain of Rudy(?) on the front has been expunged and all will be well until you next put the record on when again the fury of pent up pain and anger will once more leap forth into your ears.

For a metal lover like me "Blackout" is a perfect piece of album artwork and is rivaled only by the content it so accurately portrays that sits behind it's sleeve/case just waiting to be let out.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In Hindsight (Sepultura)

Image
I remember getting my grubby teenage mitts on "Arise" in 1991.  I was 14 and was so new and naive to the brutal sound of the Brazilian's particular brand of thrash metal I genuinely believed it to be the best album they made and spent years ignoring anything that had gone before.  Then came "Chaos AD" which I liked for about five minutes before I sold the CD for beer money.  In the space of two years I had fallen in love with and out of love with a band on the basis of two records and being offered "Roots" three years later was hardly the reconciliation I'd hoped for either. The fact is though that growing up has a certain charm when it comes to music and learning to understand the concept and importance of a discography is a key part of any music lovers maturity. For this reason I remember with equal clarity my discovery of two of the most important thrash records in my collection, both of them unheard by my young and frankly at times stupid ear
Read more

The Vinyl Collection - Metallica "Master of Puppets"

Image
Following the rude interruption of Xmas in the otherwise perfect equilibrium of Eminent Silence, the realm now finds itself in possession of a record player.  To maximise the potential of this new toy steps have been taken to find appropriate items to facilitate the functionality of the latest addition to the available technology in the realm.  Ok, the short version, I bought some vinyl records. However, owning a cloud library that itself contains a fair few days worth of listening material as well as a reasonably sized CD collection means that not just any old release will find its way to my turntable.  Since I spend most of my week travelling and living in hotels it is obvious my record listening habits will be limited to weekends so the titles that will occupy my vinyl collection will be only those considered as "classics". This leads me nicely to another excuse to write random reviews of aforementioned vinyl classics, starting with Metallica's 1986 thrash metal op
Read more

Bell Witch - "Four Phantoms"

Image
Yep, another late review but I am sure by now any readers of the blog will know to expect little in the way of regularity in terms of posts here.  Nowadays I only post when I feel the need to share something so good or impressive that to listen to it alone does not do it sufficient justice.  Sometimes, not sharing something borders on criminal.  This ethos is very much applicable to "Four Phantoms", which is an extraordinary, challenging and thought provoking listen. To start with Bell Witch are not a stereotypical metal band.  The two members use only bass and drums as their preferred weapons of choice.  The bass is a six string affair so the capacity for some very heavy and harrowing riffs and leads is explored fully by Dylan Desmond.  The 4 tracks flow effortlessly between crushing heaviness and melancholic melodies.  The hour of your attention that it demands takes you to dark places as it explores four violent deaths at the hand of nature.  Drowning, suffocation, imm
Read more