Episode #10 - Under the Radar
You ever have that moment where you come up with an idea, act on it - and then realise it all sounded very different in your head to the way it did in reality? Yeah, so did the boys. All of which is by way of a welcome to the strange odyssey that is the tenth episode of the podcast.
So, here was the thinking.
Between them, Mark, Richard and Steve own several thousand rock and metal albums and have spent a combined epoch-like 120 years listening to them. But they don’t own every rock and metal album ever produced, and so it stands to reason that there is at least one (actually, a lot more than one) album they’ve never heard but which should be considered for entry to the Hall of Fame.
So, Mark - who really shouldn’t be allowed in a room on his own with anything sharper than a crayon - decided that it would be a great idea to pick albums that had slipped under the radar.
The rules:
The albums had to feature in an online list of the Top 100 rock and metal albums of all time - in other words, an album had to already be considered by someone other than the Sadmen to be an elite release within the genre;
An album only qualified for the episode if the person choosing it had not heard more than one track from it - but it could be known to one or both of the other two;
The album had to meet the show criteria - it had to have been released between 1970 and 1995, and it had to be an album that could reasonably be described as hard/heavy/progressive rock or metal - in other words, Springsteen, Bowie, et al wouldn’t count.
So far, so good … so what, in the words of Mustaine, happened? We’ll tell you what happened. Tool and Kyuss happened. And then, in some altered and twisted reality in which reason, hope and sanity spun to the outer reaches of the known metalverse, just where it meets howl-at-the-moon crazy, Steve picked some Jethro Tull to add to the otherwise 90s stoner mix.
Don’t say we didn’t fucking warn you.
Jethro Tull - Aqualung (1971)
Episode 10 kicks off with Tull’s commercial breakthrough album - one that provoked widespread debate about whether or not it was a concept album. Ian Anderson, the flamingo-stanced flute-wielding muse of the previously folksy Tull, always insisted that although the album (and specifically side 2 of the album) was presented as a suite, it was not a concept album.
(And, as an irascible grumbler of some repute, he underlined that denial by deliberately writing the ‘you-want-a-concept-album-we’ll-give-you-a-fucking-concept-album’ Thick As A Brick by way of a follow up less than a year after Aqualung’s release.)
But regardless of that, what wasn’t in any doubt was the prevalance of unashamed flautism on the album. Enough, in fact, to be a worthy contender in a solo-off with Yngwie J. Malmsteen. The question, though, is how did it fare in the company of its more contemporary (though still two decades old) episode stablemates?
Kyuss - Blues for the Red Sun (1992)
Mark’s choice took the pod into stoner rock territory for the first time, with this release from the band that would ultimately lead to the genesis of Queens of the Stone Age.
The boys were surprised Mark had gone for this. This, remember, is a fella whose rock tastes are so Seventies they could be wearing flares and smoking weed. Yet choose it he did, for the simple reason that to all intents and purposes Mark spent the Nineties sticking to what was comfy and familiar and the stoner scene completely passed him by.
It was time to find out what the fuss was all about if, indeed, there was any fuss about at all.
Tool - Undertow (1993)
The youngest of the albums reviewed on the show so far has still been around for nearly 20 years, and was the debut from American rockers Tool - so named, according to vocalist Maynard James Keenan, because ‘Tool is exactly what it sounds like: It's a big dick. It's a wrench. ... we are ... your tool; use us as a catalyst in your process of finding out whatever it is you need to find out, or whatever it is you're trying to achieve’.
And whilst the boys aren’t sure how using Tool to find out whatever it is they need to find out might work when we have Wikipedia to provide the world with every unassailable truth imaginable, this only slightly-pretentious explanation of the band’s name does give some hint that the contents of Undertow were never going to be entirely straightforward.
And so it proved. And as such, it appeared to be very much up the strada of Richard, who has forged a rep as the musical academic of the show. Steel yourselves for talk of layers and the things that Mark ‘just doesn’t understand’.