Were the Vibrators real punks? Maybe not, but then again, were the Stranglers? Or Eddie and the Hot Rods? Even more to the point, was Steve Jones? Plenty of rock careerists jumped onto the punk/new wave bandwagon in the wake of the Sex Pistols' success (and more than a few folks, like Jones, stumbled into the new movement by accident), but unlike most of them, the Vibrators took to the fast/loud/stripped down thing like ducks to water, and both Knox (aka Ian Carnarchan) and Pat Collier had a genius for writing short, punchy songs with sneering melody lines and gutsy guitar breaks.
PopoffĤ97 The Vibrators - Pure Mania 411 Points 3 Votes a sort of sickly anemic Sabbath trudge with excellent screechy, Ozzy Byron vocals and handicapped drums, more like traps.
ChelledĪgain, we're talking holy grails of fledgling metal magic here (see Sir Lord Baltimore. Loved it? Try: Jerusalem, Hard Stuff, Buffalo, Lucifer's Friend, Pentagram. Bang is a quintessential Heavy Rock album, very influenced by early Black Sabbath, but the band waivers off any over-adventurism or Psychedelic meanderings with only one song to break the five-minute barrier."Questions" was even a minor radio hit in the States. If you dig: Black Sabbath, Hard Rock, Classic Rock. A dynamic rendition of Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame" also got play, and the platinum-bound album was finally released in the US the following year. The live version of "I Want You to Want Me" was picked up by American radio programmers, who turned it into a Top 10 hit. Hoo boy, I won't be able to do it for most of this first round cuz I'll be commuting home from work, but.Īs a result of Cheap Trick's burgeoning Asian popularity, the band's Japanese label recorded a pair of April 1978 Tokyo shows and released a live album, At Budokan, proof of the band's supreme stage power and an opportunity to introduce several previously unreleased tunes ("Need Your Love," recorded for the next studio disc, whose release was held up by the live album's unexpected success, is amazing).
Was that tradition started by Deep Purple or does it go back further? Nice start with two iconic live albums recorded in Japan. The naïve musicians in Bang were barely given another chance to build upon this solid debut's abundant promise, and, as would be shown by pair of flawed and confused follow-up albums, their career was to be thrown into a tailspin before hardly getting off the ground. Having thus heard Bang's best shot (if you catch our meaning) and then watched "Questions" flounder on the charts, the bean-counting suits at Capitol Records apparently and perhaps prematurely deemed their new charges to be anything but the perfect marriage of Sabbath and Grand Funk they were hoping for. And, sprinkled amidst these angrier moments lay a few curious stylistic diversions like the gentle Arthurian fingerpicking of "Last Will and Testament" and the hippie-dippy sentiments of "Our Home," each of which respectively veered into art rock and the sort of post-flower power whimsy that Altamont should have categorically nailed to a tree a few years earlier (and which had dominated Bang's ambitious but flawed first effort, Death of a Country, which was shelved upon delivery). In fact, such outright savagery was only momentarily threatened here on a few subsequent tracks, including the biting staccatos of ""Come with Me" and Neanderthal plod of "Future Shock," but by the arrival of lead single "Questions" and its undeniably infectious sibling "Redman," some measure of civility had largely been restored. What they had, as exemplified by memorable opening gambit, "Lions, Christians," was a hard rock style that tempered the sheer bombastic doom and gloom of Black Sabbath with a less oppressive, blues-reliant sound redolent of most every other proto-metal band out there at the time (think Toe Fat, May Blitz, Dust, etc.), to be quite honest, and therefore lacking in the uncontrolled danger of a Blue Cheer or Sir Lord Baltimore. Signed by Capitol Records on a wave of goodwill toward heavy rock following the gang buster success story that was Grand Funk Railroad, the members of Bang were hastily ushered into the nearest studio while the ink on their contract was still drying and essentially asked to "show us what you got" by their new backers.