The Many Voices of News of the World

Was indulging my baroque side that extends a bit past metal's boundaries by rocking out to Queen's News of the World earlier today when it occurred to me how many of the tracks had been covered by at least one other artist:

• "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions:" two of Queen's most well-known tracks have undergone a whole host of treatments, including various re-recordings by different versions of the Queen lineup years after the band's demise. I'm pretty sure I don't plan to go out and find any of them, either.
• "Sheer Heart Attack:" Helloween recorded a version, but the band that crept out of a dark recess of my mind when I thought about covers of this song was Sam Black Church, who released a live recording of the song as a bonus track on Superchrist in 1995.
• "Spread Your Wings:" Germans who love ostentatious metal seem to love Queen, too: Blind Guardian took the far more genre-appropriate "Spread Your Wings" and recorded a pretty kickin' version for Somewhere Far Beyond.
• "Get Down, Make Love:" much like The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)," Queen's psychedelic celebration of free love was begging to be re-recorded in a more twisted form by an artist with the right chops. Nine Inch Nails did so in 1990, releasing the cover as a b-side on the single for the equally bondage-heavy "Sin."
  

Keep of Kalessin Gets a Little Old School

Keep of Kalessin, whose last album was a part of this blog's top 10 albums of 2008, has released an edited stream of a track from their upcoming album. The track is making an early appearance because the band entered it into a portion of the Eurovision Song Contest, because Norwegians are just more metal than we are. Entitled "The Dragontower," the song has a taste of the chorale-sounding open chords that the band favored on Kolussus and Armada, but it's the two main riffs - the verse riff and its marching beat variation in the chorus - that really caught my ear: they're hooky and drenched in a vibe that feels distinctly NWOBHM. Keep of Kalessin have never shied away from lacing their music with a bit of prog, but while "The Dragontower" has some more traditional prog ideas, like the Queen-style acapella chorus in the bridge, writing a song that sounds like it might be at home in the Diamond Head catalog is an interesting musical step. After this taste, I'm more than a little curious to hear how the rest of the album sounds.

Song Review: Dream Theater Covering Queen

I've now listened to Black Clouds & Silver Linings once through, which means that I'm nowhere near ready to give my thoughts on it. However, I do have some thoughts on the cover of the "Tenement Funster/Flick of the Wrist/Lily of the Valley" medley: I finally understand why people think that Dream Theater's covers are so soulless.

You see, Queen was my favorite band from around the time Wayne's World came out. I spent far more of my adolescence listening to A Night at the Opera, Sheer Heart Attack, A Day at the Races, and News of the World than I did pretty much anything else. I wanted to be able to sing like Freddy Mercury; I wanted to find a gigantic copy of the cover of Queen II and put it up on my wall; and I definitely gave Queen's music enough ear time that a lot of it became ingrained on a subconscious level.

When I listen to the original "Tenement Funster," I hear the essence of rock music: musicianship that's loose without being sloppy, a vocal line that sprouts sex appeal and attitude. When I listen to "Lily of the Valley," I hear one of Brian May and Freddie Mercury's most beautiful collaborations, a song that builds from a fragile beginning to a gorgeous bloom that crescendos with one of the best examples of Queen's multitracking vocal experiments. The Dream Theater covers seem pale in comparison, faithfully rendering the material without being able to execute the idiom that made the originals so powerful. As the song closest to a metal track, "Flick of the Wrist" is the best showing (which might be more indicative of either the limitations of the band's abilities as a cover band or their stylistic choices when arranging covers than anything else), but overall these recordings sound like Dream Theater covering Queen - if Queen sounded like Dream Theater.

Head Banging: An Exploration

Are you familiar with the term "bangover"? I wasn't either, until Municipal Waste frontman Tony Foresta used it during an intro at Irving Plaza a few weeks ago. The Urban Dictionary has a nice definition, with the wonderful side-effect that depending on the audience, it sounds like I had rough sex last night instead of overindulging in the wonderful world of bang yer head.

In the midst of extreme physical activity, like head banging way too much during Pinebox's set up in Yonkers, NY last night, my mind ends up wandering a little bit. Is it because the conscious mind releases so much control to keep the body moving in time with whatever it's doing that the subconscious takes full control? Is it because my levels of ADD are so high that I need to multitask whatever I'm doing, even if it's not effective? Maybe I'm trying to stave off an embolism (aka "bleeding on the brain") by making sure I can still think straight? Who knows.

In any case, when I wasn't staggering around trying to regain/keep my balance, I got to thinking about head banging and why people do it. I'm not a sociologist by any stretch of the imagination, so I'll just put up my own thoughts on the matter and we'll have to be content without any science to back them up. I have two theories:

1. It looks cool, especially in photos that you see when you're young and impressionable. For me, that was in the mid-1990s, when I saw things like the cover of "Bleach" and the Black Album tour video, which features stills and video of people head banging. Then there was Wayne's World and the "Bohemian Rhapsody" sequence - four metalheads in a car completely rocking out to Queen.
   
   Speaking of that scene, for some reason, the fashion among the kids with the larger bar mitzvahs was to have not only DJ-ed after parties, but lip sync contests at those parties. Thanks to the time limits on the songs, my friends Jeff, Alan and I chose to enter one of those lip sync contests by playing "Bohemian Rhapsody" right from that "head banging" bridge to the end and won because nothing slays a crowd like a group of thirteen-year-olds doing their best whip imitations with their skulls.
   
   With a background like that, there was no way I wasn't growing my hair so I could whip it around whenever possible.
   
   
2. The music itself demands you do something ridiculous with your body. Like those old movies about rock and roll where the repressed parents would feel like they were possessed because the back beat in the music made them want to dance, a good metal beat makes you want to move something, hit something, do something in time to the music. Pinebox was the first set last night and I blew my neck's load watching them play. For the rest of the night, there was no head banging, but the rhythm to move was so intense that I had to do something - so I ended up bruising my hand a bit by pounding it against a pillar.
   

So, let's sum up. Desire to head bang: ingrained enjoyment stemming from exposure during an impressionable youth, combined with frequent exposure to extreme music whose rhythm demands extreme responses from the body. And there you have it.