MEGADETH – SWEATING BULLETS (CAPITOL)
I genuinely believe that you cannot take seriously the opinion of anybody on guitar music unless they had a metal phase. Of course it is essential that a person grow out of such music but the appreciation and adulation for playing that is learned during such a state of enjoyment will remain constant and essential for maintaining enthusiasm for the form.
Megadeth were never really a band I jumped up and down for. I realised early on that Mustaine was a has-been and beyond the great band name he inhabited, on the whole his produce was pretty stock.
“Sweating Bullets” was a single that I pretty much bought by accident, purchased with one on the b-sides and extra tracks. The song represented something of departure for Megadeth with a wacky, almost slow paced delivery that saw Mustaine deliver his vocals in a manner he probably thought in similar style to Tom Waits. Not quite. The track actually reminds me of something you might have heard on The Muppets, which, considering a few years later there was a brief indie movement called “Fraggle Rock”, perhaps saw them ahead of the game. Or did I just imagine that genre/subgenre?
Lifted from the album Countdown To Extinction, the big song off that record was always “Symphony Of Destruction” which here was represented twice in the form of a live version and an industrial “Gristle Edit Mix” reworked by Trent Reznor. I have to concede that this song still sounds pretty decent to me, albeit on a regressive level. Obviously the end of world lyrics sound silly to an adult but the manner in which the piece drops in the chorus is genuinely symphonic. The remix is very noticeable as being Reznor although it is mainly kept to feeble distortion and sounding like sparklers during the chorus. This was just before all hell broke out with industrial rock and it mutated into Goth techno. Still it would have been a nice payday for Reznor.
The other track is a live version of “Countdown To Extinction” which is pretty decent if not devastating.
Bless ‘em they tried.
Thesaurus moment: ginger.
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