By Jon Fine
Guitarists who create heaviness all by themselves, through strategic riffing and thick tone, are more rare. Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi is one of them. Jimmy Page is not, but with Bonham and bassist John Paul Jones behind him he may have recognized that he could concentrate on expanding Led Zeppelin’s tonal colors without costing the band a single ounce of weight. AC/DC is heavy, and Angus Young’s lead guitar accentuates the band’s raw physical thrust–but his lines are not heavy without Phil Rudd behind the drums.
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Metal’s vocal styles are more single-mindedly aimed at expressing extreme moods than hard rock’s. Metal is the pinched falsetto wail of Rob Halford, the tight growl of James Hetfield and his legions of imitators, the subsonic Cookie Monster gargle of present-day black- and death-metal singers. Metal rhythm sections are exemplified by double-kick drum styles popularized by the 80s speed-metal bands. It is a very rare drummer who can coax a groove from such hyperactive beats, especially since Dave Lombardo quit Slayer. Metal is about impact, not sensuality; it has no hips. It’s about the glory of fucking shit up, not the glory of fucking.
There were period grotesqueries, like Budgie, whose appeal was in part an almost willful badness. They achieved posthumous fame when Metallica covered two of their songs, but they mostly deserve recognition for how their records pit first-rate ideas in desperate, losing battles against harebrained notions and an audible ineptitude that persisted well into their career. And some bands had the misfortune of being born in the wrong place, like Australia’s Buffalo, who failed to win a European or American label for their best work.
Every well-traveled hard-rock loner-stoner wishes he’d made this record. Holden’s name is typically preceded by “Blue Cheer guitarist,” but the characterization is a bit of a stretch. He appears only on half their third album, New! Improved! Holden went through several bands in the 60s, from the garagey Sons of Adam to the heavy psychedelic act Savage Resurrection, on whose album he’s mysteriously identified as “Randy Hammond.” Shortly after his stint in Blue Cheer, Holden recorded this masterpiece with drummer Chris Lockheed, playing bass as well as guitar; shortly after that he moved to Hawaii and faded away. The legend is that he didn’t even know Population II had come out until some collectors tracked him down a couple decades later to tell him the album traded hands for steep sums. The sleeve shot of Holden and Lockheed dwarfed by enough speaker stacks for a few Woodstocks’ worth of bands is appropriate–Population II has a wondrous, cavernous vibe. It has the feel of a lone (albeit highly amplified) voice wailing in the wilderness, as if Holden lived in an enormous cave and had to invent rock music to fill all that dead space. Thirty years later there are still few albums that fill a room quite like it.
High Tide Sea Shanties
Original release: Mercury, 1970
