Black Label Society -- 'Skullage' CD/DVD [review]

Black Label Society - Skullage
Eagle Records (4/21/09)
Metal

Skullage is the much-warranted career retrospective for one of metal’s living guitar gods, Zakk Wylde. The set offers up a glimpse of 12 years of recording; from the once-obscure Pride and Glory days (Wylde’s first band which recorded its only album in 1994) all the way through to BLS’s 2006 release Shot to Hell, there’s a little bit of everything on here.

Presented in chronological order, the album is a compendium of riffs, metal anthems and melancholic bliss. It opens with Pride and Glory’s “Machine Gun Man” and immediately shifts gears into “Dead As Yesterday” (off Wylde’s solo offering Book of Shadows, which featured material much different from the usual BLS fair).

It’s a good set, to be sure, though it does seem to lean a little heavily on the later, more popular releases—three songs from The Blessed Hellride (“Doomsday Jesus”, “Stillborn” and “Won’t Find it Here”) and Mafia (“In This River”, “Fire it Up” and “Suicide Messiah”)—and only touches on the oft-overlooked 1919 Eternal (“Bleed for Me”) or the lesser-received Shot to Hell (“New Religion”). Skipped entirely is the acoustic Hangover Music, Vol. 6 and the BLS debut Sonic Brew. However, the acoustic set “Slightly Amped”, recorded back on the Blessed Hellride promotional tour, is on here, and it does feature a killer version of “Spoke in the Wheel” (off the aforementioned Sonic Brew) so... perhaps that was a two-birds-one-stone type of deal.

Skullage is also available with a DVD set, which features a bunch of live footage, a handful of music videos, the aforementioned “Slightly Amped” set, and a half-hour piece with Wylde working out, goofing off, jamming and talking about the inspiration for some of his songs. Of note is an insane version of "Spoke in the Wheel" (which looks like it was recorded on the Mafia tour), the "In This River" video and some fun footage of Wylde messing around with the late Dimebag Darrell (talking about the "In This River" video and inspiration during an interview).

The set, on the whole, is killer, and metal fans really can’t miss with Wylde, but die-hards will miss a couple of things. With what was presented on the accompanying DVD, it would have been easy to omit songs like “Fire it Up” or “Won’t Find it Here” to include stuff like “Battering Ram”, Wylde’s sick version of “America the Beautiful”, his insane cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “I Never Dreamed” or another track off of Book of Shadows for the CD side of things.

Nonetheless, Skullage is a must-have for BLS fans and metal-heads in general.

Dragonforce -- 'Ultra Beatdown' [review]

DragonForce - Ultra Beatdown
Roadrunner Records (8/26/08)
Metal

If melodic, melodramatic power metal is what you crave, these days it seems no band is quite as over-the-top as DragonForce. Ultra Beatdown is a worthy follow-up to the goliath that was Inhuman Rampage, but while the band continues to put its technical prowess on full display, the songwriting this time around is a little too pedestrian.

Given the title and album art (including a pixelated group shot on the back of the case), one might look for some sort of overriding theme on the album, but apart from the keyboards being much better incorporated on most of the songs, and a slight electronic edge to a couple of moments, this is vintage DragonForce. Every song is completely epic—turgid with riffs and solos and manic drumming and glorious, overblown instrumentation. And every song clocks in around seven or eight minutes in length, apart from the token (albeit fairly forced on this outing) ballad “A Flame for Freedom” (at a little over five-minutes) and the bludgeoning six-minute “Reasons to Live”, which features some fantastically cheesy, inspirational group-sings and a nice keyboard solo.

That aforementioned electronic tinge rears its head on “The Fire Still Burns”, which features plenty of mind-bending guitar solos dancing around some impressive machine-gun drumming that somehow manages to never let up.

There’s no point to go through every track, as the basic DragonForce formula is to put together dramatic, epic power metal tracks with an overabundance of intricate guitar play. Add to that a wealth of drum work and top it all off with soaring, saccharine lyrics. What the band does manage to do better on this album is make total songs. For some reason a fair portion of Inhuman felt like three-minute songs with four-minutes of instrumentation tacked on for good measure. It’s still metal, but not so loud as to alienate fans of good music, either. In fact, if anything, it’s the length of the songs that will push non-metal fans away.

Sure, in the end it’s all cheesy as hell, and you’ll either love it or hate it, but if you like an epic scope to your metal and enjoy listening to musicians show-off their skills, then DragonForce is for you. Ultra Beatdown isn’t the band’s best, but you can’t go wrong with any of the catalogue.