Päle Rider puts the head back into headbanging
Time again to show my age with one of those “you kids get off my lawn” moments. When I was a teenager, my musical tastes, as they are now, were quite varied. I don’t know if I ever qualified as a full-blown metalhead (I never got my membership card and it’s hard to headbang with a mullet) but I was a fan.
Thing is, in my day, there was one kind of heavy metal music. It was called heavy metal, and we liked it that way.
Metal was loud, and mean, and had the ability to make a pimply fourteen-year-old feel like he could take on the world. Guitar players were god-like figures. There were giants in those days. Good stuff. When you said, “I love me some heavy metal,” people knew what you were talking about.
Then came hair metal, which still purported to be loud and mean, but was awash in bouffant hair-dos and more make-up than Tammy Faye Baker. It was hard to take it seriously. Before you could say Hüsker Don’t, there was speed metal, thrash metal, rap metal, nu metal, black metal, death metal, Olympic medal, those meddling kids, and so many subgenres that it was impossible to keep up with. My interests turned elsewhere as it seemed the heavy metal I grew up with was no more.
At least that’s what I thought, until my old pal Charlie Shelton, long acknowledged as one of the premier badass guitar players in the area, called me up and said, “Hey, I have this new band, would you like to hear our album?” An album’s worth of tunes later, I learned that old school heavy metal, the stuff of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motörhead, Iron Maiden, and more, is BACK!
Päle Rider, featuring the talents of Matt Thompson, Charlie Shelton, Brent Joly, and Scott McMasters, is as bone rattling, devil horn, old school heavy metal as it comes. With raging power chords, furious double-bass drums, throbbing bass lines and gorgeous, soaring, melodic lead lines, it’s enough to make a fellow dig out his patched denim vest, fingerless gloves and spiked wristbands.
Like all great metal albums, it opens with a short, blistering instrumental (“Crucible”) before jumping headlong into “Red Flagged”. With Dickinson-esque vocals and savage guitar, the opening strains of the tune prompt a loud, lusty exclamation that cannot be printed here.
Though it hardly seems possible, the next track, “Fury of Apollo”, goes even heavier, an unstoppable wall of sound to quicken the pulse and make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
“Tennessee Woman” is a lead guitar masterpiece, evincing styles that range from Yngwie to blues, and covering all the relevant ground in between. Coming in at 7:12, there plenty of space to shift gears, and the song does, several times, but never in a way that is a jarring or “too many notes”.
It’s a tour de force illustrating the broad palette of techniques the genre was built on. If rock and roll traces its history to the blues, all future incarnations of metal trace their lineage back to music like this.
The album finishes off with “Snake Charmer” and “Mothership”, two more driving songs that evoke the image of a thousand fists simultaneously pumping the air in time to the thundering drums.
Loud, raw, mean, but never simplistic, the album and the band demonstrate what fans have always known, that a genre often maligned in pop culture as being crude and basic is anything but.
There is a high level of musicianship here and technical skill that dwarfs what a lot of other bands are doing. That it manages to do so while simultaneously imparting a feeling of invincibility to the listener is the heart and soul of heavy metal. There are giants in these days, and they are Päle Rider.
The eponymous album is available on Spotify now. Have a listen, but unless you have another job lined up, probably best to wait until after that important call from the boss.
Otherwise you may find yourself expressing your work frustrations in a parade of colorful metaphors that, while ultimately satisfying, may necessitate updating the old résumé.