After assuring their fans that they were alive and kicking with Jason Newsted on the bass, the remaining three horsemen plus newkid went into the studio with Flemming Rasmussen for the first five months of 1988 to record the successor to Master of Puppets. What came out was something that people either considered a great album, more conceptual and a bit speedier than the prior, or a bloated, badly produced example of a big band getting too big. Either way, it stands as an interesting historical note, because it’s after Cliff Burton, the major driving force of the band’s early career, had died, and it’s right before the band decided to trade in metal for hard rock and go to producer Bob Rock for their self-titled black album, which many new fans consider the real start to their career.

First off, AJFA is long. It’s 65 minutes and only 9 songs, with only two of them being under the six minute mark, and two of them landing just short of the ten minute mark. Everyone’s first comment about this album is that things are just too damn long, and I’d agree. Most of the songs have an extra repetition of the chorus or an extra verse that grates on my nerves, and I think if I had a good copy of the master tapes and Protools, I could probably turn out a 45-minute remix that would be just as strong as the original. But maybe that’s just me.

This album has a really eerie, sinister tone to it. Many think it’s thin, and I guess it is in parts. The biggest thing to me is that Kirk Hammett’s guitar solos and the general composition of most songs show that he’s become a much more modal player, probably based on his training with Joe Satriani. Solos go from sounding vaguely Egyptian to Mid-eastern to minor and eerie, instead of the standard blues-box licks he used on Kill ‘Em All. This trickles down into the songs a bit, changing structures and sound to be much more unique. The guitars in general are also layered and deeper than they were in the early days, and it makes the album more progressive than just straightforward thrash.

The songs on the album mostly have to do with injustice in some way or another. The title cut, which sprawls out to 9:44, talks about the loss of justice in society, in pretty simple terms. Compare that to the opening track, “Blackened,” which describes a biblical end to the world due to man’s woes. With two exceptions, most of the songs are fairly interchangeable in theme. Although they are musically different and offer varying solos, it would have been hard for me, even in 1988, to distinguish between “The Frayed Ends of Sanity” and, say, “Eye of the Beholder” without checking the liner notes first.

As far as those other two songs, one is “To Live Is to Die,” an almost-ten minute instrumental that’s built up upon a little fragment of poetry left behind by Cliff Burton. The song builds up layer after layer of creepy guitar sound by Hammett and Hetfield, with overlays of distortion and signal processing, quickly dropping into clean acoustic in places and then coming back to establish new themes. Halfway through, someone (who? Not sure…) reads the Burton poetry. The song continues on the tradition of “Orion,” an instrumental on their last album, while leaving tribute to Burton. It’s not as good of a number as “Orion,” but it’s still awesome. I remember many a night listening to this in my car alone as I drove through the darkness, and always loved it for the eerie mood it produced.

The big song on this album is “One.” It’s based on the Dalton Trumbo book Johnny Got His Gun, an anti-war novel about a man in World War I who is hit by a shell blast and loses his arms, legs, and all senses. Many people think it’s about Vietnam, and I’m sure there are Metallica fans dumb enough to now think it was written about Iraq, but you should probably hunt down the book and read it at some point. The song starts out slow with clean guitars, then breaks into more of a power ballad, as the soldier pleads for help. Later in the song, as he realizes he’s trapped forever in his comatose body, he wants to die, and the song speeds up to a frenzy of double-bass and shredding guitar solos. It’s an excellent composition, although I’m still unsure as to how it exactly became a big hit. After years of shunning MTV, the band created a video using live performance in a loft-warehouse sort of space intercut with pieces of the movie based on the Trumbo book.

The most interesting thing to me about going back to this album is to reverse-engineer some of what happened. I listen to pieces of “Harvester of Sorrow” and hear that black album, and think that if this was produced just a little bit differently, it would have ended up one of the tracks there. What if Bob Rock had been hired at this point instead of an album later? What would have survived? What would have changed? I also look at something like “To Live Is to Die” and see how much it tries to hang on to the legacy of Cliff Burton. And I try to listen to any bass by pre-Metallica Jason Newsted, and imagine what this album would have been like if he were allowed to actually play. How did this happen? I imagine a weepy Lars Ulrich in the studio, crying “Cliff just died! Dammit, turn down the bass, Flemming!” and the producer just caving in to his demands. “I can’t cut out the 17th chorus-verse-repeat! Cliff died!” And of course, I try to imagine what this album would have been like with Cliff alive, how songs like “One” would have had even more intensity with his bass, and how lamer numbers like “Dyers Eve” would have been more aggressive with his musicwriting behind them.

Overall, this is a decent album. I’m biased because I listened to it so much in 1988 and 1989, so much that my tape of it is completely worn clean of any lettering on either side. But after about 1989, I pretty much completely forgot about this album for 15 years, which should also tell you it’s not a real contender. Maybe with shorter songs… maybe with better production… maybe with more bass… I don’t know. It’s still an interesting look back, and unfortunately, it’s also the last entry for the band before they became hard rock dandy boys.

Rating: 8

This four-song EP was released in 1988 after Satriani’s big breakthrough Surfing With the Alien, and was largely a keep-alive of tracks from the tour, with a single studio number. At only 22 minutes, it’s not a high-value purchase, but it was the first look at Joe’s live work, and has a great new song on it, too.

The live tracks are okay, nothing special. What really got me about that is that I read a review in an issue of Guitar Player or whatever, and Satriani basically admitted that he had no idea how he could take such a crazy studio album on the road. But he got Stu Hamm and Jonathan Mover, and made it happen. “Ice Nine” sounds pretty close to the album, with little trills and frills to keep it interesting. “Memories” starts with a totally solo piece that is very ambient and bluesy, just him noodling around and playing with his tone, before he catches the song by it’s first little riff. The song takes off and seems to have more tempo than the studio version, although everything’s just as precise. At the end of the nine-minute performance, he gets into a jammy little improv breakdown before closing it up, which is pretty sweet. They finish with “Hordes of Locusts,” which is an odd choice for a closer, but it’s cool that they can do something that intricate live.

To me, this album is memorable for a few reasons. One, I had been a fan of Satriani’s since his first album, and I remember getting a flexi-disc (which I still have, somewhere…) that contained a radical arpeggio bit that segued into a song with an absolutely crushing melody played on a chorus pedal. About a year later, I picked up this CD, and found that very same song, “The Crush of Love,” as the first track! The CD sounded much better than the floppy plastic thing did on my cheap turntable, balanced by a bunch of pennies I put on the face to keep the needle from hopping. It’s a very cool little track, and it has no great heroics as far as the fretwork goes, but just a really hip sounding guitar part, the kind of thing I could listen to on repeat for an hour at a time. And that’s what Satriani is all about; a stellar tone, pretty good fingerwork, but just an overall melodic hook that totally brings you in.

Oh yeah, I skipped school the day that album came out. There was a fire drill before first hour, and the firemen were telling everyone to get the fuck out, so I left and didn’t come back. I was going to drive to Chicago and hang out for the day, but I chickened out, went to University Park Mall in South Bend, and picked up the album at the Camelot records. I remember listening to it in awe, maybe three times in a row on my car deck, before I slept in a Sears parking lot for two hours and then went to the crap pizza store in the mall for a slice.

This album is neither a stellar collection of b-side marketing or a formidable live EP, but the one studio song pretty much made the purchase price for me. Call me a sucker, but I really do enjoy this CD.

Rating: 8

When I was in college, I dated a girl who was probably a bigger Queensryche fan than me. And when listening to a snippet of their music, she’d sometimes say things like “Oh, that’s such a Chris song,” and roll her eyes, apparently bemoaning the songwriting ability of guitarist Chris DeGarmo. The habit made me realize that up until that point, I’d never even considered how the power structure within the band operated. Queensryche has two guitar players, who initially formed the band, but they are usually both referred to as “lead/rhythm guitar” and without studying some videos or going to a bunch of live shows, it’s not apparent who’s taking what solos. Contrast that with a band like Guns N’ Roses, where you know Slash plays the lead and Izzy’s on the rhythm guitar. So after almost ten years of not thinking about it, I wondered, who was the driving force behind the band? Who was in charge? Was Geoff Tate the ringleader, or just the guy brought in by the real brains of the band to front them? Who was the John and Paul, and who was the Ringo?

All of that was answered when DeGarmo left the band in 1998. The remaining members jumped from the then-bankrupt EMI to Atlantic, adding Kelly Gray, a former bandmate of Geoff Tate’s from his old band Myth. They quickly went back to the studio for their new release, Q2K. I initially moaned at the news of the new album name, because Dan Quayle used the same slogan for his 2000 Presidential campaign (which, thankfully, died quickly.) And the album title happened during the surge of Y2K paranoia, when every other spam in my mailbox was about Y2K radio flashlights and Y2K survival food and Y2K fallout shelter plans and Y2K asbestos-lined condoms with emergency first-aid instructions written on every package.

I have to say that Q2K is the beginning of the end for me and my love for this band, and I don’t think I’m alone in this conclusion. The band took a serious turn with this mid-paced collection of eleven songs. Prior to this album, every Queensryche album had a mix of songs. For every slow-paced song like “London,” there was a faster-paced rocker, like “NM156.” Making a good album is like making a good can of mixed nuts; if you have no almonds or honey-roasted peanuts, and 90% of the nuts are those crappy tasteless ones they use to pad out the mixed nuts combination to make it cheaper, it’s not any good. And with Q2K, you’ve got a lot of those crappy mixed nuts.

What I mean is, most of the songs sound about the same here. Play a random five seconds of “Beside You” or “One Life” or “When The Rain Comes,” and it’s basically the same mid-paced, contemporary, almost easy-listening smooth rock music. Radio pros used to call this stuff MOR, for Middle of Road, and now I think they call it AAA, or Adult Album Alternative, to basically mean a wussier version of AOR that doesn’t rock and is suitable to play in elevators and dentist’s offices. It’s like it’s aspiring to be the Singles soundtrack. I’m not saying any of these songs are horrible; some of them are vaguely emotional or contain some interesting hooks. It’s just that they all sound roughly the same. WIthout DeGarmo to mix up the writing, it’s a very homogenized approach.

The problem is, there are too many of these mellow songs, and no rockers. They try, with “Burning Man” and “Breakdown,” but both are essentially boring attempts at it. And they put both of these songs back-to-back, which also makes no sense in the dynamics of the thing. “Breakdown” was their attempt at a single and I think it got a video, but it’s pretty flat attempt at a song. This is where the Chris song belonged, and there wasn’t one. And aside from the lack of his writing, there’s no conceptual or story-driven component to the album. That isn’t needed - their last album to do this was Mindcrime, and they had their share of decent albums since then.

The band has an almost-trademark habit of capping the end of an album with a longer, slower, but more powerful number, and they do that here with “The Right Side of My Mind”. It’s got a lot of force wrapped up in a mellower package, and builds and builds before it peaks and concludes the album. This is executed well, which makes me think it’s a Geoff Tate thing, but without an entire album of differing numbers before it, this doesn’t do much good.

I got this album, tried to listen to it for about six months, and then forgot about it entirely. When I switched over to iPod, I don’t even think I added this to iTunes for years, so it sat untouched in my collection of CDs I never used. Despite the fact that this album never spent any extended time in my current play cycle, I have two very distinct memories of it. I’ll mention them both, with the caveat that memories of an album don’t affect my rating as much as the actual contents of an album, something that other reviewers consider in the intrinsic value of an album.

Anyway, the first is that I bought this album the day it came out at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, immediately after I had a job interview in the same building. I interviewed at Juno Online, and ended up getting the job, working in the BMG building for almost two years, and spending many a long lunch hour wandering around the Virgin store, feeding my music addiction. And when I bought the CD that day, Cheap Trick happened to be playing a gig at the bookstore, which was surreal because this band I thought was bigger than life when I was a kid was setting up their amps in a room about as big as my apartment, playing for two dozen people. So there’s a strange connection in that whenever I think back to those two years I worked in Times Square, or any time I returned to that Virgin store (or any Virgin store), I always thought back to this album.

The other memory I have of _Q2K_is that I had a job interview the week after I bought it (I think I hadn’t yet got an offer on the Juno thing, and was frantically interviewing at every dot-com-bubble-funded e-sweatshop in the book), and listened to the album three or four times on my Minidisc player on the way there and back. That interview was in the World Trade Center, and was almost exactly a year before 9/11. So that’s a weird connection for me.

Despite those memories, there’s not much I can say about this below-average effort. They’ve done better albums since, but not by much.

Rating: 5

If you’re not up on your extended Frank Zappa lineage, you might not know anything about this Cincinnati-based trio. I’m probably fucking this up, but I think the origins go like this: there was a band called the Raisins, and they recorded an album that was produced by former Zappa guitarrist Adrian Belew. Then they all got together and formed a Chicinatti-based band called The Bears. After two albums and a few years of touring, the band split up and Belew went solo. But the core trio of the band stayed together and called themselves the Psychodots. They also, oddly enough, toured with Belew, both opening for him and serving as his backing band. I saw them on that tour in ‘94, and despite the fact that my friend Steve Simms is the biggest Zappa fanatic ever, therefore being huge fans of these guys too, I’d never heard note one of them until this show. I was so blown away, I bought the Blotter CD and then played it 20,000 times over the course of that summer.

First, Blotter is not a real album; it’s a 6-song compilation containing tracks from their first two albums. It’s just a simple clear slipcase with a photocopied track listing in it, nothing fancy there. On the contrary, this music is incredibly clear and present, the kind of production that reminded me of when everyone was analog and then bands like Rush suddenly went digital. Despite the fact that the trio is just a bass-drum-guitar group, there’s a lot of thick sound here. Part of this comes from the fact that vocalist/axeman Rob Fetters uses one of those Roland MIDI pickup systems that drives an external synth. I’d always heard horror stories of these things, but I saw the man do it live, and he effortlessly went from playing keyboard intros to slamming through guitar solos with no problems at all. Also, bassist Bob Nyswonger doesn’t just pluck a note here or there with a pick and then count to four; he plays the bass more like a guitar, even taking solos and pulling out chords when the need arises.

It’s hard to describe ‘Dots music, other than to say it’s not much like the twice-removed math-rock that you’d expect from a distant cousin on the Zappa family tree. It’s much more singer-songwriter oriented, with strong guitar parts, clean synth bits, and a tight sound overall. Songs like the opening “Moaner” are almost straightforward power-pop, while stuff like “Big Love Now” build strong anthems with harmonized and powerful vocals. I remember thinking in 1994 that these songs sounded so NEW, and it’s weird that over a decade later, they still sound fresh. The six-song sampler ends too fast, but I’ve also kept it on repeat a dozen times with no boredom. It’s very catchy stuff from an underappreciated Ohio band. I’ll have to hunt down their other albums and see it they also hold up. They’ve since been active and have some new material too, that I’m downloading from iTunes as we speak…

Rating: 8

If you ask many music fans what the best concept album ever is, they will all answer 2112. This is because they’re stupid. I’m not saying that this is a bad album; I’m saying that it’s not a concept album. It contains one really long concept song on the A-side, and a bunch of useless filler on the B-side. And that mental disconnect is the difference between an album that everyone remembers as really great and an album that is really great.

Okay, so this album is supposed to be a big deal, because Rush put out a lot of nerdy Tolkein-rock on their first three (well, second and third) albums, and this is the one that got people to go to the record store and put down their cash. It’s arguable whether or not this album or the following All the World’s a Stage pushed their work out there more, since the live album carried these songs a bit more. But either way, this is the biggest of the first “set” of Rush albums, and it’s one that everyone wants in their collection.

I don’t need to say much about the Orwellian 2112 song. It’s 20:33 of rock opera that has some quiet moments, some other decent songwriting, and ends in a huge finale of dueling guitar and bass and a booming robot voice proclaiming “ATTENTION ALL PLANETS OF THE SOLAR FEDERATION: WE HAVE ASSUMED CONTROL.” Even though their record company tried to steer them away from writing another giant suite of conceptual music (on the heels of Caress of Steel which was a huge commercial failure), the band decided to belt out this giant story of a totalitarian society in the future that bans music and art. Meanwhile, a dude discovers an old guitar, learns how to play it (in just over three minutes, which is part III of the song), and then presents it to his masters, who smash it. The guy go hides in a cave and offs himself. The song ends with a giant space battle and an ambiguous ending, where either the high priests of the new order destroy everything and assume control, or some new power overthrows the priests and assumes control. (We don’t know which, although I’m sure I will get a few emails from people saying what the real meaning is supposed to be.)

Chief lyricist Neil Peart was heavily influenced by the Ayn Rand book Anthem for this story, although he later claims he didn’t realize how much he ripped off her story until he looked back at it later. Either way, he thanks her in the liner notes. Oddly enough, the band does another song, “Anthem,” also based on Rand’s work. And years later, the movie Footloose was based on the main premise of “2112.” (Okay, it wasn’t.)

“2112” is a cool bit, but it’s also a curse, because you don’t want to be forced to play a huge cumbersome twenty-minute piece during every one of your live sets. And decades later, when they pulled this out of the chest and reintroduced a shorter version to live shows, Geddy Lee could no longer hit all of his older shrieking high notes, requiring a pitch shift downward that made it all sound weird. Still, good stuff and pretty much a decent ref back to 1976 for all of us.

The rest of the album doesn’t hold up well at all. “Something for Nothing” is a straight-up rocker that still finds its way into modern setlists. “A Passage to Bangkok,” a little ballad written about smoking hash, probably seemed like all the rage back in ‘76, but the band tried to later wash its hands of it during the Reagan-era “just say no” years, even deleting it from a live album when it got re-released to CD. “Lessons” is marginal (and one of few songs where Lifeson wrote the lyrics instead of Peart), and “Tears” is straight-up weepy (with lyrics by Geddy.) “The Twilight Zone” takes the mark for the strangest little song they ever released. The little romp through a handful of Rod Serling-hosted horror episodes was filller written at the last minute while the band was in the studio, something they admit used to happen on each of their albums. Aside from the titular cut, if they released this CD with none of the other tracks except maybe “Something for Nothing” and maybe padded it with live stuff, I’m not sure anyone will notice.

This is an interesting album for historical reasons, but it’s not a regular in my playlist. “2112” has been redone at least twice on live albums, plus any boots you might have, and they are all much more listenable as far as the other tracks before and after. Buy this if you’re a completist (and get the gold disc if you’re a completist with a lot of cash) but focus on the later albums if you’re on a budget.

Rating: 7.5