Happy 1986, Part 1

And Happy New Year! It's 1986 in the Year-a-Month project, and there are so many albums needed to flesh out my collection that I decided to split 1986 into two separate months to control my costs. 1986 is a tough year, because so many hard-rock bands from the 1970s and early 1980s started selling out and turning into pop-rock bands (I'm looking at you, Ted Nugent).

 Black Sabbath: Seventh Star - Wikipedia says that this album was a major, intentional departure from the classic Sabbath sound. As usual, Wikipedia is absolutely right. I like the change of pace, though. The style is a lot more groove-metal than previous Sabbath albums, and by using a (yet another) different lead singer - in this case Glenn Hughes - it lets Sabbath get away with sounding like an entirely different band. Sort of a vacation from themselves.

Joe Satriani: Not of This Earth - This one was a tough decision, because some the track previews were pretty promising. But overall it was a little too electronica-ish for me, and I decided with all the other music that needed buying this month, I could afford to miss it. Does anyone else think he looks a lot like Adam Sandler in this photo?

Judas Priest: Turbo - In the spring of 1989, I was finishing up my freshman year of college, and my school had a compressed-schedule "Spring Term" in which students took only a single class, but that class was a full day every day for a month. Students in other majors went cool places like France or the Galapagos, but I opted to take a 400-level Compiler Construction class. We were using Turbo C to build our compilers, and every time I invoked the "turbo" command on my development machine, I caught myself humming the title song to this album. I did very little partying that term.

 Motorhead: Orgasmatron - This might get me blasted by die-hard Motorhead fans, but bear with me. I'm starting to notice that all Motorhead songs pretty much sound the same. Normally I would slam a band for this transgression (I'm looking at you, AC/DC). But for some reason I love the way Lemmy belts these songs out like he's just finished vomiting up the pills he popped a few minutes ago, and is thinking about popping some more.

Ozzy Osbourne: The Ultimate Sin - Ozzy is not the most exciting heavy metal act in the world, but this is a solid album. He seems to be a little more in the game than the last one, and I caught myself tapping my foot from time to time, which is more than I could say for Bark At The Moon.

Ted Nugent: Little Miss Dangerous - As alluded to above, I have very little patience for Ted these days. It only took a few samples sporting electronic drums and prominent keyboards from this album to make me move on. Nugent's next album comes in 1988, and we'll see what he's up to then.



Next month I will conclude 1986 with Accept, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, and a bonus catch-up Motorhead.