Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Thunderstick
Label: Thunderstick Productions
Release: 2017
Length: 50:42
Rating: 4/5
Last year saw the release of yet another record tied to the NWOBHM days, and no old-school metal devotee should let it slip past. The new album was recorded by Barry Graham Purkis. That name doesn’t say much on its own, unless you’re a serious connoisseur of old British metal or you connect it with the nickname Thunderstick. Yes, Thunderstick. Isn’t he the guy who played a hugely important role in the early career of metal giants Iron Maiden and also left his mark on classic Samson records? He is, and then some. Barry backed up his alter ego »Thunderstick« with full-on stage theatrics. Up there he was masked as a demon, and at gigs his drums sat inside a cage. That way he came across as a kind of sonic terrorist and beast, especially once you added his savage drumming on top.
Later on, after Samson, Thunderstick formed a band of the same name, with a female singer always handling the lead vocals. That lasted just five years, until 1987. The marathon break that followed only ended last year. So a full thirty years passed before Thunderstick rose from the dead and finally put out a new album last year, »Something Wicked This Way Comes«.
What’s so special about this album? It was recorded last year, yet it sounds like it was recorded in 1979. That’s its main draw. Everything you hear on it works 100% authentically, with no programming whatsoever and no after-the-fact sonic touch-ups. From the drums to the vocals, bass lines and guitar phrases. It all works in a very primal, “proto” way (another fitting word is “primitive”, meaning原 raw and original). The songs, with Lucy V’s punk-style vocals, lock brilliantly into the very phrasing and fabric of the compositions, and the music delivered by the album’s ten tracks is a one-of-a-kind musical jigsaw lost in time and space. It blasts you back to the turn of the seventies into the eighties. Picture it. Hard rock was then “built” by bands like UFO, Rainbow, Whitesnake, Deep Purple, Status Quo, The Who… then NWOBHM hit, drawing inspiration on one side from the classic hard rock school and on the other from the punk boom, and so set up the framework for European metal. On »Something Wicked This Way Comes« you get the elements of the hardened original school of metal as the NWOBHM movement understood it, sharply crossed with garage grime and the untamed note of rebellion from the then red-hot, fresh-faced punk phenomenon. There are plenty of old hard rock influences too, since the songs carry an incredibly musical touch in their composing, which shows most in the multi-part vocal harmonies you can find in almost every chorus melody. A track like Blackwing calls up Uriah Heep and The Sweet in the chorus, while at the same time being delivered as a peculiar blend of early metal and the first era of punk. All in all, »Something Wicked This Way Comes« is a record that, in an incredibly effective way, reconnects not just with the work Thunderstick the band put out in the eighties, but with the whole era of the NWOBHM phenomenon.
Thunderstick was deeply shaken by the death of the band’s former singer Jodee Valentine, who died barely 55 years old in the period before this album was made. As he put it himself, that tragic event fired him up even more to get down to recording it.
Today the album sounds as if it consists of ten very sloppily played demo recordings. Production-wise, it has a raw, unpolished sound and 100% authentic liveliness, since the whole album was recorded and played in the studio like a live performance. No after-the-fact polishing, no touch-ups, no fixes. A completely analog sound. It simply doesn’t get more genuine than this these days. When you listen to Thunderstick’s drumming, it’s striking to realize that the same rhythm can wobble in speed. That is, at moments it’s played a little slower, then a little faster again. So you can tell the drumming isn’t perfectly even, which means Thunderstick didn’t use a metronome and that he played and recorded everything (band included) in a single take. The same goes for how hard he hits the skins. Sometimes a run of consecutive hits is louder and the run that follows fades out quieter. In other words, no fixes. The authenticity of the performance is kept 100% intact.
Some of the songs on this album are actually of older origin but the band never played them live until now, while others were created and composed strictly to appear on this record. Yet there’s really no difference between them (in vibe, composition or sound). They all feel as if they were played and written back in 1979. »Something Wicked This Way Comes« is thus an album that will sweeten the moments of retro-nostalgics who lived through their golden years of rebellion and teenagehood in the late seventies and early eighties! An old retro metal rhapsody and romance that’s hard to come close to these days. The recording techniques Thunderstick and his crew used on this album must surely have been the same as 35 years ago (and more).
Line-up
Lucy V – vocals
Martin Shellard – guitar
Kandy Killford – guitar
Rex Thunderbolt – bass guitar
Thunderstick – drums
Production
Thunderstick
Tracklist
01. Dark Night Black Light
02. Don’t Touch I’ll Scream
03. Go Sleep With The Enemy (I Dare Ya)
04. The Shining
05. Encumbrance
06. Fly ‘N’ Mighty
07. Lights (Take Me Away)
08. Blackwing
09. Thunder Thunder ’17
10. I Close My Eyes
