Dust - Suicide

I've never quite figured out why so many bands write about suicide.  Ozzy had "Suicide Solution", Metallica had "Fade to Black", Soundgarden had "Like Suicide", Silverchair had to throw in "Suicidal Dream" in what was otherwise a really great album, and the list can go on and on.

I think this is one of the dark sides of rock; suicide.  Is the rigors of being in a band that bad?

Dust

Anyways, I was surfing youtube looking for Blue Cheer songs and I stumbled across Dust. 

I had never heard of this band before, but their album cover for the second album, Hard Attack, features three vikings in the midst of battle.  Pretty cool image if you are into fantasy album covers.

The song I found by Dust is "Suicide".  I'm by no means pleased with the name's song and I haven't even paid attention to the lyrics, but the music is great!  It's very fresh.  They sound like early, early metal, and they weren't British, like Sabbath, they were American!!!

Their drummer later joined The Ramones.

Here is the band's bio, copied straight from wikipedia:

Dust was formed in the late 1960s by Richie Wise and two teenagers, Kenny Aaronson and Marc Bell. Additionally, Kenny Kerner wrote the group's lyrics, and acted as their producer and manager. Their debut album was released on Kama Sutra Records in 1971, and was followed by a sophomore release on the same label the following year. While the group only released these two albums, they later became of historical interest to collectors interested in early American heavy metal.^[1]

The group's members all went on to other projects.

In the mid 1970s Bell worked with Wayne County and the Backstreet Boys and Richard Hell & The Voidoids. In 1978, he joined the Ramones, assuming the name Marky Ramone. Aaronson played with Stories and Wayne County and the Backstreet Boys in the 1970s and worked as a session musician into the 1980s. He also toured with Edgar Winter, Joan Jett and Billy Idol. Wise and Kerner went into production with Kiss, among others.

Buy Hard Attack if you like it!  Just click the link.

Reasons to buy Music #1

Some people don't buy CDs anymore.

Here's one reason to buy CDs:

The artwork.

Some CDs have lots of cool pieces of art in the sleeve.  The art can help you get inside the music as you listen to it.  With some bands, I can't understand the words of a song at all.  But if I bought the CD, I can easily read the lyrics since many bands supply them inside the sleeve.  Once I've read the lyrics to a song I couldn't normally understand, I can then easily remember the words and understand them every time I listen to them after that.

Here's some of the artwork within a CD I just recently purchased: Leviathan by the band, Mastodon.

The album cover.  The album is a concept album based on the novel Moby Dick.

This piece of art gives an idea to the craziness that lurks beneath the sea!

These images all accompany the songs on Leviathan and help ignite my imagination to picture what the riffs of this album are depicting as Ahab does battle with the white whale!  If I didn't purchase the CD, I might have also missed that these songs all piece together to form one complete story arch.  This is by no means a rock opera, but it still tells a story and the artwork is part of that story.  I even saw an interview with one of the band members and he mentioned that they have an art team and that even though the music was complete, it was still going to take months for the art team to finish their job. 

Corrosion of Conformity - Wiseblood

This is the first blog post for On Rock!  I chose to feature the band Corrosion of Conformity and their song "Wiseblood" because I just started to listen to them this week.  

Click on the arrows in the Prezi presentation below to read my comments about them and to listen to their song, "Wiseblood". You might need to wait a moment for the presentation to load.

Wiseblood