| And
then there were the songs, which were, as noted above, both silly
and great. Take songs with decent melodies, goofy historical fiction
conceits and solid rock beats and then commission bands who in whole
or in part owe their very existences to those same songs and what
you wind up with is a tribute album that actually sounds like a tribute.
Most tribute albums suck precisely because one gets the impression
that a number of people who didn’t really care one way or the
other about the band being honored were invited anyway, either because
the compilers of the tribute liked them, or because they were marquee
names, or because the bands the compilers really wanted weren’t
available. This sense is completely absent from A Tribute to the
Beast, though: the sixteen participating bands here all sound
like they’re trying to impress old heroes of theirs, which they
probably are. Consequently, the pervasive feeling on A Tribute
to the Beast is one of total glee, and it’s more infectious
than smallpox. Children of Bodom’s caustic, symphonic run through
“Aces High”; a band I’ve never heard of called Rage
reading “The Trooper” as though it were a primary source
for a crucially important lost religion; Therion, the Swedish guitar-hero
act that gets the meanest power-guitar sounds on the planet, treating
“Children of the Damned” like it was the Ode to Joy; Steel
Prophet and Iced Earth breathing the eighties into being as casually
as if they were just picking up some change; Opeth wholly transforming
a song from the first Iron Maiden album (which sounded more like biker
rock than anything else) into a creation rich with the moody, spacious
grief that’s their own private milieu. |
