Hard Band For Dead is one of the best albums The Toasters ever released, and thus one of the best 2-tone recordings ever made in the United States. Whether the band is burning through the irrepressible ska of “2-Tone Army”, “Don’t Come Running”, “Chuck Berry”, or “I Wasn’t Going To Call You Anyway” or simmering on the laidback “Skaternity” or “Properly”, nearly every song works.

“2-Tone Army” is the centerpiece of the album, a tribute to themselves, their influences, and their fans. “I Wasn’t Going To Call You Anyway” is one of the poppiest songs the band has written, but Hingley’s sing-a-long vocals are accompanied by a rousing, classic ska feel. The ska-inflected covers of TV themes “Maxwell Smart” and “Secret Agent Man” are interesting if unspectacular, and the arrangement of “Flight Of The Bumblebee” (titled “Dave Goes Crazy” here) features the sickest tone you’ll ever hear from a saxophone.

Lyrically, the band focuses on the history of the music itself, from “2-Tone Army” to “Skaternity” and “Chuck Berry”—“Forty years ago there was a jumpin’ jazz Jamaica scene, they could hear those tunes driftin’ down from New Orleans. They put the two together in a thing and called it ‘ska,’ and sent it off to England in the back of Laurel Aitken’s car … Now the 90’s are here with the new bands bringin’ it to you, skins and rudies and even some punk rock too …”.

Brave New world Revisited is a good retrospective and summary of how the world of 1958 conformed to the predictions of 1932’s Brave New World, but but it provides little new information. In the first chapter Huxley says nothing that had not been written by Thomas Malthus (namesake of the Malthusian belt) 150 years earlier, yet strangely does not cite his work. When he writes of propaganda, advertisement, and subliminal messages, he does cite the relevant studies, but simply reports the research of others.

... And Justice For All is Metallica’s most progressive album; every track is built of many complex sections, with several stretching to nearly 10 minutes. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, the songcraft demonstrated on the band’s previous two releases is sacrificed. Furthermore, the production quality on this release is poor, with the bass almost completely buried and the rest of the instruments sounding muted. ... And Justice For All is a good album in spite of these flaws, but it does not live up to expectations after the band’s previous masterpieces.

The most significant highlight is “One”, an epic about a wounded soldier who continues to live without any sensory input or ability to communicate. In contrast to the other material on the album, it is one of the most tuneful songs the band ever wrote. The first half of the song features delicate, clean rhythm guitar and unusually warm vocals by Hetfield with lyrical leads from Hammett. In the second half, Hammett transitions to a howling, desperate solo while the rest of the band plays a breathtakingly fast and precise machine gun riff for a remarkable several minutes. While the music video certainly helped, the song was destined for a Grammy award and enshrinement as one of Metallica’s best-loved songs on its own merits.

The other two noteworthy tracks are “Harvester Of Sorrow” and “To Live Is To Die”. The former is the only song other than “One” to make the cut into the band’s shifting live set through the years, due primarily to the difficulty of reproducing the other songs on a consistent basis. The latter is less coherent than previous Metallica instrumentals, but this is excusable for a track that is built of the unused riffs and poetry of the late Cliff Burton. Throughout the album Hetfield continues the theme of the powerlessness of the the individual from Master Of Puppets.

Dub 56 is one of The Toasters best albums, coming as the ska music they had been playing for a decade was gaining brief mainstream success. Buck’s guitar generally takes a backseat on this album, allowing Dave Barry’s organ and Matt Malles’s driving bass to drive the songs. The core of the album are three fun, high-energy, uptempo ska songs: “Direction”, “Dub 56”, and “Mona”. “Razor Cut” uses fewer ska rhythms, but is just as infectious. “Tunisia” is an interesting ska-flavored reading of Gillespie’s jazz classic “A Night In Tunisia”. The only tracks that do not do much for me are the reggae songs – “Dancin’” and “Marlboro Man”.

Many people consider Master Of Puppets to be the most important heavy metal album ever released, and I am one of them. Although it is less innovative than the first two Metallica albums, it represents the pinnacle of the progressive thrash metal genre that they had pioneered.

The album is bookended by two very similar tracks: “Battery” and “Damage, Inc”, which feature melodic acoustic introductions fading into simple, blazing thrash. The rest of the tracks are more complex, such as “Master Of Puppets”, which starts with a finger-breaking introduction, transitions to a verse section with alternating 4/4 and 5/8 time signatures, has a several-minute interlude with twin guitars playing harmonized leads followed by a breakdown and blistering guitar solo, and returns to the introduction before slamming to a halt.

“The Thing That Should Not Be” breaks away from the thrash mentality to trade speed for extra heaviness. It does not meet the same quality standards as the rest of the album, but is a nice change of pace. “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” is another progressive epic, but a bit more subdued than “Master Of Puppets”. If the listener has somehow been lulled to sleep by the previous two tracks, “Disposable Heroes” is a drill sergeant-like wake-up call with some of the best uses of background vocals by Metallica since the “die!” chants of “Creeping Death” and an effective false ending.

“Leper Messiah” slows down the tempo again, resulting in a track that is almost, dare I say, funky. I challenge anyone to sit still while listening to it. “Orion” does not have the epic quality that “Call Of Ktulu” did, but is a fantastic instrumental nonetheless. The slow thrashy beginning and end are good by themselves, but the middle section led by Burton’s melodic bass playing is the highlight of the track.

Lyrically, James Hetfield has never been more consistent. Every song deals with control and powerlessness, whether it be from drug addiction (“Master Of Puppets”), insanity (“Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”), the government (“Disposable Heroes”), religious charlatans (“Leper Messiah”), anger (“Battery”, “Damage, Inc.”), or even a mythical creature (“The Thing That Should Not Be”). The tight, rigorous, pounding riffs of the songs add to the feelings of the helplessness of the controllee, while the blistering solos evoke the giddy madness of the controller. The result is an album that has stood the test of time and is a fitting swan song for Cliff Burton, may he rest in peace.

Perhaps each deserves to be considered on its own merits, but the comparison between Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four is inevitable. I found Orwell’s work to be the more engrossing, but Huxley paints a much more frighteningly realistic picture.

Apparently Orwell reviewed Brave New World in 1940 and claimed that it “probably cast no light on the future” (with the unspoken implication that his own work did). During the Battle Of Britain this was a very reasonable belief, but now that fascism has fallen out of favor and societal fear and deprivation are virtually unknown in the West the slow, pleasant decay of Brave New World seems much more probable. (That is not to say that there are not ways in which modern society distrubingly mirrors Oceania. Winston Smith would find the perpetual Wars on Terror and Drugs entirely familiar.)

The World State worships stability and happiness, which are certainly among the causes du jure in the United States currently. One of the principal purposes of people in Brave New World is to consume, and Americans seemingly have become consumers first, labor second, and citizens a distant third in the mindsets of corporate managers. People who lived in the shadow of Stalin may find Nineteen Eighty-Four realistic, but it is the Brave New World that is strikingly similar to my experiences.

There are times when it seems Huxley could use a dash of sublety. For example, the second chapter of Brave New World describes the Pavlovian conditioning of lower-caste toddlers that makes it quite obvious what a horrific process is occurring. Orwell, I think, would have written about the scene from the perspective of one of his characters who finds it perfectly benign, making the reader all the more disturbed when he begins to grasp what is truly happening. In other cases, Huxley uses this same technique quite effectively, as in the frequent emphatic statements that Bernard Marx is very different from the rest of the population while the reader sees by his actions that he is well conditioned indeed.

Unlike most of the books that I have been reviewing, I had previously read Brave New World 8 years ago. Although that is not a very long time, I found that I had completely forgotten the characters and plot of the book, and only found them very vaguely familiar as I read through the is a second time. I had very vivid and accurate memories, however, about the setting of A. F. 632 and the society of The World State. I suspect this is indicative of the contribution of the work: the saga of Bernard and the Savage are simply a vehicle for the social commentary and warning.

As an aside, my attempts to understand John’s allusions made me aware that my knowledge of Shakespeare has similarly atrophied. I know Hamlet well and have at least a fair memory of Macbeth and Romeo And Juliet, but I can only remember a single thing about A Midsummer Night’s Dream: that one of the characters is a fairy named Puck.

New York Fever is another typical Toasters release with a few good uptempo ska numbers (“New York Fever”, “Social Security”) and a few good slower reggae tracks (“Ploughshares Into Guns”, “Too Hip To Be Cool”, “Johnny Forsake Her”) and a cover of a song from a different genre (“Night Train”). A solid effort, but not a spectacular one.

For someone who was barely a year old when it was released, the importance of Metallica’s debut is difficult to realize. Simply put, Kill ‘Em All was the first album-length release of thrash metal, which would inspire dozens of other bands. Before this album no one else had combined the heaviness of metal with the speed and aggression of hardcore punk and the complexity of progressive rock into this style that is now quite familiar. As the first of its kind, it is essential listening for any heavy metal fan in spite of its flaws.

Several of the tracks are epic compositions, eschewing the verse-chorus-bridge structure that is common in popular music for multiple independent but connected sections. Specifically, “The Four Horsemen”, “No Remorse”, and “Seek & Destroy” are among the finest compositions Metallica ever wrote and representative of the very best of the genre. These songs draw from distinct influences - “Seek & Destroy” is bluesy, while “The Four Horsemen” uses swing rhythms more commonly associated with jazz - but every riff is equally exciting. Hetfield’s rhythm guitar is what makes these songs irresistable, but Cliff Burton’s bass work is also exceptional. For a particular example, listen to the melodic rising line used through the (relatively) low-key interlude in “The Four Horsemen”.

Burton has a showcase on “(Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth”, and makes it clear why the other band members were so interested in his services. Few people have ever managed to use the bass guitar so effectively as a lead instrument. It would not be an overstatement to say that Burton’s solo on this album did for rock and metal bassists what Jaco Pastorius’s debut album did for jazz bassists. That is, it opened an entirely new world of ways in which the instrument could be used.

The rest of the album is not up to the same quality, and has not aged so well as the limits of the new genre were explored. “Whiplash” is notable for its extreme simplicity, speed, and aggression; the song consists of little more than the band pounding out sixteenth-notes at 180 bpm. “Motorbreath”, “Jump In The Fire”, “Phantom Lord”, and “Metal Militia” are not bad songs, but they are each built of just a few riffs and seem like they could have been written by any of the bands that followed Metallica’s lead. The opening rave-up “Hit The Lights” is the only real throwaway track, and serves its purpose well enough.

Kill ‘Em All is not the masterpiece that Metallica would make in its next two albums, but it is a piece of musical history, and one that holds up quite well on its own.

Like most releases by The Toasters, Thrill Me Up has both great tracks and filler. The highlights are midtempo “Decision At Midnight”, skanking “Ska Killers”, and the “Johnny B. Goode” retread “Johnny Go Ska”. “Haitian Frustration” is a decent reggae tune, but indistinguishable from other generic workouts in the genre. Several of the tracks turn out to be good if you can get through the kitschy introductions, most notably “Frankenska” and “Go Girl”. None of the rest of the album is bad, but nor is it particularly interesting.

As a live album, Hell Freezes Over is fairly disappointing. The Eagles have always been meticulous about recreating their studio cuts precisely, so few of the older songs are presented in a fresh or interesting way. The lone exception is “Hotel California”, which gets a very interesting acoustic arrangement with an extended instrumental introduction. “New York Minute” is also worth mentioning because it was never previously recorded by Eagles. The strings and Schmit’s fretless bass provide an excellent backdrop for Henley’s song of death and mourning.

The real meat of the album is the four new songs, which are of uneven quality. “Get Over It” is a rollicking good time, but impossible to take seriously. “Love Will Keep Us Alive” is an excellent ballad in the style of “I Can’t Tell You Why” despite being written entirely by outsiders. “The Girl From Yesterday” is a pleasant slow country song, but breaks no new ground. “Learn To Be Still” is a more effective slow song, combining folksy strumming with hard rock stylings.

If this were released in 1980 it would have been a questionable follow-up to The Long Run. As a statement that one of the greatest rock bands to ever record is reforming after a “14-year vacation”, however, it cannot be ignored.