Megadeth - United Abominations (Roadrunner)
2/5
By: Charlie Potter
Somewhere in the recess of my mind, there's a small part of me that romanticises the idea of being the sort of person who likes Megadeth. The sort of person who wears a leather jacket, has a beard, drinks either snake bite or whisky and is genuinely impassioned about rubbish metal. But the thing about Megadeth is if someone says to you 'would you rather help cancel third world debt, or carry on listening to Megadeth?' you'd say 'yeah, OK, I'm sorry', and go for the responsible option (that's helping to cancel third world debt, not listening to a silly metal band - duh). However, if someone asked if you 'would you rather help cancel third world debt, or carry on listening to 'Wonderful Rainbow' by Lightning Bolt?' , I would have to say, 'ehrmmmmm... I sort of really want to carry on listening to Lightning Bolt. Sorry, kids...'
That said, this is certainly a heap more fun than a lot of other recent Roadrunner releases. But the main problem here is the excessive amount of verses used. They could without problem cut a lot of these five minute tracks down to two and a half minute rock nuggets and not lose much at all. It makes you see that when bands like Napalm Death and Terrorizer built grindcore in the mid eighties when the world was still going crazy for Slayer and thrash in general, that its creation was something of a no brainer. The way these songs go on and on is just plain silly...
Something I find weird about this sort of music is that you know that for the fans, it's just all about the solos. I'm indeed sure that a great deal of people skip to the solos of these songs in their bedroom and have a whale of a time - but who could blame them? The solos are unavoidably great - they go far beyond the boring, predictable fret-wanking of the average metal band simply because to aid them you're given things like epic key changes that don't feature at all in the rest of the song. In fact, it should be said that Megadeth are actually very inventive with their chord progressions in general. You couldn't come to these sonic conclusions simply with a great deal of noodling around, as there are so many surprise chord resolves that these songs can at times feel like pop anthems.
The lyrics of course are ridiculous. Totally ridiculous. 'The sound of galloping horses on clouds of lightning thunder'? Brilliant! The feeling I get when hear these words is not of embarrassment, it's a feeling of deep seated satisfaction and joy (this sort of joy you get from satirical comedy), but the best is yet to come - there's a track on this album, and I really believe this should win some sort of award, the title being... 'You're dead'. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
In fact, the whole thing, all of this music, is really ridiculous - but it's all the better for it, and a lot better than a great deal of their contemporaries who take themselves far too seriously.
Stream four tracks from 'United Abominations' HERE.
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