#182
July 2 1984
Cirith Ungol
King of the Dead
1.75 out of 5
I never ever ever turn music down. My ears are…special. I can hear the person on the other end of your phone call when I sit across the dining room table from you. If I didn’t hear you, it’s because I wasn’t listening. I like it LOUD. When no one is home my Sonos speakers are all set to the max. And we have a small house. I have a Play 1 in the living room. Another in the bathroom, just 15 feet away. And a PlayBar in the family room.
I play them all at max if no one is around. My AirPods are set to max, so loud that when I was on the ferry from Victoria to Vancouver last week my co-workers 2 seats away got worried about my hearing.
My doc says my ears are like magic. The rest of me….
All that said, I had to turn this band down. Not because they are jokingly bad (they are) but Tim Baker’s piercing vocals are like razors, unfettered by something as simple as, I dunno, the rest of a band. And they are doubled. Like all good power pop should be. except this is doom metal.
The drums have no heft, which is weird for the 80s, the bass is mixed too high BUT still can’t do battle with the Vox.
And the songs all want to be demonic. They want to sooooooo sooooooo bad. But…nope. I get what they are trying to do and I really want to like it but it’s all such a bad mixed mess. Shame, really. I bet there’s some chops in there. Oh, how they want to be the Sabbath of Tolkien, though….
After all the Strum and Drang there is the requisite finger plucking acoustic driven epic cum sludge rock, “Finger of Scorn”, followed by the classical piece, "Toccata in Dm" by Bach. Oh, dammit, Randy Rhodes, what thee hath wrought.
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