Samson - Head On
#259
by Paul Zickler
Samson
Head On
Genre: Mettalish Rock
Allen’s Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Paul’s Rating: 2 out of 5
Highlights:
Thunderstick
Hammerhead
Take Me to Your Leader
Let’s get this out of the way first: I’ve played guitar and sung with various degrees of laziness since right around the time this album came out, which would have been during my 10th grade year. I played a lot of bad covers in the early to mid ‘80’s through cheap-but-loud Peavey amps with generic distortion cranked to 10. And yes, I wrote some really derivative songs that have thankfully been forgotten, which borrowed (aka stole) riffs from what would now be called “classic rock,” but was then just called “rock.” So when I write about Samson (or SamSon as it’s spelled on the cover), I’m in not unfamiliar territory. “You know in my life, I’ve been a fighting man. Hard times hit me, and now I’m goin’ down.” So runs the chorus of the first track. It’s repeated at least a dozen times, including the four obligatory a capella repeats just before what might have been the end, had the guitarist not needed to play the main riff 12 more times before the song fades out. So right away we know we’re not getting anything earth shaking here, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be entertained. Lead singer Bruce Dickinson was, of course, best known for fronting Iron Maiden, whose magnum opus “Number of the Beast” is most familiar to me as “the song that was always playing at full blast from my neighbor’s dorm room around 2 AM.” Not that I would ever have been uncool enough to complain. Bruce has got chops for sure, and can hit the requisite high shrieky notes without much trouble while maintaining a recognizable melody on the non-shrieky bits. Guitarist Paul Samson got to name the band after himself, presumably because he owned the PA system and/or tour van? Either way, he’s competent at both the “bah bah” power chords and the “weedly weedly” solos. Nothing he plays is particularly memorable mind you, but he holds his own. The drummer is someone named Thunderstick, and he appears on the cover wearing his trademark leather mask. He seems to really like those almost-fast tom tom rolls that less inventive drummers throw into basically every space not occupied by vocals or a guitar lick. Wikipedia says he played in a cage, but his playing on this record makes that seem superfluous. Despite the leather image, he doesn’t sound threatening at all to my ears. I’m just saying I wouldn’t bet against Animal from the Muppets in a drum-off with Mr. Thunderstick. There’s a bass player too, I think, although most of the time they could have just run a harmonizer pedal a couple of octaves below the guitar riffs and they’d have the bass part covered. What’s the album like? I thought about listing the stolen riffs track by track, but that seemed a bit cruel. I mean, these guys are from England and who gives a ****, as Kasey Casem put it. Apparently this release hit #34 in the UK, which was probably based on the lack of actually good British metal in those nascent days of 1980, or maybe came about primarily because the 2 minute instrumental “Thunderburst” seems like it would make for kickass background music during a news feature on a rugby scrum or a squatters riot on ITV (BBC would never touch it, obviously). If you can ignore the inane lyrics, there are actually some really fun moments like the soaring harmonies on the chorus of “Hammerhead” (“Can you hear the hammerhead in the wind?”), a song that also mentions ingots, sledgehammers and “runes by the fire,” mining that neverending vein of Norse mythology so beloved of post-Led Zeppelin metal bands. “Take Me to Your Leader” also has a promisingly manic tempo and a chance for Dickinson to belt some super high notes before descending into repetitious riffing under lyrics that seem to be somehow related to extraterrestrials, always a plus in my book. Sadly, most tracks are more like the unfortunate “Hunted,” featuring the immortal couplet “You’re nailing my brain to a tree / Why can’t you just let me be?” The last word in each line echoes three times, naturally. Whoever produced this also felt compelled to throw a bunch of synthy sound effects in here and there, with seemingly little forethought. The opening of “Walking Out On You” consists of a full minute of a single bass note under what sounds like some royalty free sound effects bunched together, followed by a power ballad thoroughly ruined by a lot of “ooh, this will sound like Plant” and “this will sound like Mercury” vocal tweaks. I realize production values were notoriously weird in this era, so I’m willing to let it slide, but the song is over 6 minutes long and never really recovers, despite the best efforts of “Bruce Bruce,” as he was apparently known back then. Sure enough, by the end we’ve got Floyd-style spoken samples, jingle bells and what sounds like someone clicking a clothespin open and shut, panned from left to right, then right to left. I’m sure it seemed brilliant at the time. The Spotify version adds two utterly forgettable “bonus” tracks, including a 9-plus minute “Kingsway Jam,” which I was grateful not to listen to all the way through, since it wasn’t on the original LP. Thanks for that note, Allen. I’ll say this. I knew guys in 1980 who would’ve cranked this on cassette in their car stereos and headbanged to their hearts’ delight. Just because I wasn’t one of those guys doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the positive elements of “Head On,” and there are some. Just not enough to make me want to ever listen to it again.
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