Pilgrimage of Metal

by xaosseed

I’ve been playing a load of Brutal Legend recently and finding it awesome. The critters, the hallucinogenic landscapes, its just so much fun on so many levels – if you like that kind of thing!

I’ve drifted away from the orthodoxy of metal in the past while, mainly because its so goddamn hard to find anything thats not woefully bad in a club here. If we find a DJ that can string a bunch of Top 40 together in a non-painful manner, we’re doing well. Someplace that would put on a bunch of rock and metal…? Follow the flying pig, sir.

So one of the pleasures for me of Brutal Legend has been simply zooming about the landscape doing side missions because while doing so you’ve got your in-car radio which has the greatest playlist ever. Frankly, I’d say the cost of the game is worth it just to get your hands on the curated list of metal hits. I hadn’t much of an opinion of Motorhead before hand – but now I’m willing to go hold up my candle for ‘Lemmy as Rock God’ along with all the rest. I don’t get why the songs they stick on the ‘Best of..’ albums aren’t the best songs. Previously you could have snuck that one by me by saying I didn’t know what I was talking about, I wasn’t hardcore enough – but now I’ve calibrated against the songs on Brutal Legend and most of them I either know or would have said were excellent under any circumstances had I encountered them before (Tygers of Pan Tang – where have these guys been hiding? Wow!) So after that when I run across the Motorhead songs on the Brutal Legend score and they *aren’t* the ones that are usually on the collections I’ve got to wonder whats going on.

Anyway, all of this has lead me on a winding trek through Youtubes playlists digging out cool new stuff – such as the Tygers back catalogue among other stuff. I get the main character from the games point in the intro “don’t you wish you were born earlier, back when the music was more real?” Its got a certain rawness to it that maybe you don’t see so much anymore.

Or maybe I haven’t been going to enough big rock show. Apparently Motorhead still tours six or seven months a year! Bloody hell, thats nuts – the guy is something like sixty eight now! I watched an interview where he said “I know intellectually there was a time when I wasn’t in Motorhead, but I can’t remember it” – I guess forty odd years on the road will do that, especially when he’s one of the most famous never-stopped consumers of drugs and liqour still on the road. As best I know all the rest like the Stones and Aerosmith and that lot have dried out long ago. Lemmy, well you could probably grind up his bones and snort them to see through time…

Its an odd thing, having no such music around here. There pretty much are no subcultures – no goths, no metaller, no punks, nothing at all. I mean, I’ve seen one or two but they’re remarkable in their rarity. As best I can gather, one simply doesn’t.

Anyway; here is a youtube playlist comprising most of the tracks that I’ve been enjoying on Brutal Legend – YMMV :)