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The first few years of the 1980s were massively dramatic for the development of heavy metal as a distinctive genre, as it underwent a startling metamorphosis from a murky indistinct corner of the heavy rock scene into a distinct entity with its own sets of rules, styles, and stereotypes.

Stadium rock ruled the heavy world in the late 70s. Fans of the harder side of things freely moved within a songlist that had nasty rockers like AC/DC and Judas Priest, and larger-than-life mega-rock gods like Queen and The Scorpions. Heavy metal, as such, was really just another term (allegedly American) for what the British liked to call heavy rock. In other words, here was music that was simply a heavier, nastier version of what lots and lots of bands were doing at a variety of levels of nastiness. Blue Oyster Cult, for example (I can’t be bothered to type in the stupid umlauts), often gets lumped in with the heavy metal genre, but I challenge you to find virtually anything in their mid-70s catalague which is remotely heavy in any kind of more modern sense.

Denim-clad scruffs yearning for the hard stuff in the latter half of the 70s had to be content with a much broader definition of the term heavy metal, and if you look at heavy metal listening charts even through to 1980, you tend to find lots of appearances put in by groups rarely included with the genre today, such as Heart, or Rush. Even AC/DC, with their high-voltage trappings, are probably more accurately termed hard rock, though their popularity was so massive at the time, and their aesthetic so perfectly suited to metalheads, that it’s no surprise they were popular with the metal crowd.

Yet by 1982, and even more so in 1983, the whole hard rock world had undergone a startling transformation, and the heavy metal we know today had been born and reached a certain maturity. What had happened in the intervening couple of years to make the genre coalesce so rapidly?

It was, of course, the advent of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and the rapid dissemination of its updated heavy rock notions throughout the world. The link between late 70s heavy rock and mid-80s heavy metal is almost entirely on the shoulders of the NWOBHM, which partly explains how the term continues to evoke bleary-eyed romanticism in metalheads to this day.

Part of this is a generational thing, as successive waves of young hopefuls hit their late teens, inspired by the past but pushing things along to a new level — the groups debuting their first releases in one year all two years younger than the last wave, each directly inspired by the previous wave, like a tidal movement of successive crests breaking against the musical shores of the rock world. But it’s not just age — Ronnie James Dio would debut the first album of his band Dio in 1983, and it represented just that generational advancement of the genre over his two albums with Black Sabbath (themselves a major development over the Ozzy era Sabbath releases). Yet people were evidently catching musical waves which would break in rapid succession. Ultimately, the rapidity of the change would result in metal’s undoing, as the only path to follow eventually became ever more selective and extreme, driving metal back into the underground and into the hands of ever more selective tastes.

Anyway, 1983 was a real watershed year, with many seminal releases representing the forefront of true heavy metal. The day really belonged to the Americans this year, who had finally come up to speed with the Britons, and were bursting at the seams with their own hybridized sound.

Savatage—”I Believe”
from the album Sirens (1983)

Enter one of the big names of the heavy metal world: Savatage. A band soon to build a checkered, storied, and ultimately metamorphosic story, in 1983 Savatage were one of many fresh-faced kids in America bowled over by the NWOBHM, and by the classic 70s monoliths they’d grown up on, and ready to leave their own imprint on the genre.

And leave it they did. The group that grew into Savatage spent their formative years in Northern Florida in the late 70s dabbling in heavy metal nascently, eventually coalescing in 1981 and eventually ending up in a local studio in 1982 to cut a number of tracks (apparently as quickly and as cheaply as possible on their shoestring budget), the first fruits of which would be their debut album Sirens released in 1983 on the small independent label PAR records (the enduring popularity of this and the second album would result in a much more well-distributed reissue on the bigger Combat Records later in 1985).

It takes all of two seconds of listening to Sirens to realize that emphatically Savatage represent the absolute ideal of heavy metal as a genre circa 1983, and the album stands at the quintessential forefront of the rapidly evolving sound, easily galloping alongside the Dio debut and the Metallica debut as an instant and genre-defining classic.

Boisterous, energetic, nasty, crunchy, distinctive, caterwauling and electrifying, Savatage perfected the heavy metal sound with a hugely unique and impressive frontman, the guitar wizardry of a truly precocious 6-string hero, and a well-honed writing style perfectly suited to create the most satisfaction for the audience’s expectations with the minimum fuss.

Sitting at the flagship spot on this album, and representing for me the highest level the band would ever attain, is the mini-epic that is the enigmatically titled “I Believe”.

Underneath this innocuous little title (a strange one for a heavy metal song, something seemingly better suited to pop or folk rock) lies a five minute science fiction epic about a group of space travelers forced to flee from an Earth rendered uninhabitable by nuclear and environmental devastation, embarking on a millennium-long journey to find a new planet that will be home to the vestiges of the human race. During this uncertain journey, the narrator conjectures about the existence of other life in the cosmos, and whether they will ever meet it –

Where do we go? What’ll we find? Is there life … other than mine?

After a thousand years of wandering space for a new home, the colonists alight on a mysterious world, where they find a black box set in a large green plain. A metallic, alien voice comes from the box (reproduced to cool effect in the song itself):

Welcome to Earth, May we ask who you are? Our race is called Man. The planet is done, done, done, done, done, DONE!

As the strange metallic voice repeats the word “done” with more and more unhinged frenzy, the song itself shifts into overdrive, as the guitar work of Criss Oliva explodes into a kind of tornado of notes over a double-time beat. The next verses are abstract and enigmatic, as if the horrific realization that the colonists’ centuries-long search has brought them back to the very place they fled from in the first place has driven them mad. Each brief little irrational verse is cut off by yet another frenzied guitar solo as the little epic disintegrates into a tempest of insanity, before it suddenly and painfully stops dead, robbing us of a drawn-out and dramatic finale.

I often hold “I Believe” up as a quintessential example of a perfect heavy metal song possessing all the ingredients needed to make the best potion the genre can offer. It’s got a semi-epic tale to tell brimming with excitement, wonder, and eventually madness, it tells that tale in a musical structure that grows and evolves to match the evolution of the story, and it undergoes a metamorphosis of pace and intensity midway in. It also does what all good heavy metal should do: it spotlights the individual talents of each band member, at the same time that no one ego ever sabotages the unified teamwork nature of the piece. Heavy metal should always be about a group of musicians working together in perfect sync and harmony without losing their individuality, and “I Believe” represents that balance to a fault.

Criss Oliva is justly famous for his spastic and unique guitar flamboyance, but I think the band’s greatest weapon lies in his brother Jon’s vocals, which are massively dramatic and wonderfully adaptable to so many moods. Like with the legendary Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford, Jon can alter his voice at whim from strident and high to booming and low to rasping to pure to anything in between, and he doesn’t shy away from swinging wildly in any direction that the music demands. And the man knows dementia. I have never heard someone shriek or cackle as effectively (and without inducing irritation) as Jon Oliva.

Savatage would survive through thick and thin in the ensuing years, reestablishing their artistic integrity after a disastrous and unwanted push into commercial waters, and ultimately earn a devoted fanbase by the late 80s when they developed into a more progressive metal outfit, churning out elaborate (and expensive) rock operas and concept albums. Tragically, genuis guitarist Criss Oliva would be killed by a drunk driver in the 90s, but brother Jon kept the band alive, and it exists in one form or another to this day. Astonishingly, Savatage has survived most of these years as one of the few bands to stay with a major record label, Atlantic.

1983 was a watershed year for heavy metal, and all the exuberance and power that it brought to the genre is never more perfectly and fully represented than in “I Believe”, truly one of the classic tracks of this silly, scruffy-haired bastard child genre of rock.

Technorati tags: heavy metal, Savatage.

A couple of weeks ago Wil Wheaton went on a bit of a ramble about how much he was enjoying last.fm, another one of those Web 2.0 sites with a kind of stupid name, a widget to put in your site’s sidebar, a little client program to download, and a new silly made-up word or two.

I listened to his enthusiasm, accepted that he liked it, and then naturally assumed it was great for him and not for me, because whenever I hear someone talk about anything music-related, I naturally assume it applies to other people’s tastes in music and not to mine. Classic heavy metal and hard rock is a narrow, narrow field, and some of my favorite bands are so esoteric that they generally cause music software to start talking in a shrill voice and belching smoke, kind of like when Captain Kirk throws a whole lot of unsolvable dilemmas at a fascistic planet-controlling computer built by a long-dead ancient race.

For one reason or another, I eventually decided to give it a whirl — probably because I was a little unhinged after having to spend that one extra hour pulling HTML markup out of a poorly-designed PHP class. And the results were much more interesting than I expected.

For those not yet aware of last.fm, it is a web application that’s entirely free at which you set up an account and then begin building up a profile by listening to music on the media player of your choice, as well as listening to last.fm’s streaming “radio”, which tailors the songs to either a keyword you punch in, or an artist you punch in. The app monitors what you play, makes note of it, allows you to love or hate tracks as they’re played, and thereby build up a kind of matrix of your listening tastes by corellating them with the tastes of others who like similar stuff.

Now, none of this should sound new. The concept of building up recommendations based on the choices of others who like the same things you do is as old as the h1 tag. Amazon.com has done it for years. But I’ve always found that these types of recommendation-building engines are very flawed. Amazon.com, for example, makes some horrendous recommendations to me with both books and music, to such and extent that I simply don’t bother to look anymore. And Netflix? WTF?

Because my tastes in music are about as fashionable and popular as leg warmers, I decided to throw some of my more obscure favorites at the last.fm player just to see how much it would choke. 80s heavy metal Hawaiians Sacred Rite were first out of the gate, one of my mostest bestest bands but which precious few could possibly know. As mentioned, last.fm has a type of streaming radio which you can play either through their website, or through a little player you can download, and each “station” is built on the fly to play music based on a keyword you type in (like “female fronted beauty and the beast gothic stained black metal”) or a band. Type in your selection, hit play, and see if anything comes up … and when it does, if it’s even remotely going to be like what you consider a similar type of music to your input.

When I typed in Sacred Rite and punched Play, I assumed that one of two things would happen. That a) last.fm would stare at me blankly and tell me it didn’t have a clue who the fuck I was talking about, or b) it would play music that was horrifically inappropriate, like Linkin Park.

To my surprise, neither occurred. Instead, last.fm happily accepted my selection, acknowledging their existence, and proceeded to play what little it had in its database of licensed music that was, all things considered, not too far afield at all. Musical styles are always a combination of genre and period, so if last.fm had started spewing out very recent music — even which otherwise might qualify as traditional heavy metal — I would have been disappointed. But it managed to cough up related music that was more or less contemporary and more or less stylistically similar to what is — let’s face it — a very obscure band in the broad scheme of things.

The whole key to last.fm’s flexibility is, I think, the fact that it records everything you play on your computer, not just what you play via their streaming radio (they call this feature, rather stupidly, “scrobbling”). Thankfully, this means that you’re not limited only to what they have in their licensed catalogue, but can still interact with their system and get some benefits out of it. Over the last week or so I’ve been flitting back and forth during my computer workday between playing stuff in my own collection, and popping into the streaming radio feature to see what it can come up with, and by and large what it’s giving me is fairly sensible and fairly shrewd, and most of the time its selections are in keeping with what I consider aesthetically similar music to whatever I’ve punched in. On the few occasions where a horrible gaffe is made (because, say, there are two artists in existence with a certain name associated with the style I’m listening to and last.fm spits out the wrong one), I simply click on the “ban” button and last.fm is suitably chastened.

Now, Sacred Rite is not in last.fm’s radio, unsurprisingly. But a few other somewhat surprising esoteric artists in the same mold are, and I was somewhat pleased when last.fm pulled out a track from Omen, a track from Savatage, and then some more mainstream but not at all unreasonable stuff from Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden. They say they are constantly adding music to their radio database, of which I have no doubt, but what’s there already is not too shabby at all.

In the end, the key to the software’s strength is that its knowledge of music and its ability to learn about tastes from what people are playing is not limited to what is in its own bank of licensed music. Without that feature, I think last.fm would be just another lame example of a “Recommendations” engine, good for a moment or two of tittering laughter, and little more. Instead, even with someone with tastes as specific as mine, you stand to find your musical self at least acceptably well represented. I’d give it a shot.

Oh, and where would a Web 2.0 app be without a nifty little widget to stick in your site’s sidebar? You can probably see one now on my own sidebar, and with it you now have the power to see what I’ve been listening to recently, and point, and laugh, and say, “My word, but the man has silly taste — is he actually listening to music?”