CD Odyssey Disc 1819: Quiet Riot

I’m off on holiday today and enjoying some of that free time revisiting a record from my youth.

Disc 1819 is…Metal Health

Artist: Quiet Riot

Year of Release: 1983

What’s up with the Cover? Little known fact: Jason Voorhees only kills kids at Crystal Lake when he’s not touring with Quiet Riot. His bandmates are probably telling him that if he took off that straitjacket he would literally slay on the axe.

They mean a guitar but given that manic gleam in Jason’s eye it might be wise to just put him on drums.

How I Came To Know It: This album was played at many a beach, bush or house party in my youth. I bought it on CD about a year or so ago after suffering an acute bout of nostalgia.

How It Stacks Up: This is my only Quiet Riot album, so it can’t stack up.

Ratings: 3 stars

Welcome to the early eighties and ground zero for the explosion of traditional heavy metal. I was in the vanguard of that movement, and as a young teen if it wasn’t metal it was crap.

I have since recovered from this judgmental and ill-considered approach to music appreciation, but back in the day Quiet Riot was a Big Deal in my peer group, and this record was everywhere.

It is easy to see the allure early on. The title track opens the record with one of metal’s greatest and most recognizable anthems. That initial guitar riff crunch, with its polished slightly lighter take on something you’d hear ten years earlier on a Sabbath record.

“Metal Health” also introduces you to singer Kevin Dubrow in the form of a high-pitched metal scream, and you know immediately these boys are all in. Dubrow has that classic metal vocal style, part growl, part anthem, part shriek, and he’s the best thing about Quiet Riot and this record in general.

The boys immediately followed up on that classic tune with one of my favourite covers of all time, with their take on Slade’s “Cum On Feel the Noize”. At the time I first heard it, I thought this song was a Quiet Riot original and it took many years to get it through my head that it belonged to Slade (cognitive dissonance is a bitch).

That said, any sense of this song ‘belonging’ to Slade is in the past tense once you’ve heard this version, which is an amped up anthem that takes to song to a whole new level of party tune. No shade on Slade, but I’ll take this cover to the desert island any day.

These two songs were part of the soundtrack to my life in the early eighties. Even though neither song was particularly danceable, both were played routinely at high school dances, where they would fill the floor with fist-pumping enthusiastic youths.

Another feature of the eighties for me was having limited purchasing power, and few avenues to hear music. My rule was to wait to see if I liked a minimum of three songs before buying an album. That likely explains why I didn’t buy “Metal Health” which goes downhill in quality after that solid 1-2 punch of the title track and “Cum On Feel the Noize”. Also, my brother owned it so I could borrow it from him whenever I had a hankering.

The rest of the record is passable, but there is very little to recommend. The songs feel undercooked in places. The band will come up with a solid riff or anthemic chorus, but there isn’t enough other stuff in the song to hold your interest, and it leads to repetition. You’re left with a lot of prolonged chorus fade-outs; ever the harbinger of a songwriter who doesn’t know where they want their melody to go.

It isn’t bad by any stretch. “Don’t Want To Let You Go” is solid, with the boys channeling the Scorpions for a metal ballad where a dude professes his loves for his girl but does it in, you know, a tough way with lots of power chords. This mattered back in the day, lest your metal be considered soft (we called such metal wannabe music “tinsel” in my day).

The album is very guitar forward, and most songs have a solo noodle. Guitarist Carlos Cavazo isn’t Randy Rhoads (who helped found the band but had moved on prior to “Metal Health”) but dude can play. It is that precise high virtuosity sound that eighties metal is known for, but even after all these years, I still like that style. Some of Cavazo’s solos are inspired, and others are more by-the-numbers, but none actively annoyed me.

The second half of the record (or side two for you vinyl types) is not the equal of the first. The songs are inoffensive and filled with good energy for driving or the various party venues this record used to provide the soundtrack to, but little stands out. “Let’s Get Crazy” is the best of the lot but it feels like the lesser version of Metal Health and suffers from that “repeat/fade” problem that I found hard to forgive.

Maybe those opening tracks are just that good, or maybe I’m suffering from a nostalgia flashback but I’m going to give this record three stars. A good time from a long time ago.

Best tracks: Metal Health, Cum On Feel the Noize, Slick Black Cadillac