a nation on fire

Two weeks ago my girlfriend and I made our way down to Melbourne for a long weekend away. One of the days we were down my good mate Craig was kind enough to take us out on a day long tour of all the best record stores, coffee joints and shoe shopping (for the missus) in town. Turns out the day was to be the day of old metal reissues as I came away with something like seven or eight great LP's.

First up, and opinions may differ about this one, is a recent reissue of the first Machine Head LP originally from 1995, "Burn My Eyes" on RoadRunner Records. Black vinyl. These guys (along with Pantera) were my first foray into aggressive music beyond the Metallica film clips I'd seen on early morning music TV. It must have been around 15-16 years ago when I first experienced this album (and it's successor "The More Things Change") and I'll easily admit that this slab, amongst maybe three or four others, definitely set me on a different path. So much of my taste in music and life in general for that matter can be traced back to this album and Pantera's "The Great Southern Trendkill". Sure, everything Rob Flynn and co. have written since 1998 onwards has been beyond excruciatingly horrendous (new faux neo thrash bullshit whatever the fuck you wanna call it included), but their first two are certifiable classics and timeless to me. I listened to this album exclusively for three years straight.

Covers of the day used to included Discharge, Cro Mags and Bad Brains. This was their peak.

Happy to finally have this one in my collection. I wasn't ready to pay stupid postage amounts from the USA via eBay.