Nostalgic 80s Metal

80sMetalDude

Inspired
I was enjoying some streaming on way home from work and stumbled on some music this old guy forgot all about... Fates Warning - No Exit. I think its one of the best melodic metal albums ever made from start to finish. I had this on a 33 LP back in high school... wow just wow the memories.

Saw Fates Warning here in Detroit at Harpos and had mixed feelings from that live show but the album rocks to the core.

MY opinion of course.... but from the start of that album every single song just leads into the other perfectly as if the whole album was one song. The last song is long like Rime of the Ancient Mariner ;)

Some may find the high pitched singing a little too high (like King Diamond high) but man the guitars, the guitars are sick all the solos and time changes just seem to oddly work so well together!

Thought I would share the enjoyment here in case some have not heard this album.
 
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I've seen them live twice, and thought the shows were rather boring. I did like their first several albums though.

Probably my number one nostalgic 80s album was Fifth Angel's self titled debut. I heard the title track one night in my favorite 80s metal club, an tracked down the album the next day. That album blew me away the first time I heard it. They just had a little extra going on that a lot of the bands of that era lacked. Same with Lillian Axe. I thought both those bands should have been bigger than they were. Savatage was really something special as well.

I still have a lot of 80s metal in rotation.
 
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I don’t have that one, but I’m going to look into it!

Crobot was a band whose album I bought a few years ago that had a great 80’d metal sound. Very Iron Maiden like.
 
Fates Warning are criminally underrated IMO, along with Crimson Glory and Savatage. Between those bands, Queensryche and Dream Theater there was something really special about that era.

@grandinq Crobot are awesome - lovely dudes too. Icarus Witch are another band worth checking out if you like the 70s/80s thing too.
 
@spagthorpe thx for the info I'll look up Fifth Angel. And yup as I said I also was not overly impressed with FW live show... not that they sounded bad, they nailed it actually.... it was just they were kind of boring to watch on stage didnt generate much energy... that may have changed but I saw them twice once at Harpos, (1992?) and once at iRock I think back around 1995... oh yeah I saw Savatage once WAY after their more youthful years and it was a very personal feeling show in a very small venue.. amazing performance.

@Leon, I totally agree 100% about the underrated. I think the live aspect may have hurt them a bit. It's those live shows that build the big powerhouse bands. I know they did a lot of their albums remote to each other sending pieces back and forth if I recall correctly... and that may have also impacted their stage presence. There was indeed something special about that time frame. If you are familiar with Andy Laroque and all his work in all the King Diamond albums. NO EXIT I think has that same ominous feel to all the solos but at the same time with hints of happy notes in there to bring things together... it's so hard to describe. Just the opening solo in Anarchy Divine in the first 20 sec or so sets the stage for what I mean for the rest of the album....
 
80's metal was f***ing awesome. As long as you ignore the hair metal. And despite the hairspray and spandex even those guys could play. Too bad their genre helped kill off metal as a mainstream genre and ruined it for the rest.
 
TOTAL Tangent and off topic.... but.

What blows my mind the most about the 80s players was the lack of sources like Youtube to readily teach you everything and anything for free. Without chucking all the typical guitar god names out there from the 80s......

WHERE did they come from?

It's like at that time where did all their technique come from?

Now I get on youtube and am floored with 7 year old bands playing full Metallica songs LOL etc etc....everywhere you turn crazy talent.

The same thing I see happening in sports too...

OR ... maybe another point I'm missing is that these players existed and were not noticed because the net was not showing them off from uploads.... etc. I guess it goes both ways....

It also could be just my age showing and I am starting to slow down :)
 
When I learned all I had was my record player and my ears. Eventually progressed to the mini tape recorder from radio shack so I could slow down licks and learn them. Today there are so many resources, it's overwhelming.
 
TOTAL Tangent and off topic.... but.

What blows my mind the most about the 80s players was the lack of sources like Youtube to readily teach you everything and anything for free. Without chucking all the typical guitar god names out there from the 80s......

WHERE did they come from?

It's like at that time where did all their technique come from?

Now I get on youtube and am floored with 7 year old bands playing full Metallica songs LOL etc etc....everywhere you turn crazy talent.

The same thing I see happening in sports too...

OR ... maybe another point I'm missing is that these players existed and were not noticed because the net was not showing them off from uploads.... etc. I guess it goes both ways....

It also could be just my age showing and I am starting to slow down :)

I've wondered the same thing. 80's rock guitarists or musicians are stereotyped as party hard, dips!ts (myself included....lol). But man they seriously had the chops, technique and had to know a little theory or at least their scales to play as well as they did. Take a guy like Joe Walsh, who isn't a good example of the 80's but is a guy who on the surface comes off as if he's got an IQ of 10. I can't really use CC Deville as an example because I've never heard a Poison song that I liked. But I'm sure there are some CC fans out there who could point me to an example. (don't bother though......I just can't go down that road).
 
It was an era of 'figure it out yourself'.... look at how George Lynch holds his pick... probably seemed natural and it became the right way for him.

I watched an interview with Steve Vai and he was asked about his fret fingering technique...and he admitted he stood in front of mirror and decided X way looked cooler... lol

Think about a 8 year old kid with PC and gets shiny new guitar for his bday today.... first stop Youtube.... OMG all the material. What a wonderful age we live in really. But being DIFFERENT / Unique is much harder than the earlier example.
 
Great album. I saw them the other night opening for Queensryche. Queensryche's another band I was really into back in the day. Operation Mindcrime was so perfect that they were never able to reach that high again. Promised Land was good, but went almost too progressive...they seemed to lose that fire that they had in the early albums. Then for 20 years we just got weak Queensryche album after weak Queensryche album. But with the new singer, they've gotten that fire back. They've gone back to playing heavy metal and they sound great again.
 
Great album. I saw them the other night opening for Queensryche. Queensryche's another band I was really into back in the day. Operation Mindcrime was so perfect that they were never able to reach that high again. Promised Land was good, but went almost too progressive...they seemed to lose that fire that they had in the early albums. Then for 20 years we just got weak Queensryche album after weak Queensryche album. But with the new singer, they've gotten that fire back. They've gone back to playing heavy metal and they sound great again.
I totally agree on Operation Mindcrime.. a lot of what moves me with No Exit holds true with that Queensryche album.
 
TOTAL Tangent and off topic.... but.

What blows my mind the most about the 80s players was the lack of sources like Youtube to readily teach you everything and anything for free. Without chucking all the typical guitar god names out there from the 80s......

WHERE did they come from?

It's like at that time where did all their technique come from?

Now I get on youtube and am floored with 7 year old bands playing full Metallica songs LOL etc etc....everywhere you turn crazy talent.

The same thing I see happening in sports too...

OR ... maybe another point I'm missing is that these players existed and were not noticed because the net was not showing them off from uploads.... etc. I guess it goes both ways....

It also could be just my age showing and I am starting to slow down :)

Guitar magazines, guitar video lessons and some of them, like Satriani, moonlighted as guitar teachers. Wasn't it Kirk Hammett who said in the mid 80's that they should check out his guitar teacher, Joe Satriani?

If you ever get the chance to read some of the guitar magazines of the 80's and 90's you'll see loads of lessons being offered in the articles, loads of adverts for guitar playing instruction videos and adverts of guitar teachers. I reckon that's probably why so many of the shredders sounded so similar, they were all reading the same mags, watching the same VCR instruction tapes and visiting the same guitar teachers.
 
Guitar magazines, guitar video lessons and some of them, like Satriani, moonlighted as guitar teachers. Wasn't it Kirk Hammett who said in the mid 80's that they should check out his guitar teacher, Joe Satriani?

If you ever get the chance to read some of the guitar magazines of the 80's and 90's you'll see loads of lessons being offered in the articles, loads of adverts for guitar playing instruction videos and adverts of guitar teachers. I reckon that's probably why so many of the shredders sounded so similar, they were all reading the same mags, watching the same VCR instruction tapes and visiting the same guitar teachers.
Yeah I still remember those little sections setup for Joe Satriani lessons and back then I had no clue who he was really until one of the magazines had one of those records in them that you could tear out and I was floored!
 
Guitar magazines, guitar video lessons and some of them, like Satriani, moonlighted as guitar teachers. Wasn't it Kirk Hammett who said in the mid 80's that they should check out his guitar teacher, Joe Satriani?

If you ever get the chance to read some of the guitar magazines of the 80's and 90's you'll see loads of lessons being offered in the articles, loads of adverts for guitar playing instruction videos and adverts of guitar teachers. I reckon that's probably why so many of the shredders sounded so similar, they were all reading the same mags, watching the same VCR instruction tapes and visiting the same guitar teachers.
I took lessons from Doug Doppler for a couple years back in the 90's. He is a former Satch student who took over Joe's students once he got too famous and busy to continue teaching.

I didn't find out until many years later that the little hovel of a building in Berkeley where he taught was Second Hand Guitars, the same place Joe taught his students!

Doug is great and is a teacher at most of the Dreamcatcher events like The G4 Experience and Vai Academy.
 
I just posted in the Cracking the Code thread. That video series is a must if your an 80s fan.

It's also a must if you want to improve your picking technique. His episode on Yngwie is a revelation. I never realized that Yngwie actually does not always pick every note.
 
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