52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #15

Machine Head – Burn My Eyes

(Roadrunner, 1994)

Buy the album here

1994: corruption, racism, hate.

The church has failed.

If Jesus came down, he’d be shot.

These words blew my mind.  Machine Head were like nothing I’d heard before.  The second metal band I found, after the obvious Metallica moment of my youth, and they were talking about the world as it was right then!  And spitting venom as they did.  Recorded to make it feel like a newscast from the riot-ravaged streets of LA, this opening line to “Old” transported me to a world where all the things I’d grown up believing – Christianity, the world being a fair place, and other middle-class norms – would be challenged or even permanently erased.  From the moment I looked at the twisted, industrial Dave McKean album cover the experience was visceral, uncomfortable at times, and insanely addictive.  Unsure of what I thought on first listen, there was a burning need to revisit time and again to understand what was going on, what made these guys so angry, and how anything could be so heavy.  These were the first forays into what felt like some bizarre underground scene for teenage me, and while that perception quickly shifted over the coming years, that feeling of newness, fear, and excitement still strikes me when I listen to this record.  Burn My Eyes will always be one of my favourite metal albums.

I vaguely remember seeing the video for “Take My Scars” (from the following album) on ITV’s Chart Show (!!!), and being hooked by this grainy, dirty, playing-under-a-freeway aesthetic that I hadn’t seen before.  Machine Head carried a street-smart vibe that seemed completely alien for a middle-class kid from northeast Scotland.  This vibe infuses Burn My Eyes with an edge of authenticity and reality that makes every vaguely politicised track hit home harder.  “Block” is a prime example of this.  It comes scratching into existence on a gigantic, earth-shifting rhythm section intro with electric guitars barely able to contain their energy.  The thrash-punk attack that follows stands as a flag of resistance to the inequities and damage that modern capitalism wreaks, and encapsulates the wide-ranging rebellion against the mainstream that Machine Head were trying to embody.  From poverty to pollution via drug addiction, “Block” is a catch-all neo-thrash anthem of rebellion, and the perfect way to conclude the album.

What precedes it was just as vital back in 1994, and still feels fresh to my ears now.  While there are a couple of slightly lower points on the record – “A Thousand Lies” suffers from following the eventually iconic opening tracks, and its rap-inspired verse vocal and the accompanying lyrics are not good, while “I’m Your God Now” just feels lazy – even they work to provide balance to an otherwise non-stop onslaught.  On an album that is mostly famous for its opening duo of “Davidian” and “Old”, and perhaps rightly so, it’s impressive to note that the best tracks here are “None but My Own” and “Blood for Blood”.  The former begins as a mid-paced celebration of piercing pinched harmonics before working itself into a thrashy lather with traded solos from Robb Flynn and Logan Mader.  The final outro is a frantic thrash attack fuelled by Chris Kontos’ perfect modern metal drumming, and charged with the mantra-like words, “my heart bleeds for none but my own”.  The latter sets out to be as harsh on the ears as possible with droves of distorted sounds crashing in on top of one another, until Flynn’s count of “1-2-3-4-GO!” clears the way for another neo-thrash riff backed by pummelling drumming that had insane mosh pits breaking out wherever Machine Head played.  With Kontos on top form, bassist Adam Duce’s backing vocals setting the tone, and Flynn and Mader trading the most interesting solos of the album, “Blood for Blood” is Machine Head at their most focused and effective.

And that’s how I feel about this record as a whole.  Machine Head have journeyed through the sub-genres of mainstream metal with accompanying highs and lows in their critical and commercial success.  The nu-metal laughability of Supercharger was probably a low point for most Machine Head fans, while those same fans will probably hold the following two albums in high esteem thanks to the Gothenburg stylings and improved songwriting.  But as good as Through the Ashes of Empires and The Blackening are, they simply don’t have the same honest energy, focus, and likeability of Burn My Eyes.  Like the humanoid figure on the cover, this album crackles with electricity and captures the desire to keep thrash alive in the 90s when many bands were going the other way.  In “Blood for Blood” and “Block” you couldn’t find a better jolt of electricity to awake a genre that had, just ten years prior, changed the direction of heavy music forever.