WHAT THEY SAID Brian May: “Freddie would come into the studio with sheets and sheets of paper with notes scribbled all over them in his own particular fashion-not conventional music notation, but As and Bs and Cs and sharps and flats in little blocks, like busses zooming all over his bits of paper. Eccentric British producer Roy Thomas Baker was more than happy to oblige the boys, piling on the overdubs until the analog 16-track tape shed almost all its oxide and literally went transparent. Freddie Mercury’s ambitious, bombastic, campy and grandiloquent compositional proclivities were just the thing to encourage young Brian May’s adventurous ideas about multitracked guitar orchestration. A Night at the Opera was Queen’s fourth album and the disc that established them as a completely unique entity in rock music, quite distinct from the Seventies glam/proto metal pack with which they’d formerly been grouped. It was the first of two Queen albums to be named after a Marx Brothers film comedy. And now, according to Scholz, the album, along with it’s most-solid follow up, Don’t Look Back, sound even better, as they were painstakingly remastered by the guitarist himself for a new set of deluxe reissues. For who but a died-in-the-wool braniac could compose, arrange, record and perform most of the guitar, keyboard and bass parts on an album-in his basement no less-and produce such powerful results? Even 30 years after its original release, Boston is still widely regarded as one of the best-sounding rock albums of all time, and when tracks like “More Than a Feeling” and “Rock & Roll Band” come on the radio, few can resist indulging in fits of fleet-fingered air guitar and a spirited falsetto sing-along. It’s likely this very dorkiness-along with the fact that Boston vocalist Brad Delp had a throat of gold and a staggering range-that engendered Boston’s success. “But somehow I ended up onstage, playing guitar in front of everybody else.” “I was basically a dork that hit the books and liked to build things and did all of the things that you weren’t supposed to do to be popular,” he says. in engineering, who spent his off hours writing and recording in his basement. Scholz was hardly your typical rock-star-in-waiting then 29, he was a gangly project manager for Polaroid, with a Master’s degree from M.I.T. What was positively bizarre was the source of this blockbuster. It may have been unlikely that an album dominated by brawny riffs, harmonized guitar leads and multilayered vocal workouts would capture the imagination of America’s bell-bottomed youth. “But we stumbled onto a sound that worked, and soon everybody was imitating it.” “Everybody thought that it was impossible, because disco ruled the airwaves at the time,” recalls Boston leader Tom Scholz. When Boston's self-titled first album was released in the fall of 1976, few industry insiders thought that a guitar-heavy rock record could make much of a dent in the charts, much less become the best-selling debut of all time. WHAT THEY SAID Mark Morton: “We’ll always be a thrash metal band, but I’m interested in exploring what we can get away with within the boundaries of the genre.” Ashes may be leaner than its predecessors, but its more focused and precise, annihilating like a precision sharpshooter instead of a messy serial killer. Sometimes the axmen riff in tandem, other times they play against one another, but either way, they always demolish. Then came big-budget producer Machine, who worked with guitarists Willie Adler and Mark Morton to excise the extraneous elements without detracting from their jawdropping musicianship. Their previous two albums were musically engaging and technically sophisticated but lacked artistic direction and, just as crucial, financing. Major labels have been known to destroy a band’s soul, but entering the big leagues actually helped Lamb of God deliver their first truly lethal blow.
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