Budgie is one of the best forgotten hard rock bands of the 70’s,
\nperiod. Even forgotten might be a bit of an exaggeration since they
\nnever managed to gain more than cult status, particularly in the
\nUS. For years now I’ve been obsessed with discovering more and more
\nbands who were at the cutting edge of hard rock\/heavy metal during
\nits infancy in the early 70’s, after all, Black Sabbath, Led
\nZeppelin and Deep Purple couldn’t possibly have been the only heavy
\nbands at the time.<\/p>\n
Indeed they weren’t, and at their peak, Budgie’s music easily
\nrivaled that of the giants of the genre I just mentioned. Why they
\nnever gained even an ounce of the popularity of lesser bands like
\nUriah Heep is one of rock’s great mysteries…they were stable,
\nsuperb musicians, wrote killer tunes, and churned out a slew of
\ngreat albums for many years, so what happened? They were a highly
\ncreative band with an original sound, and most refreshing of all is
\nthat a good deal of the music is not cliched 70’s rock.<\/p>\n
Think Black Sabbath meets Rush in a way, with bizarre songs like
\n“Crash Course In Brain Surgery” (a song from this debut record that
\nwas strangely included on the cd release of their fourth album,
\nIn For The Kill<\/i>, instead). If you’re a fan of hard rock, you
\nshould love these guys…Metallica have covered a few of their
\nsongs, and that’s probably the only reason anybody even knows about
\nthem anymore; that’s how I first heard of them too. It’s time that
\nthe world finally embraced this unfairly neglected pioneering
\nband.<\/p>\n
The Welsh trio comes blasting out of the gates in their bid to
\nclimb to the throne of heavy superstardom with this immensely
\npowerful self-titled debut, released in 1971. You know that
\npatented really low, downtuned sludgy guitar tone unique to the
\nearly Black Sabbath albums that’s thunderously fuzzy?? It’s all
\nover this record! Was Tony Iommi moonlighting or something? Nope,
\nthat would be the other Tony, Tony Bourge, on lead guitar. Ray
\nPhilipps on drums and Burke Shelley as bassist\/vocalist\/frontman
\nrounded out the original line-up.<\/p>\n
This first Budgie album sounds like a
\nMaster Of Reality<\/i> copy…even the rhythms and the vocal
\nmelodies are astonishingly Sabbathian in nature, especially the
\nsongs “Guts”, “Nude Disintegrating Parachutist Woman”, “All Night
\nPetrol”, and “Homicidal Suicidal”. Most of the songs are epic in
\nlength, with a bunch of really long guitar solos, that while
\nawesomely played, do tend to go on longer than maybe they should.
\nThere is one section during the song “The Author” that speeds up
\nconsiderably, foreshadowing the speed metal approach popularized by
\nthe New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands of the late 70’s and
\nearly 80’s.<\/p>\n
Something Budgie did to stand apart from other heavy bands was
\ninclude a fair number of folky, acoustic ballads on this album,
\nresulting in a bit of a sonic rollercoaster. This is a trend they
\ncontinued on later albums. I’m not a particular fan of Budgie’s
\nsofter moments because to me they have a nasty habit of killing the
\nenergy and momentum of the more powerful tracks, and Burke
\nShelley’s voice doesn’t really seem naturally suited to balladry
\ndue to a thin, high pitched and somewhat whiny delivery. While he
\ndoesn’t really sound like Geddy Lee of Rush, he does remind me of
\nhim more than anyone else.<\/p>\n
To recap, despite all the heaviness contained here however,
\nBudgie isn’t quite as eerie or gloomy as Black Sabbath, but rather
\nmore surreal (as if the song titles didn’t already give that away),
\nand sandwiched in between are a couple of Neil Young style acoustic
\nfolk tracks that might make for some great contrast in some
\npeople’s eyes, but serve as distracting, boring interludes between
\nthe really meaty stuff in my opinion!<\/p>\n
The production is characteristically early 70’s, with that warm,
\nfuzzy low end and the high end a bit low in the mix. That hardly
\nmatters when the material is as consistently strong as it is here.
\nThe self titled debut for Budgie makes a very strong statement
\nindeed, and the band would go on to create some essential early
\n70’s metal albums. So, if you’re like me and have a burning desire
\nto seek out some of the obscure heavy bands of that particular era,
\nthen this is a great place to start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":26244,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6783],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-37466","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-budgie","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37466"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=37466"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=37466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}