The first week of March 1990 was a big week for Japanese metal singles! This is our third Japanese single in a row, and this time it's an all-ladies band! I wasn't aware of Show-Ya until now, but they have a Wikipedia page, so they weren't nothing. In fact, they were around from 1981 to 1998, and they reformed in the 2000s. They're still around now, with all five original members, which is pretty incredible.
This was the final track of Show-Ya's eighth album, Hard Way, released much later on October 24. The album was produced in Los Angeles by Beau Hill, who did production for several major bands. "叫び" (a.k.a. "Sakebi") was apparently the only single from the album. The band then did a "Hard Way Tour," and that was the last time their singer Keiko Terada would perform with them until the band reformed in 2005. She pursued a solo career for about fifteen years.
Personally, I don't think this track is quite as good as the last two blog entries, and the video's not as interesting either. The singer gets so much focus in the video that the rest of the band is barely seen. But it's not terrible by any means.
Next up is one of the biggest songs of 1990, and a personal favorite!
I didn't know there'd be so much Japanese music to talk about here! But I have a real soft spot for Vow Wow (also known as Bow Wow). They were very AOR, but just metal enough to make it on this blog. Their style reminds me of TNT, whom I also love. And this song "Tell Me" is just amazing.
"Tell Me" was the penultimate track from their 1990 album Mountain Top. As far as I can tell, it was the only single from this album. This band goes back to the seventies, and this was at least their seventeenth album. They kept busy for nearly thirty years.
The video is just random studio footage, and videos from driving along Tokyo roads. But it's fun. I enjoy watching these guys doing their thing.
Anthem is one of Japan's great heavy metal bands, formed in the early '80s. "Love on the Edge" was the fifth track on their sixth album, No Smoke Without Fire. It was their first album that wasn't on Nexus Records, instead published by the Music for Nations label. It was their first album without the big time British producer who helped make them big, Chris Tsangarides. It was also their only album with guitarist Hideaki "Shadow Walker" Nakama, and boy, does he light up this music video.
This was my first time seeing this video. The whole band looks and sounds amazing. I don't often see two kick drums used at once. Nakama seems dead set on destroying the entire set and even his guitar, long before the song ends. I like how it turns from day to night halfway through the song.
This band is still kicking around, touring and working on their twentieth album, if I'm counting right.
Ok, that first post was just practice. From now on I'll make sure everything here can be considered metal in some way. This week's track by U.D.O. is at least really heavy rock.
The German band Accept's founding singer, Udo Dirkschneider, left the band in 1987 and decided to put together another band, which he called U.D.O. (it's his name, see?). Their third album Faceless World was released on February 25, 1990, by RCA Records, and "Heart of Gold" was the opening track. The single's B side was "System of Life," which was track 3 on the album.
Faceless World was produced by Stefan Kaufmann, who was Accept's drummer until he injured his back on tour in 1989, which was one reason Accept was on hiatus when this U.D.O. album was released.
If you like Accept, this isn't much different in my opinion. The music video includes a fun cartoon character of the type that was often seen in videos around that time, when combining animation with video footage was all the rage. The animated guitarist, backup singer, and pianist in the video is Mathias Dieth, who played with a few other bands I'm not familiar with including Sinner and Gravestone.
Welcome to my blog that will explore metal singles of the 1990s. I mostly listen to metal with clean vocals, which is what I think of as traditional metal. So here I'll talk about heavy metal, speed metal, power metal, and glam metal.
Although I mostly gravitate toward metal of the 1980s, I decided to focus on the '90s here for a few reasons:
I was born in 1975, and no metal was played in my house until I started playing it myself in the early '90s. So although I heard a lot of '80s metal in the '90s, I was mostly focused on new music back then, and '80s metal is something I had to learn about later on when I became more interested in it.
Metal faded in popularity during the '90s, so there's a lot less to talk about. Trying to talk about all the metal in the '80s seemed too daunting a task, even though I love it!
Metal was going in lots of interesting directions by the time the '90s started, so it will be interesting to look at different sections that had formed and were continuing to form--and I'll only be focusing on a few of them!
Most of my favorite '80s bands were still going strong in the '90s, so I'll get to talk about them a lot!
Also, I'll be focusing on singles rather than albums, simply because it will be a much easier task. I'll be using metal-archives.com as my guide. And this won't be a review blog, just a celebration of metal! And I'll only include songs that I can find on YouTube, to make things easier.
So I'll start with one of the first singles of the '90s.
D'erlanger - Darlin' (January 25, 1990)
This isn't the most metal single to start the blog with! But I love Japanese visual kei and listen to it every day, so it seems appropriate. D'erlanger was very much a metal band in the mid-80s and then morphed into a goth-rock/post-punk band by the '90s. This track has a fast goth-pop/post-punk sound and reminds me a little bit of The Teardrop Explodes, only faster and more...Japanese.
This was track 6 of their sophomore album Basilisk (March 7). D'erlanger started releasing metal demos in 1984 and were very experienced by 1990, but they weren't added to a major record label until after they became a goth rock band. So they were really going places at this time, when Germany's Ariola Records picked them up.
Since the lyrics are in Japanese, I assume the video for "Darlin'" was played mostly on Japanese TV and wasn't seen much by Western audiences until YouTube came along.
