The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Discs that slipped our minds
From overlooked oldies to more recent releases which failed to connect – a playlist of 50 lost albums that demand your attention
1960s THE MONKS
Black Monk Time (1966)
In which five American GIs stationed in West Germany cooked up a swampy, subversive garage-rock stew, paving the way for the protopunk of the Stooges. Black Monk Time is the sole studio document of the Monks’ frenetic music, and its mythos as a “lost classic” has only grown with endorsements from everyone from the Fall to Radiohead.
BETTYE SWANN
Make Me Yours (1967)
The now 79-year-old Louisiana songwriter is criminally overlooked among the soul singers of the 1960s. Her debut album was named after her only hit, a swooning slice of southern soul, but there’s plenty more to admire here, from the lithe RnB march of Don’t Look Back to gospel-blues ballad I Can’t Stop Loving You.
OS MUTANTES
Os Mutantes (1968)
What do you get when you splice politically-charged 1960s psychedelic rock’n’roll with Brazilian bossa-nova beats and distorted Portuguese fado guitars? The unforgettable sound of Tropicalia, that’s what. Os Mutantes (“the Mutants”) were Tropicalia’s answer to the Beatles. Their self-titled debut album is a luminous, toe-tapping testament to the genius of the movement which went on to influence David Byrne and Beck, among others.
ROBERTA FLACK
First Take (1969)
There was a time when Flack was considered one of the greatest ever song interpreters, but you don’t hear her gentle, expressive, soulful voice so much anymore. She came straight out of the gates in her early 20s with some of the most luscious and sophisticated jazz soul albums ever made and her 1969 debut is almost supernaturally gorgeous. There is not a moment or note out of place – and what makes it even more extraordinary is that it was recorded in a single 10-hour session.
1970s VASHTI BUNYAN
Just Another Diamond Day (1970) Calling Geordie singer Vashti Bunyan “the female Nick Drake” does her a disservice, but, like Drake, she sang fragile folk music that sold precious few records on its release. Her first single, in 1965, was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (and featured Jimmy Page on guitar). It sank without trace. The delicate songs on Just Another Diamond Day were, again like Drake’s, produced by Joe Boyd and featured string arrangements by Robert Kirby. After the album failed to sell, Bunyan quit music, only to return for two more albums in 2004 and 2014, but Diamond Day has never been bettered.
THE PERSUASIONS
We Came To Play (1971)
This Brooklyn a capella street group applied the styles of doo wop to contemporary pop and soul classics. They were signed by eccentric rock genius Frank Zappa after a record shop owner in New York asked them to sing down the phone to him. The blend of voices is seamless, anchored in the velvet bass of Jimmy “Bro” Hayes, and topped by Jerry Lawson, who has the tone and delivery of a classic soul star. This 1971 set (which includes a tough take on Sam Cooke’s Chain Gang and a sensational gospel makeover of the Beatles’ Let It Be) is astonishing.
HOWLIN’ WOLF
The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions (1971)
Legendary blues veteran Chester Burnett (aka Howlin’ Wolf) slouched into London in May 1970 for a week-long super-session led by guitar hero Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones’ bassist Bill Wyman, and drummer Charlie Watts. But because the Stones were otherwise engaged on the first day of recording, Ringo Starr stepped in, joined, at various points, by John Lennon, David Bowie, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. The result is an album of loose, funky blues, like no other. The word supergroup has rarely been more apt.
ANNE BRIGGS
Anne Briggs (1971)
Anne Briggs might be the most influential British folk musician you’ve never heard of. Bert Jansch called her “one of the most underrated singers”, while Sandy Denny wrote a song in tribute to her talent. Despite the support of her contemporaries, Briggs effectively quit music in 1973 because she didn’t like the sound of her own voice. Her debut album of wistful, Irishindebted folk, proves how mistaken she was.
TERRY CALLIER
What Color Is Love? (1972) Chicagoan singer-songwriter Terry Callier had the uncanny ability to make folk sound like jazz, and give RnB the grandiosity of an orchestral symphony. His soulful vocals hold everything together as clashing musical styles swell and fade around him on this glorious, beguiling 1972 epic.
GUY CLARK
Old No. 1 (1975)
Guy Clark (1941-2016), a wry, thoughtful singer-songwriter whose witty, wise songs have been recorded by the likes of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, was revered in Nashville. A late starter, he was already 34 when he released this pitch-perfect debut. With its fiddles and rustic ambience, literary lyrics and hard-living attitude, Old No.1 pushed against country music’s polished commercialisation
to help establish the Americana genre. Every song sparkles, but the diamond at its heart is the extraordinary Desperados Waiting for a Train, an elegant elegy for an old mentor sweetened by Emmylou Harris’s feather-light backing vocals.
THE CONGOS
Heart Of The Congos (1977)
Jamaican band the Congos put out this roots reggae gem in 1977, when it was instantly swallowed up in the shadow cast by their compatriot Bob Marley’s Exodus album. Produced by their former school friend Lee “Scratch” Perry at his Black Ark studio, Heart of the Congos is carried by the distinct blend of Cedric Myton’s falsetto and Roy “Ashanti” Johnson’s tenor, with additional contributions from Lowell “Sly” Dunbar (from Sly and Robbie) and Gregory Isaacs. The sound quality on most versions of this album is poor, sadly – but the songs (including stone-cold classics Fisherman, Children Crying and Solid Foundation) shine through.
LOWELL GEORGE
Thanks I’ll Eat It Here (1977)
The guitarist and singer from Californian rockers Little Feat made one solo album before his death from a heroin overdose in 1979, aged 34. In their 1970s heyday, Little Feat had a reputation to rival the Band as virtuoso purveyors of a funky, soulful Americana and George really indulges his musical obsessions on Thanks I’ll Eat it Here, a masterpiece of bohemian soul and RnB. His voice is soft and pliable; the playing, immaculate; the mood, mischievous and full of life. If he had lived, George would surely be revered as an all-time great.
WIRE
Pink Flag (1977)
Punk meets art and heart in the debut album from this London quartet. The tunes are short (most come in at under two minutes), the guitars are angular, the vocals gruff. And yet something reflective and unexpectedly warm permeates Pink Flag. Coming out just a month after the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Pink Flag showed a genre already in transition towards the more textured and studious sounds of post-punk.
DOLL BY DOLL
Gypsy Blood (1979)
A lush classic of near-psychotic beauty that sweeps from the tender to the terrifying, Gypsy Blood is a lost masterpiece of British rock, driven by the late, lamented Jackie Leven. The playing is elegantly syncopated, technically impeccable, darkly dramatic, underpinning Leven’s voice which glides from baritone to falsetto, improbably lifted through the hammering drums by five-part harmonies and gospel choirs. Combining the grandeur of Dark Side of the Moon, the strangeness of Forever Changes and the bleak beauty of The Bends, it really is as good as any album ever made.
1980s MINK DEVILLE
Le Chat Bleu (1980)
Willy DeVille’s only hit was Spanish Stroll in 1977, a swaggering, spokenword ramble through the Latino neighbourhoods of New York. A macho dandy in a pompadour and pencil moustache, he had both an air of danger and a vulnerability that comes through in the romanticism of his songs. Le Chat Bleu – the 1980 album from Mink DeVille (for which he had hooked up with his songwriting hero, Doc Pomus, and Elvis Presley’s rhythm section) – shifts through musical gears from the strangled one-chord blues of Slow Drain to the brooding chanson of Heaven Stood Still. DeVille struggled with heroin addiction before dying of cancer in 2009, aged 58.
X
Los Angeles (1980)
This most claustrophobic of debut LPs fixates on the dark side of a sun
kissed Los Angeles, like a Raymond Chandler novel set to music. Here vignettes of violence, dysfunction, emotional illiteracy and cruelty tick by without a flicker of judgment. Tautly produced by former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, this is bracing stuff – nihilistic, atonal, but somehow deeply thrilling.
KING SUNNY ADÉ
Juju Music (1982)
Following the untimely death of Bob Marley in 1981, Island Records added Nigerian “King” Sunny Adé to their roster. Despite an ambitious world tour organised to support this, Adé’s first album for the label, his undulating rhythms and unfettered North African dance stylings failed to resonate with a popular audience. Nonetheless, this is deeply moving music – for your feet, body and soul.
JOHN HIATT
Riding With The King (1983)
Sleek, funny, smart New Wave brilliance from a classy songwriter once hailed as America’s answer to Elvis Costello. Hiatt, a master of the perfectly formed song, is held in higher regard by his peers than the public, including Bob Dylan, who personally asked him for songs during a period of writer’s block in the 1980s. Riding With the King represents Hiatt at his poppiest and punchiest. She Loves the Jerk is an absolute classic of unrequited longing, Lovers Will offers a brooding account of the madness of desire, while the swaggering title song is a chugging blues dream of Elvis as the spirit of American self-delusion.
BOBBY O
Freedom In An Unfree World (1983) Fans of the hi-NRG electro-disco of the Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Bronski Beat and countless others have New York’s Bobby “O” Orlando to thank. The producer effectively invented the genre, defined by propulsive bouncy electronic bass, pounding drums, synth hooks and the liberal use of cowbells. It’s uplifting, camp, exuberant – and impossible not to dance to.
THE REPLACEMENTS
Let It Be (1984)
Tension often creates the best bands. For Minneapolis quartet the Replacements, that tension manifested itself in a sort of alcoholand-drug-fuelled four-way brawl over what the band should sound like. The result is an album of magnificent contradictions, like raucous punk-rock Springsteen, where songs about tonsillectomies sit proudly next to penetrating outcast anthems and tear-jerkers. Anyone who’s heard Kurt Cobain’s impassioned howl will recognise its ancestor in the eye-watering sincerity of Paul Westerberg’s voice.
MICK JAGGER
She’s The Boss (1985)
The solo career of the Rolling Stones frontman is not exactly covered in glory: he never rose to the kind of solo superstar status many (including Mick Jagger himself) seemed to expect. But his first oneman effort remains a weirdly compelling album, arguably more interesting than anything the Stones recorded in the 1980s.
Influenced by the success of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance makeover, Jagger recruited Chic super-producer Nile Rodgers alongside jazz and funk giant Bill Laswell to help him tackle the rigid grooves, hard drum sounds and stabbing synths typical of the decade. Jagger is on fierce vocal form, and there is one great ballad, Hard Woman, that could have been a Stones classic.
ERIC B & RAKIM
Paid In Full (1987)
The debut album from New York duo Eric B and Rakim is one of the most influential hip-hop records of all time. Rakim’s suave, meticulous delivery and razor-sharp wordplay set the bar for rapping, while Eric B’s heavy use of soul-funk sampling (the Jackson 5, James Brown, Funkadelic) established this as the go-to bedrock of hip-hop. And you can dance to it all.
THE TRIFFIDS
The Black Swan (1989)
A baroque pop masterpiece from an Australian post-punk band who never achieved the success they deserved, The Black Swan is built around the melancholic, elegant, eccentric and prolific songwriting of Dave McComb. The Triffids were much admired by peers, including Nick Cave and Michael Hutchence of INXS, and this, their fifth and final album, was their best. The warm sound encompasses country, jazz, hip-hop, rock, cabaret, synth pop and opera, where instruments including bouzouki and accordion jostle with acoustic guitar, hip-hop beats and the fragile voice of McComb, a
troubled character who died in 1999, aged 37.
THE WEDDING PRESENT
Ukrainian John Peel Sessions (1989)
Taking the blisteringly fast guitar of indie favourites the Wedding Present and applying it to Ukrainian folk music sounds like a bit of a weird idea. But it’s exactly what the band did in the late 1980s, on a record that started as three separate sessions for Radio 1 DJ John Peel. The band’s guitarist Peter Solowka (whose father was from Kyiv) left the Wedding Present soon after its release and formed the Ukrainians to continue in this vein. The new band, which recorded Ukrainian versions of Smiths, Sex Pistols and Velvet Underground songs, were astonishing live.
LAURIE ANDERSON
Strange Angels (1989)
A lush, relatively straight-up pop album from a highly unlikely source. For Laurie Anderson, who made her name as an experimental performance artist and sometime avant garde musician in 1970s New York – scoring an unlikely chart hit with the austere, spoken-word electro of O Superman back in 1981 – Strange Angels was a complete departure. Here, her emotive singing has a rhythmic, almost chatty intonation that recalls Paul Simon, while the music is grand and immaculately produced. The delightfully poppy result may be considered a guilty pleasure by die-hard Anderson fans; for everyone else, it’s just a pleasure.
1990s THE JAYHAWKS
Hollywood Town Hall (1992)
This Americana classic sits somewhere between the ragged simplicity of Harvest-era Neil Young and the honeyed country-tinged harmonies of The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo. But Hollywood Town Hall by Minneapolis band the Jayhawks also sounds unique, thanks to glorious harmonising by Mark Olson and Gary Louris. If songs are ever able to “ache”, then here is where they do it. The harmonica and organ-soaked Crowded in the Wings is liable to reduce the hardest heart to jelly, while Take Me With You (When You Go) is outright devastating.
JELLYFISH
Spilt Milk (1993)
The second (and final) album from the profoundly promising San Francisco rock group Jellyfish emerged like a tie-dye trifle made up of the best bits of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Queen and Supertramp in an era whose pre-eminent American rock bands hated themselves and wanted to die: Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Upon its release, Spilt Milk limped into the US album chart at number 164, but today, at last, the LP is recognised by a growing constituency as being one of the most overlooked of the late 20th century – an album that features not a single weak moment.
LIZ PHAIR
Exile In Guyville (1993)
Liz Phair’s shape-shifting alternative rock, lo-fi folk and off-kilter altcountry continues to dazzle and surprise to this day. But she’ll never top her gutsy debut album, which mixed the tunes and temper, songs and sorrow to stunning effect. Deliciously filthy, it has a “riot grrl” instinct to offend – or maybe just a human knack for talking about love and sex and feelings without sanitising the truth.
DREADZONE
Second Light (1995)
The second album by British group Dreadzone is a captivating collage of dub, reggae, ambient and dance music. Second Light’s canvas is gloriously broad: it also takes in Celtic and Indian music, sea shanties, poetry and ample sampling (including snippets from Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Before Long and Lindsay Anderson’s film if…), as befits a band that was a splinter group from Mick Jones’s sampleloving Big Audio Dynamite. On its release Second Light stood as a joyous, even blissed out, snapshot of modern multicultural Britain, and it still sounds thrilling today.
MOBB DEEP
The Infamous… (1995)
A hip-hop fan favourite, though you’d have been forgiven for missing this as it limped its way to an almost laughable 111 on the UK chart. The menacing portrayal of New York street life from rappers Havoc and Prodigy is both matterof-fact and wide-eyed, cutting through the stately thump of the beats and dissonant screeches and whirrs of the samples.
SCREAMING TREES
Dust (1996)
Before the late Mark Lanegan became a gravel-voiced troubadour, he sang an octave higher with grunge pioneers Screaming Trees. Dust was their seventh album, and a last throw of the dice. Haunted by the death of his friend Kurt Cobain in 1994, Lanegan here showed the first signs of the depths he would bring to his solo career, summoning a vision of their home city as a ghost town on Dying Days, contemplating a world changed irrevocably by loss on Sworn and Broken and seeking personal salvation in love on Look at You. The sound is big, muddy and heavy, marrying grunge to 1960s pop influences to create a stadium-sized epic of emotional sensitivity and soulful beauty.
TONY! TONI! TONÉ!
House of Music (1996)
The fourth and final album from this family trio (comprising two brothers and their cousin) is a perfect conflation of old and new; both a sweet kiss off to the vintage sheen of classic, swinging Motown, and a look forward to future splicing of hip-hop and rap with gospel and RnB. It’s hardly surprising, then, that singer/bassist Raphael Saadiq went on to play his part in co-writing or producing some of the finest neo-soul albums of the past 20 years, from D’Angelo’s Voodoo to Solange Knowles’s A Seat at the Table.
2000s NO DOUBT
Return Of Saturn (2000)
Forget 1995’s Tragic Kingdom, which provided international radio with two eternal hits in the form of Just a Girl and Don’t Speak. Return of Saturn, No Doubt’s fourth album, sees singer Gwen Stefani delve deep into her psyche to deliver some of her most personal lyrics – about growing up amid the relentless pressures of fame. It’s refreshingly grungy stuff, and far less saccharine than the band’s better known earlier output.
JACKIE LEVEN
Creatures Of Light And Darkness (2001)
Jackie Leven’s rich folk-rock music and intelligent arrangements remain woefully underrated. He’s a sort of new wave Scottish Leonard Cohen: clever, poetic, romantic, dark and beautiful, if not exactly mainstream. Leven had a colourful life: he was almost strangled in a street assault in 1984, leaving him unable to speak for almost two years, and he battled heroin addiction before dying of cancer in 2011, aged 61.
RX BANDITS
The Resignation (2003)
A combination of twitchy ska, dub reggae, pop-punk and progressive rock may sound like the stuff of nightmares. But The Resignation, from Californian quartet Rx Bandits, comes up trumps. Recorded mostly live in the studio, the album fizzes and pops with rousing hooks, loud-quiet dynamics and right-on lyricism, all underpinned by impressive technical mastery. It’s an album quite unlike anything you’ll have heard before.
THE POSTAL SERVICE
Give Up (2003)
The Postal Service was a collaboration between Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie and producer Jimmy Tamborello, quaintly named after the pair’s habit of sharing musical ideas via snail mail. Their only album, Give Up was a mix of indie pop and electronic music, with Tamborello’s warm, looping, expansive soundbeds providing the perfect foil for Gibbard’s lovelorn laments and literary pretensions.
CANDI STATON
Candi Staton (2003)
Candi Staton may be best known for Young Hearts Run Free and You Got the Love, but this album features her earlier output from the fabled Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It’s gritty and desperately funky Southern soul, and easily gives Aretha Franklin’s Atlantic output a run for its money. Staton’s voice is both powerful and vulnerable across 26 tracks that deal with desire, love, heartbreak and (lots of ) cheating. The highlight is her cover of Harlan Howard’s He Called Me Baby, which has a bassline so outrageous it should come with a health warning.
BOOMCLICK
Halfway Between Tomorrow And Yesterday (2004)
The genre of “chill” music is always attached to a handful of “defining” albums: Air’s Moon Safari, Goldfrapp’s Felt Mountain and Moby’s Play among them. This rarely mentioned album deserves to be up there. Musicians and sometime DJs Sam Johnson, Rui Teimao and Paul Burnley combined lush hooks, intricate textures, glitchy sonics and ingenious loops on songs that you could hum. Almost two decades on, the album is still full of little surprises. It yields something with every listen.
RANDY
Randy The Band (2005)
There is a parallel universe in which Randy are the most popular band in the world. Never mind that the group’s name is an all-time clanger. Do not fret that its four members look more like a leatherjacketed chorus line from an amdram production of Grease than bona fide musical contenders. Because the 15 songs on Randy The Band, the group’s third and final LP, are as fine a slice of white-breadred-meat rock ’n’ roll as any released this side of the millennium.
FOXBORO HOT TUBS
Stop Drop And Roll!!! (2008)
Such were the levels of insanity to which Green Day were busy driving themselves in an attempt to write and record a capable successor to their 14-million selling punk rock opera American Idiot that in December 2007 they decided to become a different group altogether. And thus, in a flurry of activity intended to recharge jaded batteries, Foxboro Hot Tubs were born. If reports that Stop Drop and Roll, to date the group’s only album, was both written and recorded in a single day sound dubious, it’s only because it’s difficult to imagine anyone marshalling songs of this quality in such a short space of time. But as drummer Tré Cool once noted, watching singer and songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong compose music “is the closest thing to magic you will ever see”.
MADNESS
The Liberty Of Norton Folgate (2009) Despite a legacy as a British singles band that ranks second only to the Beatles, Madness’s finest hour came in the form of an album released 33 years after their formation in Camden Town. So good, in fact, is The Liberty of Norton Folgate that, as well as being the Nutty Boys’ best work, it is the equal of any LP released by an English band this century.
2010s JANELLE MONÁE
The ArchAndroid (2010) Kansas-born Janelle Monáe kickstarted the 2010s futuristic soul movement with this grooving, eclectic, semi-psychedelic pop album which was a minor hit in the US but all but overlooked on these shores. The ArchAndroid purloined bits of Prince, Bowie, Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu to deliver a bombastic sonic tapestry through which Monáe interwove an intricate sci-fi concept story.
ARCTIC MONKEYS
Suck It And See (2011)
When critics talk about the Sheffield indie band’s back catalogue, Suck It and See often gets passed over in favour of their ferocious best-selling debut Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, 2013’s era-defining, anthemic AM, or their two most recent – and disappointingly weak – records. Yet this was the album that heralded Alex
Turner’s transformation from spotty teenager singing about girls and Adidas tracksuits to LA rock star, before the later pretentiousness set in. The hooks on tracks such as Black Treacle and She’s Thunderstorms are irresistible, while Love is a Laserquest remains the most romantic song Turner has ever written.
THE LEISURE SOCIETY
Into The Murky Water (2011)
The Burton-on-Trent band’s second LP is an ambitious orchestral opus, jam-packed with melody and glorious harmonies. This timeless album also contains myriad classical elements and brims with drama, confidence and unexpected moments that stick with the listener. Beautifully contained and never overblown, it’s easy to listen to but far from easy listening.
JOANNA NEWSOM
Divers (2015)
With Divers, the Californian singer, songwriter, pianist and harpist finally delivered an album of blissful songwriting to match her virtuoso musicianship. It’s difficult to overstate quite how exquisite it sounds. Let it ebb and wash and twinkle in the background as melodies coruscate through the dense jazz-folk-pop arrangements. Pore over the lyric sheet as it attempts to untangle the mores of death and human duty. Only the stoniest of hearts will fail to swell.
NONAME
Telefone (2016)
A product of a then-burgeoning Chicago hip hop scene, Fatimah “Noname” Warner offers an ultrapoetic, feminine counterpoint to the sterling work of Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa and the rest. Telefone’s gentle, gospel-infused groove and sing-song rap style is as easy-listening as hip-hop gets, while the fluid rhymes tackle weighty issues (abortion, historic racial abuse) alongside lighter coming-of-age themes.
2020s WALT DISCO
Unlearning (2022)
With their adventurous debut, Unlearning, the Glasgow six-piece Walt Disco reimagined glam rock for the modern age. At the heart of the band is vocalist James Potter, who romps through every song with Shakespearean flair, channelling the vibrato of Bowie, while also tapping into the unmistakeable 1980s influence of Visage frontman Steve Strange. The rest of the band matches Potter with arrangements that are stacked with layer upon layer of instrumentation and samples to create an exhilarating, utterly glamorous sound.
DUKE GARWOOD
Rogues Gospel (2022)
Precious few blues desperados wander the pop landscape these days, but south London’s 54-yearold unsung master Duke Garwood has carved out a singular voice in isolation, his smoky, nocturnal sound and quietly intense purr mesmerising a cult listenership. Hypnotic picking and jazzy brushstrokes are textured throughout with cryogenically understated organ and, on the penultimate track Whispering Truckers, fathoms-deep saxophone, all contributing to that droning meditative version of blues which almost seems to transcend time itself.
BABY ROSE
Through And Through (2023)
Baby Rose (real name Jasmine Rose Wilson) has one of those other-worldly voices that takes your breath away. Expansive, husky and with a velvety depth that belies her 29 years, the Atlanta-based artist sounds just like a next-generation Nina Simone. Melding soul, stirring rock, upbeat RnB, psychedelic funk, pop and more to create her own distinct sound, Wilson writes about her own insecurities and lost loves – ultimately, this is a record about healing and figuring out life, with all its heartbreak, on your own terms.
AVENGED SEVENFOLD
Life Is But A Dream… (2023)
Even in a musical genre committed to seeking out new ways to make a racket, Life Is But a Dream…, the eighth album from Californian metal rockers Avenged Sevenfold, is a work of remarkable invention. It’s almost as if the quintet came to the conclusion that, since no one buys records anymore, they may as well produce something that will thrill, confuse and alienate their audience in equal measure. This they managed to do with 11 songs that mix together pop, lounge music, hip-hop, dance, speed metal, classical, and God knows what else into a somehow seamless brew. In lesser hands, it would have been a disaster. Instead, A7X, as they are known to their friends, have made the best metal album of the century.