Suicide Messiah by Black Label Society

I guess I’m very late getting into Zakk Wylde’s band Black Label Society, but I just got three of their albums, Sonic Brew, Shot to Hell and Mafia.

I saw a video of Zakk Wylde ages ago on a Guitarist magazine cover disc and was deeply impressed with his skill.

Then a few months ago I was searching on the iTunes store and came across the Zakk Wylde track Code 19 on the Carmine Appice album Ultimate Guitar Zeus.  This track pootles along fine until the first guitar part comes wailing in.  Without getting too over the top about it, the guitar playing on Code 19 is utterly awesome, my idea of the perfect guitar part.

So for me it all started there, I downloaded a couple more Black Label Society tracks from iTunes but there comes a time when you just need to go out and buy complete CD’s.

One of the things I wanted to do on mymp3s.co.uk was to focus on particular tracks, not just talk about everything an artist does, or complete albums.

And the Black Label Society track Suicide Messiah from their 2005 album Mafia is the track I’m focusing on here.

I don’t know how deliberate it is, but Zakk  Wylde has played in Ozzy Osbourne’s band, and this particular track sounds to me like it was inspired by the Black Sabbath album Never Say Die! (their exclamation mark, not mine).  There is a particular sound and mood on that Sabbath album that I’ve always liked – kind of urban desolate.  Maybe my sense of recognition is something to do with Wylde’s voice, which sounds like the guy from ZZ Top trying to de-skin a plum in his mouth as he sings, but somehow recalls the sound of Ozzy’s voice.

So that particular sound and mood from Never Say Die is taken into other dimensions on this track.  Firstly it is devastatingly heavy.  Turn your MP3 player up full and you feel you could still tweak a few more decibels out of it and it would sound even better.  So if you can pump it through a decent stereo system, go for it!

Next, it’s got some guitar soloing on it, and that’s good news for me. It has become unfashionable for metal bands to have guitar solos, which I think is a real pity.  On this particular song Wylde demonstrates his particular skill for epic vibrato (although I think the sound he achieves on Code 19 is the ultimate example).

Fortunately on this track there aren’t too many pinched harmonics which generally I consider to be an OK sound but Wylde tends to throw them into tracks like sprinkling salt into a vat of McDonalds French Fries.

Something else about this track is that it doesn’t put a foot wrong.  That hardly sounds like an amazing compliment, but actually there are a lot of songs out there that aren’t perfect from beginning to end, you know, tracks where you just can’t bear to play them after a while.

Next in the list of reasons why I particularly like Suicide Messiah is that it sounds like the sort of song that anyone could write.  In reality this is an illusion because the fact is there are very few people that can write a simple song that is actually good.  Especially one that is this good.  But it has the benefit of making you feel there is hope yet, one day you too could come up with an awesome song that would be worthy of public attention.

And because it’s a simple song it doesn’t fall into that old heavy metal trap (think early Metallica or heaven forbid Yngwie Malmsteen) where it has a dozen different phases within the song, a zillion notes, and sounds like too much time was spent writing and practicing it.

Finally I’ll mention the feedback that cuts in about 30 seconds from the beginning of the track.  I love feedback, and this is a particularly good dose – I could listen to it forever…

The band members on the Mafia album were Zakk Wylde (Acoustic Guitar, Bass, Guitar, Piano, Vocals, Talk Box, Artwork, Voice Box, Mini Moog), Nick “ET” Catanese (Guitar, Group Member (when the band plays live), Barry Conley (Buchla Synthesizer, Mini Moog, Piano, OutofControl-atron), James LoMenzo (Bass, Vocals), Eddie Mapp (Mini Moog) and Craig Nunenmacher (Drums, Shaker).