118. Blue Cheer - Vincebus Eruptum (January 1968)

 

1. Summertime Blues*

2. Rock Me Baby

3. Doctor Please*

4. Out of Focus

5. Parchment Farm

6. Second Time Around

B

There are two problems with this album. Firstly, it only makes sense when under the influence. The first two times I listened to it, it left me cold. The third time I had a bottle of wine and it was... ok, I guess. The second problem is that this album is basically just background music for getting fucked up. I can't imagine anyone having any more fun than I did sitting down sober and trying to listen through it on headphones.

That said, some albums are important because of inherent quality, while others are important because of the ideas they contain. And this album is obviously a massively influential one. Of the stuff we've had so far, only Hendrix and Cream come close to matching the sheer thunderous madness of this album. The idea is a simple one, but it works - take a bunch of your favourite blues tunes, crank the volume up to one million and eleven, and play as sloppily and crazily as you can manage. Vincebus Eruptum has been called the first metal album, and while it honestly doesn't sound much like metal (aside from a couple of riffs that show up which have a distinct Tony Iommi flavour) the volume and rawness of the music were an obvious influence on the emerging metal scene. It's a long way from this shit to something like At the Gates, but the swirling, primal guitar solos and crunching riffs point the way forward towards a new era of heavy rock.

All said and done, though, I didn't much care for this. Like I said, it makes good background music when you're lit, but I doubt I'll ever feel the need to come back and listen to it again. I mean, the Stooges did this sort of thing much better, and if I'm being honest then aside from a handful of songs I don't even like them very much.

It must have been pretty amazing when it first came out, though. The sheer audacity of approach must have floored people. But unfortunately something being the first doesn't make it the best, and what floored people in 1968 is probably going to make people who grew up with punk and hardcore and noise and NWOBM just sort of sigh at it's quaintness. But then again, it's possible that without Vincebus Eruptum and things like it, none of those things would have come to pass (or at least in the form they have now).

So, yeah. This is a decent album, a very important album, but not something anyone who actually likes heavy metal would be that impressed by, in my opinion.