Track #15: "Wrathchild" by Iron Maiden (1981)

Welcome to Track Chatter, where with each post we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we approach the 1980s through examinations of Heavy Metal and Indie music.

Lew: Iron Maiden released their second album, Killers, in February of 1981. In the spirit of Aaron’s observations about his musical taste at the time The Cure released “A Forest,” I should say that I was not aware of Iron Maiden at the time, or even aware that rock music could sound like Iron Maiden. My family was essentially radio-centered – it wouldn’t be until a couple of years later that we would join Columbia House  and start listening to more albums as a family – so my experience of music was pretty well limited to the kind of light rock that one could hear on the radio in Washington County in 1981. I think the heaviest contemporary song that I knew of was probably “Start Me Up” by The Rolling Stones. Also like Aaron, I was a pretty big fan of “Take It on the Run,” which, along with “Kiss On My List” by Hall & Oates, was probably my favorite song. So, with that said, it’s probably unnecessary to note that the New Wave of British Heavy Metal would have been a very unfamiliar concept to me at the time.

As a brief introduction, The New Wave of British Heavy Metal (or NWOBHM, as it’s often abbreviated) was a movement that formed in reaction to two conditions: One, the seminal metal bands of the 1970s, such as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, had generally abandoned their original sound or deteriorated in other ways. Two, the punk movement, which had dominated British rock in the mid-late ‘70s had declined and begun to give way to New Wave and post-punk. NWOBHM bands looked to the original metal bands for inspiration, but filtered those influences through the faster, more urban sounding punk. Where Zeppelin and Sabbath looked to the blues for the foundation of their early sound, NWOBHM bands found a more rock-centered urgency to draw on.

Killers was Iron Maiden’s second album, and their last with original singer, Paul Di’Anno. While Maiden is much better known for their work with Di’Anno’s replacement, Bruce Dickinson, it’s worth noting that the Di’Anno-fronted iteration of the band has several qualities to recommend it. Killers is a rawer conception of the band, and is more related to the punk bands that preceded it, than the band that would record Dickinson’s debut, Number of the Beast, two years later. At the same time, the hallmark Maiden qualifiers were already in place – namely, aggressive bass playing, dual guitar solos, and songs based on literary works and historical figures. The song we’ll be discussing for this entry, “Wrathchild,” sounds distinctively like Iron Maiden, but is a fairly aggressive, concise statement by their standards.




Aaron, a good deal has been made of Iron Maiden’s original incarnation with Di’Anno as being “punkier” than the Dickinson years. As someone who has listened to a fair amount of punk music, how do you feel about that? Do you see any alignment between “Wrathchild” and the punk music of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, or is that comparison exaggerated?

Track #14: "A Forest" by The Cure (1980)

Welcome to Track Chatter, where with each post we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we approach the 1980s through examinations of Heavy Metal and Indie music.

Aaron: Seventeen Seconds, The Cure’s second album, was released in April of 1980. It’s safe to say that I had no clue about the album’s release or the band itself. Looking back, I’d like to think my favorite song of 1980 was AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” but if I’m honest it was probably something like “Take it on the Run” by REO Speedwagon. What can I say, I was young! Nobody I knew listened to The Cure in 1980, none of my friends knew who they were. And it’s pretty likely that very few people in the US knew the band. In the UK, while the band’s early releases couldn’t be considered break-out smashes, the albums did fairly well in the swirling, heady post-punk days when the likes of Goth, New Wave, and New Romantic hadn’t yet ossified into generic convention. Seventeen Seconds reached number 20 on the UK album charts.

It might be worth pointing out that April of 1980 was really only barely the 1980s – so many signifiers of the decade had yet to fall into place. In the US Ronald Reagan was not yet president and in the UK Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister for under a year. E.T. was still two years away, Top Gun six, and MTV wouldn’t debut until the following summer. Pacman was still six months from landing on US shores, and the world had two and a half years to wait for Thriller.

Into this era of transition, The Cure released their second album, approximately a year after their debut, Three Imaginary Boys (which would be renamed Boys Don’t Cry for its US release in early 1980). Seventeen Seconds is often considered the first of The Cure’s “goth” albums – a label front man Robert Smith regularly resists. While the album features drones, spooky sound effects, and some lyrics heavy on gloom and sadness, all hallmarks of goth, it also includes elements of ambient music, shoe gaze, and a sort of Romanticism evoked by Smith’s highly expressive voice.


We've posted the above rather than the original video (which can be found here) because it includes the entirety of the song.

Had I heard this entry’s track for discussion, “A Forest,” in 1980, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have known what to think of it – stupid? boring? – I don’t know. Certainly not for me. Yet listening to it now, one can hear how incredibly influential the sound of early Cure music would become to indie bands from the 1980s and beyond.

Lew, listening to the song in its historical context, it sounds to me like something almost completely new. What do you think? Does “A Forest” sound distinctly ‘80s to you? Can you hear the music to come, or does the song still have a 1970s vibe to it?

Metal v. Indie in the 1980s: Introduction pt 2

Welcome to Track Chatter, an occasional blog where two long-time friends and music lovers geek out about songs. With each entry we choose one track to discuss in depth, from a variety of angles. This entry is part of an introduction to a new series looking at Heavy Metal and Indie songs from the 1980s.

In the first part of the Introduction, we spent some discussing our own thoughts about the '80s - both as we experienced the decade and also through the lenses of history and nostalgia. In this part, we'll talk (a bit) more specifically about the upcoming series and the types of songs we'll be chatting about.

We ended the previous post with Aaron posing three broad categories of pop music from the '80s as something of a loose framework for thinking about how the decade's songs have been treated by history. Lew takes it up from there . . .

Lew: I think your groupings capture what we’ve been discussing quite well. As you say, it might be that one could debate which songs and artists are included in each category, but I think the categories themselves are strong, and probably could be relevant when discussing any decade of music. I also agree with your suggestion that we keep these categories in mind as our discussion moves forward. So, with that in mind, I think we’re in a great place to introduce exactly what we’ve got planned for this project.

We’ve been discussing our experiences with music during the ‘80s (and of the ‘80s), and we’ve both been fairly vocal about what music speaks to us best from the decade, so I don’t think it will be a big surprise that we’re going to be talking metal and indie. They’re two genres that were relatively under the radar at the beginning of the decade (more so in the case of indie, I guess), and enjoyed quite a bit of success in one way or another by the end. It’s going to be interesting to track the evolution of each genre from an internal perspective, as well as the cultural significance that each of them developed throughout the ‘80s. Each of us will select five tracks for discussion, and we’ll roll them out, one at a time. It will be similar to The Beatles project in that sense, except that the artist we’re discussing will change for each entry. Aaron, do you want to say anything about the process that you’ll be using to select your tracks?

Metal v. Indie in the 1980s: Introduction pt 1

Aaron: Welcome to Track Chatter, an occasional blog where two long-time friends and music lovers geek out about songs. With each entry, we choose one track to talk about, from a variety of angles – lyrics, musical style, structure, production, and so on. We’ve recently wrapped up a project in which we discussed one song from each of The Beatles' UK studio releases.

With our new series, we thought we’d go in a slightly different direction – rather than pick one specific artist or band, we’re going to talk about songs from a particular decade: the 1980s. Yes, that overcooked oldie is coming up again. But our hope is that the spin we’re going to put on the discussion will lend it a relevance that a lot of more nostalgic appreciations of the decade don’t always convey. We’ll see.

But before we layout the ground rules of this series – the limitations we’ve imposed on ourselves, if you will – perhaps it’s worth having a chat about the decade in general. Lew, is there anything that can be said about ‘80s music that hasn’t been said already, and maybe hundreds of times?

Lew: You know, my depth of knowledge as regards critical writing on the music of the ‘80s is probably not that deep, so I’m not sure if my perspective is original or not. But, I guess there are a couple of things about the ‘80s as a decade of music that are immediately significant to me. 



First, and probably most obviously, the ‘80s was the decade in which the forms of popular music, which generally still exist and populate the landscape of pop music today, came to full prominence. For example, prior to ‘80s the differentiation between what could be called heavy metal and what would be interpreted as hard rock was not an especially meaningful distinction, with your Thin Lizzies and Foghats occupying a place not greatly removed from Deep Purple or even early Judas Priest. By contrast, by the time Metallica released Kill ‘Em All in 1983, it was pretty obvious that they were doing something quite different from AC/DC. Equally as important, the ‘80s is the first decade in which you start seeing hip-hop emerge as the massive artistic/social/commercial phenomenon that it has been for the last two decades (at least). Those are two strong examples, but one could discuss punk, indie or dance pop and I think the idea that we see those forms evolve to something fairly close to their current iteration during the ‘80s is still apt.