Repost from September 2006. Freshly ripped in interstellar sound quality. For more of this NWOBHM group, check the recent “Lead Weight” post.
My summer of 1977 came a bit later. I don’t recall whether it was just one single record or much rather a chain of happenings and music that opened my ears to new music (and my eyes to girls). Sometimes I think it was the first Iron Maiden LP that started it all, then again I remember how much Judas Priest’s “British Steel” sounded “new”. But maybe it was the rawer stuff from what was called The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, like the bands on “Lead Weight”, a compilation album from Neat Records. During the summer of 81, I checked out whatever was freshly released and looked un-pop. Be it the Dead Kennedys, Venom, Minor Threat, Killing Joke or else; I liked some better than the other and bought whatever I could afford (and I hated Minor Threat because of the singer). When somebody would tell me that Venom sounded like a bad punk band, I couldn’t care less, like I didn’t give a shit about AC/DC not being “cool” enough for the trendies. One or two years later, when the first storm was over, labels would become more important to me because correct labeling would signify the expert and I wanted to become one. Also, the village in which I was doomed to live, had its first few Punks hanging around. They all went to high school and had nice middle class parents. I hated them all. Living on the countryside, far away from the bigger cities, Heavy Metal was Punk.
BLITZKRIEG impressed me one helluva lot. The song “Lead Weight” still had that 70s feeling but on the same hand already sounded “modern”. The 7″ was of another caliber. Twin guitars, consequent riffing (listen to “Buried Alive” - is that so far from “Hillside Strangler” from The Hollywood Squares?) and a slightly more aggressive singing was of a quality that was unheard of. It’s strange with my taste, I sometimes think: Some old records I like because they sound like they were recorded half an hour ago. Others I appreciate because their sound is deeply rooted within a specific moment in time. BLITZKRIEG belongs to the latter category.
Everybody kept saying how rare this 7″ was, so I just thought I might try and contact the band directly. It was one of my first fanboy letters in english. I sat there for quite a bit of time really, picking word from word from a dictionary I had used years before, when I started teaching myself some english by translating AC/DC lyrics (I never had english in school or later, so blame all my mistakes and bad grammar on those song lyrics). However, to my great pleasure, I received a package a few weeks later with a whole bunch of BLITZKRIEG 7″s, autographs and some stickers. It had worked!
Here’s the complete 7″ for you - and don’t you say this is not spectacularly good!
