Cameron Carpenter: The ABC’s Of Rock’n’Roll – U Oughta Know

 

I don’t know if we are on vacation this week or not but a column in hand is worth two on the hard drive. Hard to tell where I am in the alphabet right now but I think U will work as I wrote about television last week.

Now U is not the most rock’n’roll letter in the alphabet and the list of band names is pretty low. Many would argue that the world’s greatest band, U2, makes up for the lack of overall U numbers but I would disagree. Outside of “I Will Follow” and a couple of good moments on “The Joshua Tree” I never was really taken with the band, or their sound.

Cameron Carpenter: The ABC’s Of Rock – Heavy Metal Thunder

Defining what constitutes heavy metal is now damn near impossible. Much like the debate on what is or is not classic rock there are not set guidelines. In the seventies heavy metal was pretty easy to define: fast, hard rock, blues based and guitar dominated. Bands such as Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin were the poster boys for the genre.  Things changed in the late seventies with the introduction of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. Post punk bands relied less on the blues and performed a faster more aggressive version of metal.

Cameron Carpenter: The ABC’S Of Rock – U

O Y this week I have an I on U.

Ultravox! (Not to be confused with Ultravox. Well maybe a little)

I feel sorry for those who never got the chance to discover a band on the strength of their album cover alone. You would walk in to a record shop, grab the new releases you came for, spend a good 20 minutes thumbing through the delete bins (for your 99 cent specials) and then graze the racks for something that caught your eye, The graphic was so big, and the information on the back was readable so you could usually get a decent indication of what the artist was all about.