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Anvil’s comeback has been heartwarming. After a well-received documentary (reviewed here) — which unintentionally doubled as a massive promotional campaign — the band’s latest album, This is Thirteen, will get a proper label release (September 15, on VH1 Classic). Anvil will also open in US stadiums for AC/DC, whose Highway to Hell turns 30 today.
In a press release about these successes, one paragraph stood out:
“This is Thirteen is more like our first three albums,” says Lips [Kudlow, singer/guitarist], “which represent our real identity. For many of our albums, we went on an ‘integrity hunt’ instead of on a ‘commercial/radio hunt,’ so we became extremely inaccessible to radio. This time, we stepped back and said, ‘What were we originally?’ And we rediscovered ourselves, I suppose.” [Robb, drummer] Reiner adds, “There are three tracks that in my opinion, are definitely 100% AOR/hard rock/commercial radio tracks — ‘American Refugee,’ ‘Flying Blind,’ and ‘Feed the Greed.’ Catchy melodies, incredible drum feels — they just all rock.”
So the band lost integrity by searching for it. Ballsy for it to say that its heart lies in the commercial realm. AOR? As in Foreigner and Journey? Then again, Anvil comes from a time when hard rock and heavy metal got more radio play. KISS, AC/DC, Van Halen, and Judas Priest weren’t far removed musically, and sometimes toured together. Many hold up Anvil’s first three records as true metal. The band considers them pop. Who’s right?
That was the one part of an otherwise excellent movie that really stuck in my craw, Lips's & Reiner's delusional shopping of the album to major labels. After so many years in the business you'd think they'd be smarter than that, especially these days when the record industry is tanking.
On the first albums, in their early eighties context, they were shocking and transgressive. If it was meant to be a stunt for them to get played on the radio, I'm not sure they got it right. Transgression is a quality that while not completely alien to pop music certainly isn't its exact forte, and when it exists its tempered by other populist concerns, made palatable with a measure cup. Even if unintentionally, stage presence and force of steel made them appear as something like Canada's answer to Venom, they weren't very 'measured' at all. As time went by and they kept doing variations of the same thing the progression of their wider context painted them as a tamer band. Still, I don't know if Lips dressed in drag and playing guitar with a vibrator while singing songs about underage sodomy is exactly radio friendly even today, but the American market is kinda strange and could sell that under specific circumstances.
If we take Twisted Sister as a commercially successful band then and call them a pop band exactly due to numbers grossed, then by the same standard I can see how Anvil might have been wanting to be a pop band too.
But is that enough? Pop music as a matter of intention? Would Marylin Manson still be a pop artist if he had never hit it big and were putting out the exact same records (I know his records are very informed of his success, but bare with me here) that sold 500 copies each? He very clearly wants to be consumed widely and be popular, but is that the dominant quality that makes something 'pop', or is it the adherence to populist conventions when composing material and shaping aesthetics? Perhaps both? Does it really follow that when an artists craves popularity, they are more determined to shape their material in a way that will ensure it? Most industry-savvy types would say it's more a matter of marketing, more how the new sound can be sold than it is about self-awarely making making music that people already expect.
The American music market is very interesting because it insists on these 'trend jumps' where every 5 years or so it appropriates a few nascent music scenes that are pushing boundries and sells them wholesale, in the process robbing them from their embryonic innocence, making them self-aware. Send in the clowns. Then when time's up they're discarded for the newest new thing. Heavy Metal certainly had this done to it and for about 5 years, playing music like Anvil's could be considered to be a populist venture. After they were left behind in obscurity, not so much. Now that the industry is resurrecting straighter forms of HM (straighter than new metal and metalcore, I mean) for another round of voracious necrolatry, Anvil stand another brief chance to call their music 'pop'. But would it be considered calculating on their part that they toughed it out for so many years doing the same thing while mostly unsuccessful, or is it more the case that they were oblivious to how the market works?
At first I thought you were talking about the Clevo band, and I was getting ready to fight.
i too thought it was about dwid and his infamous horde.
As someone who was in the Canadian metal scene around the time of the first three Anvil albums, I have to say that I have no idea what the commenter named "Helm" is talking about.
Anvil were never comparable to Venom. That is probably the fucking craziest thing I have read all week! A Canadian version of Venom? Seriously? I think a much more comparable UK band, if you need one, would be Raven.
If you go back and listen to Anvil's debut album, originally released independently under the name Lips, it is a much more commercial, hard rock/metal album that's obviously influenced by 70s hard rock ala Cactus, UFO, Scorpions, Ted Nugent,AC/DC. The band really became a metal band with the release of Metal On Metal on Attic Records (already the Canadian home to early releases by Riot, Motorhead, Judas Priest, etc). Anvil were Attic's homegrown metal band and I am sure that it was the NWOBHM explosion of 1980-81 that was infuencing Anvil much more than Venom (who were considered much like my beloved Voivod to be laughable to most of the metal fans of the world at that time. They really didn't start to get popular until 1985, although Possessed was a major letdown after the previous three albums).
Venom albums weren't released nor widely available in Canada until the Canadian metal imprint Banzai started licensing them from Neat Records in 1984. Unless you lived in a major city and were shopping in Rock En Stock in Montreal or the Record Peddlar in Toronto you probably only knew of Venom from reading about them constantly in Kerrang!.
Anvil were striving to be next to the Iron Maidens, Scorpions, Judas Priests, Budgies of the world. Raven were pretty much in the same boat. I feel pretty comfortable in that statement.
Sean – Thanks for the invaluable historical context. I myself only know Metal on Metal and Forged in Fire, so evidently I should hear the first record as well for comparison.
Sean: by the Venom comparison I do not mean that they were influenced by them directly (perhaps they didn't even know of them when they were making Forged In Fire) but that their stage persona and thematics were comparatively extreme. Thanks for the information, though.
Wow.