ANVIL – ‘Strength Of Steel’ / ‘Pound For Pound’ / ‘Worth The Weight’ (SPV)
According to the book ‘The Story Of Anvil’, by Lips’ own admission after “three albums and several tours of North America, Europe and Japan” the crab-marching bust-buttering Canadian quartet (the single-monikered singer/lead guitarist and his bandmates guitarist Dave Allison, bassist Ian Dickson and drummer Robb Reiner) “were still a relatively small-time band.” If ‘Hard ‘N’ Heavy’, ‘Metal On Metal’ and ‘Forged In Fire’ were the records that put Anvil on the map, then the next trio of studio releases, now lovingly re-issued by SPV on both CD and coloured vinyl, can best be described as lost gems.
By the time they recorded their fourth studio album (excluding 1985’s cash-in out-take and demos record ‘Backwaxed’) ‘Strength Of Steel’ Anvil had no label, no backing and just their unaccountable faith in the future to carry them forward; in addition, a disastrous stab at hitching a ride on the mid-Eighties commercial metal bandwagon had lost them both a lot of fans and a lot of ground. As a result they wanted to bounce back with something, well, hard ‘n’ heavy. Originally issued in June 1987, ‘Strength Of Steel’ was pretty much panned on its release which is a bit disconcerting as it’s an extremely good album. Ironically, Lips puts some of the blame for the album’s failure on the back cover photo, noting in the book that they looked “too polished and too clean… [Allison’s] hair was too puffy and he was wearing a leopard-print jacket with a red shirt… Robbo was in a red leather jacket instead of a black one… My bondage suit had gone from black to red and [Dickson] was wearing leather trousers and a red-and-black T-shirt with a bandana tied around his arm… The content was tainted by the cover.” Well, maybe; maybe not. Maybe in the critics’ eyes Anvil had just had their one shot at the Big Time and were now filed away under ‘gonzoid vibrator-wielding has-beens’, but in the title track and ‘Concrete Jungle’ ‘Strength Of Steel’ has a cracking pair of openers, and if their cover of ‘Wild Eyes’ and ‘9-2-5’ are pretty weak, and ‘Paper General’ a slowed down version of Priest’s ‘Rapid Fire’, the likes of ‘Kiss Of Death’ and ‘Mad Dog’ redeem the album with slabs of pure metal; and the instrumental ‘Flight Of The Bumble Beast’ is unadulterated genius. Trust me on this.
Given the critics’ reaction to the album it’s unsurprising that lady luck didn’t turn up at the band’s rehearsal studio; but where lesser mortals might have thrown
in the towel, Anvil steadfastly refused to be cowed and tried to flush their disappointment away with ‘Pound For Pound’. Their 1988 release is more of the same, really, with no great surprises, although whereas its predecessor had (just about) nosed into the lowest recorded reaches of the US charts, according to Reiner “the response to [‘Pound…’] had been lukewarm at best. We’d sold a few thousand copies to a cult following of Anvil supporters but nobody else knew it existed”; it didn’t even get a UK release until 1996. That said, ‘Pound For Pound’ certainly isn’t just the Brussels sprout of these three (semi) festive season re-issues (due for release on 23rd January) as there are many treasures to be found on it. ‘Blood On The Ice’ is a cracker, as is ‘Machine Gun’, to name but two. The ensuing tour – named the ‘Rubber Glove’ tour after the album’s ‘Safe Sex’ song – gave rise to the recording of 1989’s live release ‘Past And Present – Live In Concert’ (taken from a show in San Pedro) after which Allison quit, closing the door on an important chapter in the band’s history.
But were they cowed? Were they heck! The advert went something like ‘legendary band Anvil require second guitarist’ and the man who got the nod was Sebastian Marino. A graduate of Hollywood’s Guitar Institute of Technology Marino was a player steeped in technique, and for the first time ever Anvil now had two lead guitarists rather than Lips handling both vocals and leads and Allison just strumming away to the rhythm; and boy did it show. The album that was born from this marriage from heaven, ‘Worth The Weight’, didn’t appear until 1990 (hence, given the cover, the wordplay in the title) but saw Anvil step up to the mark in true metal style. OK, so it owes more to Metallica than Metallica ever owed the Canadians (all right, so Marino is American, but you know what I mean), but the two plank-spankers shared and traded solos like they were long-lost twins. It was also the first album where instead of recoding whole songs the band taped segments individually and then spliced the best takes of each part together to make a whole – which, to be fair, does make some of the songs sound a little disjointed at times. Still, the likes of ‘Pow Wow’ and the opener ‘Infanticide’ ably show off what the new-look Anvil could do, and ‘Worth The Weight’ is one of those albums that can burn paint off a door at sixty paces: check out the pounding ‘Sins Of The Flesh’ or the Megadeth-ish ‘On The Way To Hell’ and feel the shock wave blast the skin from your bones. Unfortunately it wasn’t destined to last. With Marino based in New York, Reiner notes that “long-distance relationships had a habit of not working” and in 1995, as Anvil began working on ‘Plugged In Permanent’, Marino handed in his notice and joined Overkill; a great shame, as had this line-up continued there’s no telling what they might have achieved. As Lips points out, “the finished ‘Worth The Weight’ album was a one-off, something for the real Anvil fan. It was as hard and heavy as we ever got, and many fans said it was their favourite album.” Despite the fact it’s undoubtedly a truly weighty slice of metal it is a real shame that no-one seemed to notice that, on the sleeve, Marino was (and still is) confusingly credited as “lead vocals” rather than lead guitar…
Taken as a triptych these three albums confirm what most people already knew: Anvil were never likely to change the world; Lips’ vocals were an acquired taste; the band wrote some truly cringe-worthy lyrics; and they recorded a fair share of turkeys in their time; but when the band were smoking they were right up there in the big league, if only for four-and-a-half minutes at a time.
© John Tucker January 2012