The Plasmatics - Put Your Love In Me: Love Songs for the Apocalypse ♠♠♠♠Punk-O-Rama 6 ♠♠♠♠
Queen - Sheer Heart Attack ♠♠♠♠♠
Queen - A Night at the Opera ♠♠♠♠♠
Queen - A Day at the Races ♠♠♠♠♠
Punkzilla - The Compilation ♠♠♠♠♠
Queen - Live Killers ♠♠♠
The Plasmatics - Maggots: The Record ♠♠♠♠
The Plasmatics - Final Days: Anthems for the Apocalypse ♠♠♠♠♠
My absolute for The Plasmatics and Wendy O. Williams aside, I'll save my thoughts on their discography for later.
Queen. My god, I can't believe I considered selling these albums! "Sheer Heart Attack" is a classic album, notably for basically creating thrash metal with "Stone Cold Crazy". The way the tracks simply roll by as if it's one large piece of music, culminating in "The Lap of the Gods"... orgasmic. Simply orgasmic.
"A Night at the Opera" should easily become required listening for ANYONE with a taste in music whatsoever! The seamless blend of genres, from metal to hard rock to opera to almost everything in between... this album is simply perfect, not one imperfection in sight, and just going from "Death on Two Legs" to "Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon" cracks me up! "Day at the Races" is a decent listen. It falls in the shadow of the monolith that is "Night at the Opera", but still works incredibly well. Lets be honest, here; if you reached the top, your not going to duplicate it the next time around.
Also, yeah, "Live Killers"... that was actually one of the first albums I ever bought in my life, possibly one of my first 100 CD's (I've bought, owned, and sold off a total of over 1100 so far, although that's a bit of an estimate. A good one since I own nearly 1000 right now) when I was 14 in 1999. I was never thrilled with the album but, with time, I've basically got used to it. Queens right about the production, it really falls short. Really, I think if the surviving members of Queen simply went back to the master tapes and remixed and remastered it the result would be a million times better. Damn it, take a cue from Dave Mustaine!
Punkzilla and Punk-O-Rama 6 are really good comps of punk songs, both of them simply just being able to bring about some really great artists and really great songs. Punkzilla actually has material from AFI before they, lets face it, sold out their horror-punk style for commerical succcess. They also have material from The Offspring's S/T disc. Punk-O-Rama has a damn good line-up and, really, it's hard to pick any one band or track since they all seem to kick so much ass!
Finally, the Plasmatics. God-damn these comps are good! "Put Your Love in Me" and "Final Days: Anthems For the Apocalypse" are released under The Plasmatics name, but it can be reasonably argued that these are more Wendy O. Willams comps than anything else. After Coup d'Etat, The Plasmatics, for all intents and purposes, broke-up. The story actually is conflicting; the word from Wendy O and Rod Swanson, Rod being the man who created the band, stated constantly that they simply renamed the band. That, despite the fact that only Wes Beech the bassist and T.C. Tolliver from the Coup sessions as the drummer remained. By the time Maggots: The Record arrived, only Wendy and Wes remained and, really, it was just Wendy being a solo artist using the Plasmatics name. That's another day and another argument.
"Put Your Love in Me" is, in essence, what "Fuck You!!! And Loing It: A Wendy O. Willams Retrospective" should have been instead; Not released under the Plasmatics name but under Wendy's. A little over half of the 11 songs are Wendy's solo-work and the stand out tracks really are from her solo-career. The fact that it starts out with the incredibe song, "Fuck that Booty", just simply makes this a damn good comp.
Meanwhile, "Final Days" is THE defineative Plasmatics comp. It features THE best tracks by The Plasmatics group, from the "New Hope" to "Maggots". These really are the best of the best tracks, and I'm certian that a few of them, such as "Opus in Cm7", were never released before. Throwing in a Wendy O, track from her "thrash" rap-metal album (which actually pre-dates Anthrax's "I'm The Man", depending mainly on who you ask) "Lies", an incredible song that sounds more and more like something recorded today and may had inspired Frank Miller's story line about a "fake president" in The Dark Night Strikes Back, right down to Regan himself!
FIANLLY, Maggots: The Record. I don't have enough room or time to just explain this one, so look for a full review later. It is simply brilliant and stand-out track from this thrash metal opera are "Destoryers", "Propogators", and "Finale".
