Coming out of my
Hidden ‘70s hangover, I wanted to make today’s SOTD selection as low-effort and high-reward as humanly possible. First I just sat around and played online gin rummy for two hours. That’s always good to clear the head. No, wait, it’s terrible. Around 10:56pm I decided I had to finally extend some effort, so I looked in my music bookmarks and noticed I’d saved something called “
The Greatest 100 Obscure Heavy Metal Albums of the '70s,” a list by a guy named Martin on the well-known site
Rate Your Music, which I haven’t fully decided is helping or hindering the cause. No matter. I haven’t done metal on here in a long time, and this whole reset is one of those things where it might be best if we just blew everybody out of the room and blamed the maid. I figured, let’s not do anything half-hearted now that all my options are in front of me in list form. I went straight for Martin’s #1 obscure heavy metal album of the ‘70s, and found he had named the 1978 debut album by Boston band DMZ as his designate. There was a song on there called “Don’t Jump Me Mother.” Thank you, Martin. Thank you, intellectual exhaustion. I hit play.
You can't call DMZ “metal,” you just can't. Martin needs to reshuffle his criteria. But goddamn were they good. It’s more straight-up late ‘70s garage rock produced by Flo & Eddie, snagged up by Sire Records and left to die in some cut-out bins. They’re great even though they kind of cheated and covered songs by the Sonics, the Wailers and the Troggs — really, if you’re going to A-list yourselves in garage revivalism, that’s the surest-fire way to do it. I’ve provided you with both “Don’t Jump Me Mother” and the album-opening “Mighty Idy” to be your coffee substitute this morning. This comprises the extent of my statement to the press today. Come back tomorrow.
(Note: At the last minute I added “Bad Attitude” to today's lineup because it's utterly irresistible. I'm giving into everything tonight.)
