Theme: Red White and Blue - Judas Priest
I slept on Saxon for far too long primarily because their classic era never really grabbed me all that hard. Despite being renowned as the most quintessentially English of bands, the NWOBHM leading lights spent half the 80s courting an Americanesque blues-rock biker bar band image and the other half trying to fit in with the hairsprayed Sunset Strip set. Then in the 90s, when many metalheads tried to go grunge, they circled back round to the pure trad metal groove they ought to have been ploughing all along, until finally hitting their belated peak in the 2000s.
2001's Killing Ground through 09's Into the Labyrinth is the true triumphal and definitive run of Saxon albums (I want to throw 2013's Sacrifice in too but 11's relatively meh Call to Arms breaks the streak). The fact it's rare for a band to get noticeably better by their third or fourth decade (their debut dropped in 1979) seems counterintuitive only when you think about it, which I guess means it's not actually counterintuitive, but it should be, because in principle you should get better at something the longer you keep doing it, but in practice this is seldom the case, perhaps because the Muse bores of her vessels as they age.
But Saxon, workmanlike and undeterred, just kept doing their schtick until refining it to perfection. There's little experimentation with song structure or fancy-schmancy production tricks, just the right pick-and-mix of epic anthems ("Deeds of Glory", "Lionheart", "Battalions of Steel" and "English Man o' War" are like a steel-toe-capped boot to the skull of le grimdark peepeepoopoo irony dork pop historiography), viciously menacing shredfests ("Demon Sweeney Todd", "Witchfinder General" and "Attila the Hun" are just plain savage), and endearingly funny bitching about speed c*meras and traffic ("Slow Lane Blues" and "Going Nowhere Fast", respectively, to which canon of grievances we must add Sacrifice's perfectly self-explanatory "Standing in a Queue"). You might wonder how well an album vacillating between the transcendent and the mundane holds together, but I routinely spin this whole era back-to-back on a lengthy drive or while I'm editing my drawings, and I scarcely skip a track.
Therefore, good reader, don't give up on your guitar/drawfagging/unicyclage, for the best, like your girlfriend, might be yet to come. Need I remind you I myself have yet to reach my third decade of blöggotry?
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