Seeking Perfection

As Iron Fist is gearing up for our first full-length album, I started to think about albums that I consider to be “perfect.”  That’s a difficult term to define, because it can mean many things depending on whom you ask.  I certainly have albums that I “love”: Rock and Roll Over by Kiss comes to mind, as does AC/DC’s Back In Black.  But when I got to thinking about criteria by which a “perfect” album might be judged, I came up with an entirely different set of conditions that needed to be met. 

This gets complicated quickly as you consider the makeup of the band.  It’s no secret that the core of the band – myself and Rebel – stretches all the way back to high school.  As we move forward from THIS point, however, it becomes increasingly important to treat IF as a foursome…really five, when you consider the audio expertise that our sound designer Hans brings to the table.  In order to make sure everyone feels a strong sense of ownership in this project, then, we need to multiply exponentially the sound concept of what we’re trying to present.

Hans had a hard time defining “perfection,” but brought up concepts like the relevance of an album, how one that is perfect should be defining, that it should “shape a generation, an artist, a career, a genre, and a fan base.”  To make his point, these are some excerpts from HIS list:

            Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles: “Not only was the music so far from what The Beatles had released previously, it catapulted the musical experimentation that began in the late-‘60s.”

            Master of Puppets by Metallica: “They showed that you can play fast and loud but also have intricate lyrics and music that truly tells a story.”

            Five Man Acoustical Jam by Tesla: “They exposed themselves to their fans and their peers to show their raw talent.  And they didn’t just play the songs acoustically; they rearranged them, made them fit the environment and the performance without losing the emotion and feeling of the original.”

Pappy echoed many of Hans’ ideas, and included the notion that a perfect album should be socially relevant and stand the test of time.  He said that it should be “listenable as a complete album or by individual songs,” and that of course it needed to “pass the 'listen-in-the-car' test.”  He gave me four that conformed to those ideals, in no particular order:  Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen, So by Peter Gabriel, New York by Lou Reed, and American Idiot by Green Day.

Rebel cited the first two Boston albums as his choices for perfection.  He gave a nod to the need for being timelessly classic and relevant.  Working through a list of songs, he demonstrated how Boston deals “with issues of life: relationships, inner peace, working to build a better life, and some good old party songs.”  One thing Rebel mentioned specifically was about the clarity of the music: “vocals are clean and understandable, with JAMMIN’ electric guitars.”  He insisted that, musically, a perfect album must “inspire thought…reflection…evoke feeling.”

Scooby Drew gave the nod to Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti as a perfect album for its demonstration of LZ’s versatility.  He liked the full display of John Paul Jones’ “masterful arranging talent” and the alternation of virtuosity and riff-mastery by Jimmy Page.  He said “what I like most about this album is that LZ moved away from the heavy blues of their earlier albums; while there are obvious blues influences, they don’t dominate.” 

For me, an album that is “perfect” doesn’t necessarily have similarity between all the songs.  I think those songs need to sound cohesive within the context of the overall package, but, as in the case of Rock and Roll Over, the songs have too MUCH similarity.  No matter how I love the record – and I DO! – it’s all one flavor.  Same thing with Back in Black: it’s one scoop of vanilla after another.  It leaves me wanting just a *hint* of chocolate.  Ultimately, that’s what became my defining criteria for a “perfect” album: all the songs had to SOUND like the artist (that’s the cohesion), but there should be many flavors to break up an otherwise dull-sounding sameness.  Coming in a distant second to that – for me – is the sense that I don’t want to skip a single track, that doing so would diminish the majesty of the whole.  Sounds silly in a modern age of being able to pick-and-choose your own playlist on iTunes, but the whole band comes from an earlier time, when the entirety of an album was meant to be a statement.  By this logic, I’d also rule out Def Leppard’s Hysteria, an album that is SO dear to me…and it would be perfect if it was 10 tracks instead of 12.  There are just a couple of songs on there that…well, I could easily skip and still be satisfied.  My list of perfect albums would include:

            Wrecking Ball by Bruce Springsteen: I’m a late arrival to the Boss, but Pappy took me to see this tour and I listened to the album a LOT before the show.  Bruce is a chameleon who’s able to move from fist-pumping rockers to Quaalude-ish waltzes, sometimes from one track to the next.  This whole album just works for me, and I don’t want to skip a single song.

            Destroyer by Kiss: yeah, there had to be ONE on here, right?  The outlandish orchestration by producer Bob Ezrin alienated many fans from the band’s early years, but for me it all worked.  The whole things sounds cohesive, and ballads like Beth and Great Expectations are balanced by stadium-pleasers like Detroit Rock City and Do You Love Me.

            Some Girls by The Rolling Stones: for me, this is the ultimate.  It’s timeless but so much OF its time.  The Stones here present an astonishing cavalcade of personas: hard-driving blues rockers on Lies and When The Whip Comes Down, a honky-tonk country band on Just My Imagination and Far Away Eyes, a white-soul/Motown band for Beast of Burden and Shattered…hell, they’re even a disco quintet with their monster hit Miss You.  THIS is where I’d see Iron Fist end up: as a band that is respected (revered?) enough that they can break out of any stylistic inhibitions and just write and record SONGS.  Cohesive songs.  GREAT songs. 

So this is who we are: Bruce and Beatles, Kiss and Zeppelin, Stones and Boston and Green Day and Peter Gabriel.  Lou Reed.  Can you dig it?  I knew that you could!