Alright man, this was a hard one.


This one took a while because yea, I listened to every single Machine Head album.
Let the gravity of that statement sink in for a minute.

I listened... to EVERY SINGLE... Machine Head album.

Okay, I’m gonna start this off with the story of when I first heard Machine Head. I used to frequent guitar player chat rooms on Yahoo Chat where 40+ year old men would play guitar into their onboard microphones to impress pre-teens like myself on the internet, it was like the late nineties equivalent of inviting people to like your band on Facebook for the third time. I was hanging around one day and I saw some guy talking about this band called Meshuggah and how they used seven string guitars that sounded like typewriters, I fucking HAD to hear this. I opened Morpheus and set a Meshuggah song called ‘Sickening’ downloading before school. When I got home I listened to it and it was the most fucking incredible thing I’d ever heard. It was punishing man, super precise thrash with hardcore influences full of so much actual aggression. Not long after that I ordered the Contradictions Collapse + None’ bundle. When the album finally came, I went straight to Sickening and it wasn’t even the same song. It wasn’t even the same fucking band. About 6 years later I heard Blood for Blood by Machine Head and it was that fucking song dude! Some asshole was trying to troll Meshuggah fans into listening to Machine Head, which in hindsight is fucking hilarious and it got me into Meshuggah. And Meshuggah fucking rule.

Okay, Machine Head. Ugh. Dude I wanted to enjoy this I swear to god. Machine Head are one of those bands that I really do want to like, I swear. But when 85% of everything they play is total fucking filler, that’s when you really start looking at yourself aye. Why am I doing this? Are natural harmonics even remotely dope? Should I have become a tradie so maybe I could actually like this?
It’s a hard fact that all tradies like Machine Head.

Now while Machine Head have certified bangers in their back catalogue. They hardout only have ONE solid album, and that album is Through the Ashes of Empires. Honestly, that album fucking rips, as long as you can put up with Robb Flynn writing lyrics entirely after kids have gone to sleep on his babysitting side job, the album is a real good time. Yeeeeea I get that a couple songs plod harder than a fat dude pretending to do cardio but he tells you he’s doing cardio everyday but we all know the reality. Get at me if you don’t listen to Imperium and wish this band was great all the time, that song is a fucking dynasty. The rest of this discography was full of violent hit and miss moments, when they hit yea, it rules. When they miss, the gravity of what you’re listening to really sinks in. I had a couple moments of that on the road this week, like, what if I straight up crash my car and fucking die - then the firefighter tells my mum that the last thing I was listening to was Machine Head.
That’s a fucking real heavy emotion man. My mum can spot a fake ass poser a mile away. Fuck that dirty firefighter for telling her that.

Do firefighters come to car crashes?

But when you’re absorbed in these atrocious misses like ‘The Blood, The Sweat, the Tears’ and you’re just fucking hurting inside, let’s not forget, Phil Demmel and Rob Flynn were straight up in god damn Vio-Lence. Two guys from fucking Vio-Lence went on to write White Knuckle Blackout, a song that I can only assume is about jacking it with such a tight grip you pass out on your 90's Metallica albums. I know a few of you listen to these albums after these reviews, but please listen to Oppressing the Masses by Vio-Lence and get back to me.
Vio-Lence fucking own.