Scribed by Sandre the Giant
For better or worse, the shadow that Machine Head has cast across the New Wave of American Heavy Metal in the early 2000s onwards is vast. They, alongside Pantera, really put down the blueprints for groove laden heavy metal, with tinges of hardcore and death metal, in the 90s and led us to the metalcore/thrash renaissance of 2004 onwards. Their latter years have been a little more love/hate for me, but their early stuff is a foundational, transitional sound for my growth and evolution as a metal fan. It has been 30 years since their debut ‘Burn My Eyes’ came out, and it still stands tall as one of the decade’s most potent metal records. If early 90s hardcore, 80s thrash and death metal had a baby, this is that baby, and that baby was the best selling Roadrunner record for a full five years before Slipknot’s debut took over that crown.
Stepping into the void of thrash dying on its arse under the weight of death and black metal, ‘Davidian’ is an opening track for the ages. If you were left cold by grunge and thrash in the early 90s, but weren’t ready to delve into the extreme fire or the ice, Machine Head and Pantera were the place to go. Machine Head’s work is more hardcore influenced in these early days, chugging thrash riffs and massive breakdowns bulldozing throughout. Tracks like ‘Old’ have a touch of Fear Factory about them as well, another band whose influence is wildly underrated on 2000s metal. The underlying truth to what makes ‘Burn My Eyes’ such a great record is the fact that it has a surprisingly layered and varied sound. None of the songs feel like retreads of the others, but they all have a familiarity. The cover art suggests some kind of industrial influence but I see it more as the nasty underbelly of the 90s metal scene and the slowburn fall of western civilisation in the wake of the end of the Cold War. A youthful Robb Flynn rails agains society, abuses of power and urban decay while the thunderous chugging tones of the likes of ‘None But My Own’ and ‘A Nation on Fire’ are the spirit of thrash modernised into a world that needed something heavy again. Grunge was killing anything outside the underground, so Machine Head decided to burst out of it and take them head on. One of my all time favourite Machine Head tracks, ‘Death Church’, is my highlight, but this is an album full of them.
Where Machine Head have gone a little wrong on their newer records in my opinion is believing that the longer songs that worked so well on ‘Through Ashes and Empire’ and ‘The Blackening’ are now the be all and end all of their sound. If they could give us an album or two as stripped back and yet subtly layered as ‘Burn My Eyes’ again, that’d be ideal. As it is, this record stands tall even thirty years on as an unassailable pillar of American metal, a foundational work of an entire sound and genre, and yet most of them never came close to being as varied, as interesting or as fucking heavy. Machine Head were a vital injection of inspiration into a vapid metal mainstream in 1994, and sometimes we forget that.