Published on Sep 24, 2002
Budgie is one of the best forgotten hard rock bands of the 70’s,
period. Even forgotten might be a bit of an exaggeration since they
never managed to gain more than cult status, particularly in the
US. For years now I’ve been obsessed with discovering more and more
bands who were at the cutting edge of hard rock/heavy metal during
its infancy in the early 70’s, after all, Black Sabbath, Led
Zeppelin and Deep Purple couldn’t possibly have been the only heavy
bands at the time.
Indeed they weren’t, and at their peak, Budgie’s music easily
rivaled that of the giants of the genre I just mentioned. Why they
never gained even an ounce of the popularity of lesser bands like
Uriah Heep is one of rock’s great mysteries…they were stable,
superb musicians, wrote killer tunes, and churned out a slew of
great albums for many years, so what happened? They were a highly
creative band with an original sound, and most refreshing of all is
that a good deal of the music is not cliched 70’s rock.
Think Black Sabbath meets Rush in a way, with bizarre songs like
“Crash Course In Brain Surgery” (a song from this debut record that
was strangely included on the cd release of their fourth album,
In For The Kill, instead). If you’re a fan of hard rock, you
should love these guys…Metallica have covered a few of their
songs, and that’s probably the only reason anybody even knows about
them anymore; that’s how I first heard of them too. It’s time that
the world finally embraced this unfairly neglected pioneering
band.
The Welsh trio comes blasting out of the gates in their bid to
climb to the throne of heavy superstardom with this immensely
powerful self-titled debut, released in 1971. You know that
patented really low, downtuned sludgy guitar tone unique to the
early Black Sabbath albums that’s thunderously fuzzy?? It’s all
over this record! Was Tony Iommi moonlighting or something? Nope,
that would be the other Tony, Tony Bourge, on lead guitar. Ray
Philipps on drums and Burke Shelley as bassist/vocalist/frontman
rounded out the original line-up.
This first Budgie album sounds like a
Master Of Reality copy…even the rhythms and the vocal
melodies are astonishingly Sabbathian in nature, especially the
songs “Guts”, “Nude Disintegrating Parachutist Woman”, “All Night
Petrol”, and “Homicidal Suicidal”. Most of the songs are epic in
length, with a bunch of really long guitar solos, that while
awesomely played, do tend to go on longer than maybe they should.
There is one section during the song “The Author” that speeds up
considerably, foreshadowing the speed metal approach popularized by
the New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands of the late 70’s and
early 80’s.
Something Budgie did to stand apart from other heavy bands was
include a fair number of folky, acoustic ballads on this album,
resulting in a bit of a sonic rollercoaster. This is a trend they
continued on later albums. I’m not a particular fan of Budgie’s
softer moments because to me they have a nasty habit of killing the
energy and momentum of the more powerful tracks, and Burke
Shelley’s voice doesn’t really seem naturally suited to balladry
due to a thin, high pitched and somewhat whiny delivery. While he
doesn’t really sound like Geddy Lee of Rush, he does remind me of
him more than anyone else.
To recap, despite all the heaviness contained here however,
Budgie isn’t quite as eerie or gloomy as Black Sabbath, but rather
more surreal (as if the song titles didn’t already give that away),
and sandwiched in between are a couple of Neil Young style acoustic
folk tracks that might make for some great contrast in some
people’s eyes, but serve as distracting, boring interludes between
the really meaty stuff in my opinion!
The production is characteristically early 70’s, with that warm,
fuzzy low end and the high end a bit low in the mix. That hardly
matters when the material is as consistently strong as it is here.
The self titled debut for Budgie makes a very strong statement
indeed, and the band would go on to create some essential early
70’s metal albums. So, if you’re like me and have a burning desire
to seek out some of the obscure heavy bands of that particular era,
then this is a great place to start.