Published on Dec 26, 2000
It’s interesting to listen to Bruce Dickinson’s career, in that
you can almost hear when he’s losing interest in a band by the
quality of his singing. By the time he made his exit from Iron
Maiden, you could hear almost complete indifference on
Fear Of The Dark… which I know we haven’t reviewed yet,
and I know will result in someone getting pissed off by what I just
said.
In the case of Samson, you could hear Dickinson’s vocals taking
a turn for the bored on their 1981 album
Shock Tactics… which ironically is also the band’s best
album to that point.
What changed – for the better (in Samson’s case) and for the
worse (in Dickinson’s)? It’s easier to pinpoint the former: the
songwriting took an upwards turn. Tracks like “Nice Girl,” “Bright
Lights” and “Blood Lust” showed off what this band seemed to know
they were capable of all along. I still wouldn’t call this
top-notch work, but compared to their two previous albums, this is
a major improvement. Even some of the weaker tracks, like “Grime
Crime” and “Communion,” have many more redeeming features to
them.
It’s harder to say what was up with Dickinson. Obviously he
wasn’t bored with heavy metal; after the band’s performance at the
Reading Festival, Dickinson would be tapped to become the second
lead singer for Iron Maiden. It probably wasn’t that Dickinson was
frustrated as a songwriter; only one song (Russ Ballard’s “Riding
With The Angels”) wasn’t written by Samson as a band, at least as
far as the liner notes claim. I don’t claim to know what was up,
and I honestly think speculating on why he did choose to leave
Samson would be counter-productive.
But there is no doubt that Dickinson’s vocals sound a little
more tired than on
Head On.”Riding With The Angels” is called Samson’s
best-known song, yet it’s here where Dickinson seems to have the
least amount of kinetic energy… and that’s kind of disappointing.
That streak continues on songs like “Earth Mother” and “Once
Bitten”… and even to a lesser degree on the quality tracks on
Shock Tactics.
I’m not insinuating that Dickinson deliberately delivered a
sub-par performance on
Shock Tactics. But when looking back at this album, and
knowing Dickinson’s history, it’s hard not to notice a change which
people probably didn’t hear (or didn’t know to hear) way back
then.
I’ve been kind of hard on Samson in these pages, so I will say
this to close our look at
Shock Tactics: it is kind of a shame that Dickinson left the
band at this point in their career, since this is the most
comfortable the group had sounded to this point. One has to wonder
what Samson would have accomplished had Dickinson stayed.