#Megadeth rust in peace remastered review plus#
" Good Mourning/Black Friday" takes a few minutes to rev up, but then it's like everything great about hardcore, plus a dose of the kind of show-off skill that makes lesser musicians' fingers bleed. But while drummer Gar Samuelson is no slouch in the chops department and songs shift tempos in seconds and plenty open with those noodly sturm-und-drang intros that made 80s metal so portentously great, the pummeling pace rarely lets up. This is a thrash record of course, and so there are solos galore, with Mustaine deep in the throes of technical ecstasy. The bass hook that opens " Peace Sells" is so instantly memorable that everyone who watched MTV in the late 80s and early 90s knows it even if they think they don't. Megadeth had plenty of the grimy intensity of the cassette-trading bands that would give birth to death metal and all that followed, but they'd absorbed enough radio hard rock to not abjure things like memorable thuggish riffs, big shout-along triumphant choruses, and a rhythm section that could actually throw down on a groove without succumbing to the metal vice of momentum-killing displays of virtuosity. And while the lyrics to " Devil's Island" make their point about death row being a sad end for any human being, the music makes state-sponsored execution sound suspiciously awesome. Nuclear war was as shit-your-pants real as fears got in 1986, but it also made for some great exploitation-flick imagery. He believed in peace but knew thrash metal wasn't particularly suited to depicting some hugs-and-kisses utopia. He was also plenty pissed over the non-nuclear atrocities of the Reagan years, along with the kind of bleak, man-against-the-universe shit that transcends presidential terms.īut Mustaine also understood he was working in an idiom that invariably turned the most serious material, from eschatology to existential despair, into thrilling, fist-pumping, head-banging Grand Guignol. Like most literate metalheads of his era, Megadeth leader Dave Mustaine was deeply spooked by the supposedly imminent threat of mutually assured destruction, a day-to-day possibility that those born after the cessation of Cold War hostilities might not understand. Peace Sells is a dead serious record that never takes itself too seriously, a slab of political shock commentary that's loaded with black comedy, and which treats Satan and ICBMs with the same awe because they're both great villains. So this reissue of Peace Sells, celebrating a quarter century of Megadeth's second but first truly great album, is probably more a sop to those diehards than anything else, but if it turns one curious party into a convert then it's worth it, even in this time of bald cash-grab reissue ugliness.Īnd there are many reasons why this album might still appeal to fence-sitters and folks turned off by extreme metal's very extremity.
(Discounting Metallica, who conquered the world only to become a joke.) They were absolutely huge cult acts- festival draws and elder statesmen still listened to by millions- but cult acts nevertheless. For the class of '86, a year that gave us Megadeth's Peace Sells and Metallica's Master of Puppets and Slayer's Reign in Blood, the refusal to go the Poison/Cinderella route was both a point of pride and what forever kept them cult acts.
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