Anvil - Anvil Is Anvil
- Written by Marky Edison
“No one knows who they were/ or what they were doing/ But their legacy remains/ Hewn into the living rock/ of Stonehenge”
Canadian rockers Anvil are pure, unreconstructed old school metal. It’s the kind of music that makes you want to slip on the double denim replete with patches.
This is their fifteenth studio album but they are probably best known as the subject of Sacha Gervasi’s superb documentary Anvil! : The Story of Anvil.
When I was in primary school in the ‘80s I used to go to my friend's house after school to play pool in his garage and listen to his older brother’s cassettes. We would duck walk around the pool table pretending to be Angus Young using our cues as guitar substitutes. AC/DC and Guns ‘N’ Roses were our favourites but even then I always thought of Anvil as being ridiculously over-the-top. Like AC/DC but without the subtlety.
I only heard of them again five years ago when I saw the documentary. It was like a real-life Spinal Tap. The music too was, and is, very ‘Tap’. Anvil have great riffs and tight rhythms. Listening to them you just can’t help but bang your head. Like their pals in AC/DC, every song starts with a big riff, and the song subjects are made to match the tone of the guitars.
Anvil Is Anvil opens with the metal sea shanty ‘Daggers And Rum’. Imagine Bon Scott joining Jake and the Neverland Pirates and you’re halfway there. The music is excellent throughout with the accessibility of The Darkness and simple sing-along choruses that will have the listener throwing up the devil horns. The NWOBHM influence is still strong with them too; ‘Runaway Train’ could be a Motorhead song.
And the lyrics … Where to start?! They're hilariously bad and it must be deliberate. They are cringe-inducing and could easily pass for Spinal Tap. Steve "Lips" Kudlow makes Liam Gallagher look like W. B. Yeats. I found myself questioning whether English is his first language. Anvil are big in mainland Europe. German fans have maintained their career and they often sound like a German metal band performing in English.
But at the same time, they are undeniably fun. Big, dumb fun. Probably best enjoyed on headphones because if anyone overheard you listening to this it would be embarrassing.
You may hear them and be unsure whether they’re a Steel Panther style ironic spoof or a ham-fisted real deal. But really, does it matter? As the Ramones proved before them, it takes real intelligence to pull off tunes this wonderfully stupid.
Their cack-handed approaches to gun control (‘Gun Control’) and religious warfare (‘Die For A Lie’) are enormously enjoyable in their naivety. They are like the songs we improvised in that garage with our “cue-stick” guitars.
It is on songs like ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ and ‘Fire On The Highway’ that Anvil find their natural habitat. The music matches the menace of the lyrical vignettes. They are stories for grown-ups told in the clunky style of the pre-adolescent. And it works for the same reason Spinal Tap songs work. They love metal, they understand it, and their passion for it shines through.
Even the album cover is prototypically metal, and shouts both its respect for the genre and awareness of its ludicrous nature. The hand-painted picture of an anvil facing its own image in a full-length mirror in front of a red brick wall with the album title spray painted on it is a simultaneous statement of intent and wink to the audience
If you don’t know Anvil then you simply must see Anvil! : The Story of Anvil. If you only know Anvil from the movie, you should get this album. Any rock or metal fan will appreciate it. Play it loud, where no one else can hear, and air guitar 'til you drop.
For the past 30 years metal has changed and evolved, movements and subgenres have been born and died. Amid the maelstrom Anvil stand alone, untouched, unreconstructed, a relic of “ancient times/ hundreds of years before the dawn of history…”
Anvil Is Anvil is available from amazon.