Formerly of Slint, now of Pajo and Papa M [among many others, including Tortoise and Zwan], David Pajo has been loosely defined as an ‘alternative rock musician’, but in truth his music runs much deeper than that. Part-folk, part-country, part-electro, part-everything else in between, Pajo is constantly reinventing his sound — which probably explains why his Playlist is so rooted in death and thrash metal. Hmmm, perhaps the next Pajo album will feature crucifixes and pinch harmonics. Only time and that strange old mystic who lives up the road will tell.
Amon Amarth / The Pursuit of Vikings
Epic Viking metal from Sweden. What’s not to love? These guys are like the Ramones — they are so consistent in their sound and aesthetic. Plus, they seem almost apologetic about kicking so much ass.
Arch Enemy / My Apocalypse
Michael Amott has this ability to write extreme music that’s memorable—at any given moment I have one of his riffs stuck in my head. That not typical for this genre. I didn’t know this was a girl singing until after I’d listened to the album three or four times! I hated melodic death metal until this band showed me it was possible to do it in a compelling way.
Whiplash / Power Thrashing Death
Old school thrash metal in the tradition of early Metallica and Megadeth. I wish more bands sounded like this these days. Clearly, I left my heart in 1986. This is one of my favorite albums of all time — absolutely relentless thrash. Their guitarist is amazing. On this, their debut album, they were a power trio all named Tony. It’s hard enough for Dead Child with one Tony in the band, but three? How did they do it?
Bloodbath / Year of the Cadaver Race
What a fucking band. These guys are a tribute to old school death metal, but I actually prefer their take on it more than a lot of the ‘vintage’ bands. The breakdown where the flies start buzzing is so incredible; I can almost feel my enemy’s bones snapping beneath my boot. Rot and roll!
Blotted Science / Laser Lobotomy
This seems to be a studio-only band featuring the white-hot drummer from the band, Behold … The Arctopus. It’s instrumental prog metal the way it should be. Of this list, this might be the only band non-heshers can enjoy because of the lack of vocals. The guitarist has a weekly gig in a Rush tribute band, which I can’t even imagine. I would eat my left leg to be able to play guitar half as good as this chap.
Autopsy / Disembowel
I never heard a band that sounded so much like my old band, Maurice. Although our songs were written three years before this, some of the riffs are nearly identical. The last Maurice song became the first Slint song — when we broke up, the bassist and singer formed Kinghorse while the drummer and I formed Slint. It’s a long stretch between Slint and Autopsy and I’m not exactly sure what happened.
Meshuggah / I
Todd Cook and I are convinced that these guys are beaming their songs from the year 2020. I love everything they’ve ever done, including Fredrik Thordendal’s solo record. But this is the first thing I heard from them and it’s still my favorite. It sounds best really loud, after the bars close. Be warned — this one song is exactly 21 minutes long.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s actually David Pajo of Dead Child. He doesn’t do any of those other things anymore.
Thanks Candy Wrapper, we’ve made the change.
BLOTTED SCIENCE FTW!!! Actually, going from Rush to Blotted Science is not as big of a stretch as you make it sound. ‘2112′ was really the first prog metal album and Blotted’s Ron Jarzombek grew up on Rush (among other things). If you follow his career from S.A. Slayer (also Dave McClain from Machine Head’s first band) to Watchtower to Spastic Ink to Blotted Science it’s pretty easy to connect all the dots and see his evolution as a writer/player.