This article has been sitting on my desk for nearly three weeks now. I guess I'll have to change my approach to writing my articles altogether as I've been going down a rabbit hole. I've been reading and reading and listening to album after album. "If you listen to A then you have to listen to B because they were a huge influence and then again there is C which pioneered the genre" and so on... I've been all over the place.
After writing about Mötley Crüe and Poison I've actually intended to leave glam metal behind and move on to thrash metal. But I've caught myself listening to more and more glam metal bands while I went through my day. There are several glam metal bands that are played frequently on my headphones, so they will have to be featured in my blog as well.
Today's article is about W.A.S.P. - founded in 1982 by Blackie Lawless and Randy Piper. Blackie Lawless had been playing as a guitarist with the glam metal band New York Dolls before and together with Nikki Sixx in Sister and later on London.
W.A.S.P. experienced many line-up changes. Blackie Lawless is the only founding member still playing in the band today. And it was Lawless' voice that got me hooked on W.A.S.P. His voice is raspy and gruff and Lawless growls and snarls and spits with a measured amount of aggression that makes him the perfect voice for metal.
But he also knows how to use it with plenty of emotion and it works beautifully in power ballads.
W.A.S.P. has released 16 studio albums to date and they are currently working on new material for a new album. Their fourth studio album The Headless Children reached No. 48 on the US Billboard Charts and was the band's highest chart position, while the fifth allbum The Crimson Idol is said to be the best album by many critics and fans. The band has sold about 12 million records worldwide.
Being founded in 1982 W.A.S.P. had its roots in shock rock and full on glam metal. Blackie Lawless was greatly inspired by Alice Cooper and KISS and his stage performances featured many shock elements like half-naked women on torture racks or raw meat that was thrown into the audience.
W.A.S.P.'s heyday was in the 80s and their first three albums W.A.S.P., The Last Command and Inside The Electric Circus are thematically relatively similar: Women, sex, satan, violence and death. After a short break 1994 Lawless regrouped and the best-selling album The Headless Children was the first album which not only dealt with sex in the lyrics. W.A.S.P. was leaving the 80s glam- and shock rock livestyle behind, now singing about drug abuse and political themes and moving on to more serious music. And with the follwowing concept album/rock opera
The Crimson Idol (which was actually Lawless' solo project but in the end released under the W.A.S.P. name) they managed to do just that. The Crimson Idol was mature, structured and profound heavy metal and the band continued with this music in the following years. This album is among the undisputed classics in heavy metal.
Blackie Lawless played bass and rhythm guitar over the years, he provided all the vocals and produced many of the W.A.S.P. albums himself. He is said to be a perfectionist and a serious musician. He was brought up in a Baptist family, rebelled against religion in his youth and found religion again in 2009. Since then Lawless refuses to play one of W.A.S.P.'s most famous songs live: Animal (Fuck like a Beast).
Since I enjoy listening to Lawless' voice immensenly, it is hard to pick favourite songs. The albums I've listened to so far I enjoyed as a whole. You have to ignore the lyrics in the early albums a bit, but if you manage to do that the songs are good and solid metal with galloping drums and driving guitars. Of course The Crimson Idol works best if listened to completely as it is telling a coherent story.
W.A.S.P. provides songs for every mood. There are the more dark songs with serious lyrics for the more sinister moods (The Invisible Boy), the power ballads (Sleeping in the Fire) and the fun-fast-heavy-metal-stadium anthems like Wild Child.
I've definitely found another heavy metal band that will be stocked in my music library and I am very pleased to see it grow! I'll be adding more songs on my playlist as I go. Check it out!