Do I want to see the future? No. The future is boring. What I want to see is the past.

The future is separated from us by a few sunrises and sunsets. The past is locked away forever. If you want to know what will happen in anno domini 3014, the solution is relatively easy: live a thousand more years. But we’ll never know for sure what happened in 1014, unless it’s documented in some way through art or writing (which themselves are unreliable). In theory, we could use computers to recursively calculate past events, but even that approach is better suited to the future than the past. It’s easier for a computer to take some causes and calculate the end state than to take an end state and calculate the causes.

What’s particularly interesting is musical history. Who was the first guitarist to use distortion? Who was the first drummer to use a matched grip? Many of these questions have no answers. People who make history often don’t realise they’re making history, and many things from music’s past are unrecorded and undocumented.

In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum is an Italian progressive rock album, allegedly from 1969. If this is true, then Jacula was more groundbreaking than a nose-diving 747 packed with shovels. The levels of distortion and heaviness rival anything Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, or Deep Purple could boast at the time, and the songwriting is dissonant, challenging, and very dark. If it could be proven that this is from 1969, you could definitely say that Jacula were the true forefathers of doom metal.

But maybe it’s not from 1969. The guitar distortion has a very processed and modern character, quite unlike the rawness of Link Wray’s early sound, or the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter”. There’s fairly technical guitar shredding that also doesn’t jibe well with a 1969 release date. Nobody can find any reference to this album in contemporary Italian music magazines. There are rumours that In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum was recorded much later, and given a ludicrous back-date to enhance its street cred.

Sadly, lies about release dates are common in metal. French hack Luc Mertz (who records as Zarach “Baal” Tharagh) claims he was playing black metal in 1983, before even the first Metallica album. Black metal musician Kanwulf claims to have released a demo in 1989, which seems unlikely given that the name “Kanwulf” comes from a TV series that aired in 1995, and this name is prominently stamped on the cover of his demo. Everyone wants to be the first to the party.

How well does this album stand up, if we give it a later release date? Not too well. The songwriting is bleak but tedious. Its symphonic themes are fairly complex but tonally the same, and this bores the ear. The guitars are just “there” – there’s no riffs driving the music, the way Tony Iommi would have it. The album’s one interesting moment is “Triumphatus sad”, where guitar solos and hammond keyboards duel back and forth in an interesting manner. Otherwise, the album is a monotonous backdrop of sound. ONE sound.

Does In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum have value? That depends on the release date. If it’s from 1969, it’s an important part of musical history. If it’s from the 90s, it’s worthless and forgettable. And nobody knows when it’s from, so I guess it’s like they used to say: You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Or did they? I don’t know. That’s from the past too.

80% of heavy metal is played by after-hours Burger King workers with lyrics that are about killing people and worshiping the devil. It’s not exactly high-class entertainment, and you’d think more metal fans would have a sense of humor. However, they tend to be insecure crybabies, and this album illuminated that fact with an atom bomb blast.

Iron Fire is a power metal band that arrived in 2000 with Thunderstorm, a Hammerfall ripoff that possessed energy and passion (things the actual Hammerfall has not had in years) but little creativity. Their second album, On the Edge, was frontman Martin Steene’s effort at fixing that by adding Motley Crue vocals, progressive song structures, and various other things. The results were dismal sales, countless lost fans, and the termination of a record deal.

The band is too obscure for the album to be a notorious flop, but a listen reveals a sadly overlooked and misunderstood album that could have been the cure for power metal’s current diseases. I would rather hear this sort of thing than the new Edguy, Helloween, or Sonata Arctica albums – “experimental” though it is. Derided and maligned, this album is the power metal Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (but as Neil Degrasse Tyson pointed out, if Rudolph’s nose is shiny then it’s probably just reflecting light, not emitting it – useless for navigating fog.)

If you don’t want to listen to the whole thing, stay with the program just for tracks 1-7. The band is just on fire in these six songs and one prelude, with huge hooks, addictive melodies, and Tommy Hansen’s superb production – each of “The End of it All’s” kick drum hits strikes your ear like a spitball of perfectly compressed air. “Into the Abyss” lurches from downtempo sludge to uptempo thrashing like a Panzer tank changing gears, and “On the Edge” brings lots of agitation and vocal histrionics, accentuated by some death metal vocals.

But the greatest song of all is “Thunderspirit”, an amazing shockwave of high-speed energy driven by Morten Plenge’s lightning-fast drumming and maybe Martin Steene’s best vocal performance ever. The cannon-fire in the bridge was a nice touch.

Two songs are total bombs. “Wanted Man”…Stop it with this cat crap, Steene. The only place where you’re a wanted man is in the local gay bar for the 345345987 male escorts you forgot to pay. “The Price of Blood” is not as irritating but instead is far more boring – nothing to grab on to here except dry rock riffs and some goofy vocal effects.

But out of all the Iron Fire releases, this is the one that interests me the most. It’s unified, it’s catchy, it has an impressively low number of filler songs, and it’s not overly muddy or dark-sounding like their newer efforts. Definitely underrated, and worth seeking out. Heavy metal can suck, but you don’t have to.

It’s not as notorious as “Having Fun with Elvis on Stage” but it’s probably the most famous Elvis bootleg to actually contain music. Released on the “Dog Vomit Sux” label (a subsidiary of “Dead Obese Guy Enterprises”), Elvis’s Greatest Shit kifes shitty b-sides and soundtrack songs and presents them in a lovingly disrespectful package. The goal, apparently, was to remind people that Elvis was human.

Honestly, it compares favourably to Roy Orbison’s efforts at making disco, or Brian Wilson’s rapping, or the more ghoulish Beatles songs such as “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” Greatest Shit isn’t as musically intolerable as you might think or hope. The main reason? It has Elvis singing on it.

As a performer, he’s too good, and he keeps making these bad songs sound better than they have a right to be. “Old McDonald Had A Farm” made me laugh at the start, but then Elvis’s timeless baritone got me under its spell. The songwriting is consistently dreadful, but that doesn’t mean the songs are also consistently dreadful. The end result is often like a skilled poker player winning the river on a bad hand.

Elvis came from the period when albums existed to promote singles. Stab down a turntable needle at random on nearly any late 50s to early 60s LP and you’ll likely hear impaled bad music bleeding and writhing through your speakers. Elvis was no exception – even his some of his supposed classics sound boring and uninspired to me. I don’t believe “Now or Never” have been a hit without the push of the Elvis name behind it.

A lot of these songs come from soundtracks – specifically, films from his flower-necklace-and-hawaiian-guitar days, and obviously they sound odd with no context. And a lot of them are gag songs, with comical lyrics – “(There’s) No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car” takes a courageous stand against dancing inside moving vehicles, and “US Male” (often considered the album’s classic) is full of funny chauvinism.

The packaging’s a hoot, too. The back cover contains images of nonexistent Elvis LPs “Dead on Stage in Las Vegas, Aug 20th 1977” and a vocal duet with Richard Nixon. The front cover contains the iconic picture of Elvis lying in his coffin – ultimate proof that Elvis was human.