Out of the classic Manowar albums (1982 thru 1990), you could make a case for this one being the best, or at least the most consistent. Kings of Metal‘s best moments are better, but it’s worse moments are far worse. I can never get comfortable with that album, despite the greatness of “Hail and Kill” and “Blood of the Kings”. Listening to it side to side is like sleeping on a luxurious hammock that has several large holes in it. There are no Manowar albums with all killer and no filler, so don’t look for them, but there’s a difference between normal crappy and “Pleasure Slave” crappy. On Sign of the Hammer I merely skip a few tracks. On Kings of Metal I actually deleted several mp3s so I can pretend they don’t exist.

Anyway…

1. Shitty songs: “All Men Play on 10” and “Thunderpick”. The first is an annoying Spinal Tappish self-parody – Manowar is at their best when they’re playing with absolute conviction, not winking at the audience. The second is four minutes of unlistenable bass guitar masturbation. Can someone keep Joey DeMaio away from those higher frets? It’s like giving Bashar Al-Assad access to white phosphorous. It’s nothing personal, he just does not use them for the betterment of humanity.

2. Good songs: “Animals” and “The Oath” – really fun high-energy rockers, the first reminding me of KISS, the second a NWOBHM inspired speed metal song. Not much songwriting going on here, just a shot of Manowar’s larger than life energy, like an Epipen in your arm.

3. Great songs: “Thor, the Powerhead” and “Sign of the Hammer.” Holy crap these rule. Elaborate early power metal, rivaling anything done by Manilla Road and Fates Warning. Great vocals, great instrumentation, and great songwriting equals two bona fide classics. If Manowar sounded like this consistently I’d quit making fun of Joey DeMaio’s ego forever, because he’d have earned it.

4. “Mountains”: the standout track and one of the most incredible moments of Manowar’s career. A long-winded ballad that finishes on a massive emotional crest. This is the sort of song you point to when trying to convert someone on a band. Eric Adams has never sounded better than this.

5. The outlier: “Guyana – Cult of the Damned”. An odd doom metal song that I don’t hate, but it doesn’t really do anything to sell me. Some more bass shredding, some heavy doomy riffs, and a bizarre chorus that sounds like the band flailing around in free-time. An odd lyrical choice for Manowar, too. Just a strange, strange song all around.

I’m torn on whether to recommend this as a first Manowar album. One other thing is that Sign of the Hammer opens with terrible cheese while Kings of Metal opens with the great “Wheels of Fire.”

As is always the case with Manowar, you can get a much better album by just deleting all the garbage and dogshit. The trouble is: sometimes this results in a 20 minute long album. Sign of the Hammer fares better, you still get 33:00 or so of good stuff.

Some jokes require you to think about them for a bit before you laugh. For example, that classic knee-slapper we all heard in the locker room: “ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”.

Some jokes are the opposite: laughter requires that you do not think about the joke, at all, and that as soon as you hear it you must jam a screwdriver through your eminence ridge, giving yourself a frontal lobotomy.

Playboy’s recent announcement that it will stop featuring pictures of nude women provoked in me a “hahaha” reaction followed by “…makes sense, I guess. Not like they signed a contract saying they’d print porn forever. They’re in a declining market. Or rather, a market that has declined so much that it has ‘declined’ into a hill on the other side of the world. Might as well jump ship and start doing something that makes money.”

Welcome to 2015: there isn’t a market for print porn. Photographs of naked women are worthless now. This isn’t the 70s, or an Amish community. We have a military-funded porn delivery system in our houses now. Porn is so common and ubiquitous that they might as well have decided not to print photographs of wallpaper.

Playboy’s selling point was that it had a thin veneer of class, you could read it without feeling like a total sleazeball. So why not focus on the class? Playboy’s value is not that they provide porn. Any idiot can find porn. Their value is in their brand. They’re an iconic household name. There’s all sorts of ways they can spin it to make money. They don’t have to do porn. And that’s good, because they’d file chapter 11 if they did.

The magazine actually has really good content. Porn is worth literally nothing against exclusive new writing by Stephen King and Haruki Murakami, or interviews with Metallica. It’s safe to say that the average person in 2015 actually is reading Playboy for the articles.

Times change. Playboy’s Playmates have their time in the spotlight, then they gracefully age into real estate agents and radical feminists. Hugh Hefner’s changing too – once he was the icon of crazy wild partying, now he’s the icon of crazy wild oxygen therapy (does he even have sex anymore? At that age all I’d want from my girlfriends is a nice long foot massage.). Why shouldn’t the magazine itself be ready for change? Remember, there’s no stasis anywhere in nature. If you’re not evolving, you’re regressing.

(Also in the funny if you don’t think about it category: this. That’s like a 50 meter walk. Would you want to carry heavy bags of groceries and furniture that far? Let the man have his car. Jeez.)

Ask a musician how they want their music listened to, and you’ll get an answer like “lossless FLACs over a $5,000 stereo system with a Filipino houseboy giving you a foot massage.”

Of course, the average person will listen to it on torrented 128kb/s mp3s on $19.95 headphones while watching porn and playing a videogame and texting on two different phones. That’s the world we live in now, and it isn’t going away.

This is a new and untested ecosystem for music, and I wonder how it’s affecting what sort of music gets listened to. Theory: music that you can listen to with 5% of your brain is selected for. Elaborate, subtle, and detailed music is selected against.

It would perhaps shift the tonal centers of popular music towards frequencies that are easy to filter out. Some frequency ranges – like around 10khz – have a harsh, grating quality: “look at me” kinds of frequencies. Easily ignorable music would probably dial back those frequencies and boost the soft, low 300hz bass and the clean, sparkling 12khz highs. I’ve heard it said that Bose speakers do exactly that: and their supposed pleasant sound comes from a pretty lopsided response spectrum: emphasising nice frequencies, and killing harsh ones.

What about song lengths? Here’s a graph I found about the average song length per year, but I mistrust it. They just dumped all the songs from MusicBrainz’ database into it, but aren’t some songs more popular than others? Why include a bunch of 30 second grindcore songs that nobody listens to in your data? Someone should find a way to calculate the average length of #1 singles. An ideal length of 3:20 is something I’ve heard before, although I don’t know how true it is.

Another thing is that a lot of radio stations actually speed up their music by 1% or 2% – for a more upbeat feel and so they’ve got room for more precious ads.

But to add epicycles, there’s likely other trends running counter to simpler, dumber music. Digital media also allows you to do things like easily skip to a certain point to hear it again, or look things up on the internet so you can REALLY find out what “Puff the Magic Dragon”‘s about. We’re at the mercy of radio DJs no more, and that should encourage more variety.