Faces (4.5 stars)
Five Guys Walk Into a Bar
The ultimate good-time bar band, the Faces never found much in the way of commercial success, and as for respect, well .... Yet despite the hijinks, these five talented lads managed to make some wonderful music together.
Obviously, Rod Stewart's solo success ultimately overshadowed the Faces, but he was at his best with these guys. My guess is that Rod would never have dared "Do You Think I'm Sexy" if he had to demo it for his bar buddies, sparing all of us. "Stay with Me," "Flying" and "Ooh La La" all find Stewart at his most wonderfully reckless as a singer. A patch of dialogue included after a cover of John Lennon's "Jealous Guy" perfectly captures the banter that made the Faces such fun. Keyboard player Ian McClagan begins the needling and is quickly joined by bassist Ronnie Lane and guitar player Ron Wood.
McClagan: "Yeah, Rod didn't do anything—he just shouts like he always does."
Lane: "Yeah, he shouted just like he usually f--ckin' does."
Wood: "How much is he getting, then? He should get nothing for that vocal performance."
While ganging up on Rod may have been the band's favorite sport, what becomes clear listening to the four discs' worth of music is that the Faces were very much a band. Lane's vocals hardly have Stewart's grit, but his songwriting is at least as good. And throughout, kudos go to the solid drumming of Kenny Jones—who sounded like a lead weight when he joined the Who—for managing to hold this circus together.
Megadeth
Rust in Peace (4 stars)
Countdown to Extinction (4 stars)
Youthanasia (3.5 stars)
When Megadeth officially disbanded in 2000, after a bizarre nerve injury seemingly ended the guitar-playing career of leader Dave Mustaine, the reaction of the world at large was general indifference. The average music fan probably didn't know the band was even still around to break up. Although Mustaine's injury has healed and he re-assembled a version of the band without any of its well-known members, Megadeth is still strangely obscure for a band that's sold 15 million albums worldwide and is one of the most influential metal acts of all time.
Perhaps Capitol's reissues of seven of the band's albums (all but their first and last) will remedy that a bit. Though Mustaine always operated in the shadow of his former band mates in Metallica, these three Megadeth albums, from the band's commercial and creative peak, show him crafting songs that are at once more complex and more direct than what Metallica was doing at the time, and truer to his roots in the early days of thrash. Rust in Peace has the best epic songwriting and political doomsaying lyrics, but Countdown to Extinction is the perfect balance of Mustaine's mainstream and metal sensibilities. The extras, especially Mustaine's bitter and self-serving liner notes, are nothing special, but the original material is monumental heavy metal that should not go unremembered.
Josh Bell