Armageddon

Martin Popoff, in his The Collector’s Guide to Heavy Metal, Volume I: The Seventies, the definitive source for all things ‘70s, all things heavy and all things obscure, describes Armageddon as the “crazy uncle in the A&M attic.” He says this with a certain amount of reverance, actually, even including it in his list of the Greatest 100 Obscure Heavy Metal Albums of the ‘70s. Surprising, I guess, because to these ears this is one of the worst records of the era’s progressive hard rock movement. A B-grade supergroup of sorts, this four-man band rose from the ashes of the Yardbirds (singer Keith Relf), Steamhammer (guitarist Martin Pugh) and Captain Beyond (drummer Bobby Caldwell), and dropped its one and only album in 1975. Don’t let the fact that this five-song self-titled debut hit the Billboard album charts fool you; aside from the monster riff heard in “Buzzard,” the lp’s opening track, Armageddon is a ponderous, overwrought musical exercise, full of go-nowhere guitar solos and incomprehensible lyrics (“shining chariots/bearing sacred souls/ride the surface/of the deepest holes?”). The album’s low point comes in the form of the four-part, 11-minute “Basking in the White of the Midnight Sun” (I’d go into more detail, but I can’t seem to listen to more than three minutes). As was the case of most ‘70s supergroups, a padded resume didn’t necessarily make for a great record. That was never more true than with Armageddon.