For today’s edition of Manic Monday, we’re keeping it metal by spotlighting one of the most promising bands to emerge from that genre in the 90s, the mighty Machine Head. We say promising because, while they certainly came charging out of the gate strong with their classic debut album Burn My Eyes, they subsequently suffered a modest sophomore slump with The More Things Change in 1997 (which could be forgiven considering Burn My Eyes was no doubt a tough act to follow). But then things went further downhill (at least in the eyes of the Puritan metal community) with 1999’s The Burning Red, which fully embraced the popular trends of the era with a stark nu-metal flavor. They didn’t really reclaim widespread acclaim/respect in the metal world until the release of 2007’s The Blackening. Still, they never topped the force, power, and swagger of their debut album, as this classic performance from Dynamo 1995 emphatically demonstrates.
If you don’t have time for the entire set (which is nonetheless highly recommended), check the opening jam (which would eventually become the rap-metal guilty-pleasure “Desire to Fire” a few years later) and their absolutely crushing performance of “Davidian” to follow it up, which is evidence enough that Machine Head was at the height of their powers back when they first started out roughly 30 years ago:
