Click picture above to purchase from

Excerpts From Stairway to Hell-The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe

#451 The Proletariat - "Indifference"

Laurel Bowman, who is either a man or a woman, sings anthems in the rain, so high-pitched and high-strung they jet past Geddy Lee, toward Art Bears/Slapp Happy cabaret chanteuse Dagmar Krause: "Homeland" starts loud 'n' fast, gets even louder as it slows down and has Bowman stretching the two syllable title to eight syllables at one point and to twenty-one seconds at another; "The Guns Are Winning" builds soaring U2-gone-heavycore axlines to an orgasm that goes "The guns! The GUNS! Are winning! Are WINNING! Again! The guns are winning again! Again! AGAIN! AGAIN! AGAAIINN!!!" then makes way for "No Real Hope" or rather (first) "No Real Hope/prelude." Original Proletariat throat Richard Brown's dozen turns at bat aren't quite so extreme and Frank Michael's fed-back-atop-its-own-residue buzz ain't as jagged as it was on these Beantowners' '83 debut, the denouncements of "cheap visions of the flesh" are perturbingly prudish, and the war-kills-work-dehumanizes-rich-rule-poor-starve-nobody-cares-everybody-dies polemic lacks insight and compassion. But the stuff's seemingly contradictory status as punk rock made inspirational by virtue of its pomp-rock-grandiosity still puts it over, and in its own way, I think it's a trip.

- Chuck Eddy, 1991 (updated 1998), Da Capo Press, Inc