Lezlie Paice - Fightin' Man (1983)

The cover of Lezlie Paice's lone release Fightin' Man is puzzling because it resembles the product of a child's imagination and not that of a heavy metal band. Looking at the art, you'll see a crudely drawn monster--which I assume was their mascot--against a spacey, bottomless backdrop that recalls the absolutely uninspired nature of the music. I suppose I'm bitter toward Lezlie Paice because I wanted to uncover a heavy metal gem amidst all the bands that I had glazed over already, but their single is not the revelation I hoped it would be. Instead, these Swedes' preferred style of music treads dangerously close to hard rock territory and backhands innovation in favor of playing it safe. The end result yields an unfortunate combination of forgettable and lackluster song writing.

Fightin' Man's songs don't deviate far in sound from one another, with the title track midpaced heavy metal devoid of stimulation and inspiration; and the other full of happy-go-luckiness that I find curiously annoying. Nonetheless, they're both based around a tried and true formula, which was done much better by their contemporary, Torch, who carried the torch (no pun intended) with far better song writing. While the Swedish wave of heavy metal from the '80s certainly cultivated gems, Lezlie Paice is not one of those and is best swept back into the depths of time, only for the brave souls who want to waste a few minutes on an archaic record that harkens back to the once muddled Scandinavian metal scene.

-TMA