Like many bands in the 1980s metal underground, Megadeth were hugely successful while still essentially operating under pop's radar. Their abrasiveness, speed, gross-out extremity, and nasty humor essentially barred them from the airwaves in the days when people called Slippery When Wet a metal album with a straight face. Like their indie-label peers who'd come up out of hardcore, Megadeth built an audience by touring relentlessly, and when they were finally signed to a major, they became even more popular. And yet if you're reading this, you're under 30, and you don't consider yourself a metal fan, you might not know their music at all.
This is a sad thing. For the class of '86, a year that gave us Megadeth's Peace Sells and Metallica's Master of Puppets and Slayer's Reign in Blood, the refusal to go the Poison/Cinderella route was both a point of pride and what forever kept them cult acts. (Discounting Metallica, who conquered the world only to become a joke.) They were absolutely huge cult acts-- festival draws and elder statesmen still listened to by millions-- but cult acts nevertheless. So this reissue of Peace Sells, celebrating a quarter century of Megadeth's second but first truly great album, is probably more a sop to those diehards than anything else, but if it turns one curious party into a convert then it's worth it, even in this time of bald cash-grab reissue ugliness.
And there are many reasons why this album might still appeal to fence-sitters and folks turned off by extreme metal's very extremity. Peace Sells is a dead serious record that never takes itself too seriously, a slab of political shock commentary that's loaded with black comedy, and which treats Satan and ICBMs with the same awe because they're both great villains. Like most literate metalheads of his era, Megadeth leader Dave Mustaine was deeply spooked by the supposedly imminent threat of mutually assured destruction, a day-to-day possibility that those born after the cessation of Cold War hostilities might not understand. He was also plenty pissed over the non-nuclear atrocities of the Reagan years, along with the kind of bleak, man-against-the-universe shit that transcends presidential terms.
But Mustaine also understood he was working in an idiom that invariably turned the most serious material, from eschatology to existential despair, into thrilling, fist-pumping, head-banging Grand Guignol. He believed in peace but knew thrash metal wasn't particularly suited to depicting some hugs-and-kisses utopia. Nuclear war was as shit-your-pants real as fears got in 1986, but it also made for some great exploitation-flick imagery. And while the lyrics to "Devil's Island" make their point about death row being a sad end for any human being, the music makes state-sponsored execution sound suspiciously awesome.
Megadeth had plenty of the grimy intensity of the cassette-trading bands that would give birth to death metal and all that followed, but they'd absorbed enough radio hard rock to not abjure things like memorable thuggish riffs, big shout-along triumphant choruses, and a rhythm section that could actually throw down on a groove without succumbing to the metal vice of momentum-killing displays of virtuosity. The bass hook that opens "Peace Sells" is so instantly memorable that everyone who watched MTV in the late 80s and early 90s knows it even if they think they don't. This is a thrash record of course, and so there are solos galore, with Mustaine deep in the throes of technical ecstasy. But while drummer Gar Samuelson is no slouch in the chops department and songs shift tempos in seconds and plenty open with those noodly sturm-und-drang intros that made 80s metal so portentously great, the pummeling pace rarely lets up. "Good Mourning/Black Friday" takes a few minutes to rev up, but then it's like everything great about hardcore, plus a dose of the kind of show-off skill that makes lesser musicians' fingers bleed.
There's a drunken laugh-so-you-don't-cry attitude on Peace Sells that seemingly owes as much to Flipper as to Ozzy, especially on the title track, but that doesn't mean Mustaine was mocking his audience. Megadeth were always a metal band first and foremost, which meant never condescending to anyone for feeling helpless and hopeless, or for thinking death and destruction were simultaneously kinda cool and really not-cool. Like most metal heroes, Mustaine on Peace Sells identified deeply with the dead-end kids who bought his records, even if he could play better than 95% of them. The raw live set appended as a bonus disc to this reissue-- there's also a multi-disc version that features many different mixes of the original album that will probably be of interest strictly to those who've been living with it for years-- features a snarling and ferociously funny performance of "Peace Sells" that outdoes the album version in everything but fidelity. It's an all-time ode to feeling disenfranchised but at least knowing you can still write an epic screw-you song about that fact. Mustaine knew there was no point to making this stuff sound like a drag. Because if you did manage to survive another day, there was always another beer and another awesome metal record waiting for you, and sometimes that was enough.
