"Anvil! The Story Of Anvil"

Just thought I’d add my own nod to the well-deserved kudos for Sacha Gervasi’s doc on the hard­scrabble life of the Canadian met­al band Anvil; it really is the feel-good movie of the year so far. Quite a few review­ers have deemed the pic­ture a “real-life This Is Spinal Tap” (which is a bit of a conun­drum, giv­en the num­ber of rock­ers out there who will tell you that This Is Spinal Tap was their real life). But I (not unlike Armond White, as it hap­pens, not that his review isn’t the usu­al mess) found the film more mov­ing than hil­ari­ous. Yes, band co-founders and lifelong buds Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner are a little rough around the edges and have their goofy moments, but they sure aren’t dumb, and they’ve got tre­mend­ous integ­rity. They’re genu­inely hero­ic, albeit on a level that most movie­go­ers don’t get to see a lot. 

Yes, on the one hand, it’s kind of funny to watch Kudlow shov­el­ing snow and scrap­ing ice off the side­walk in front of his house, or play­ing a very humble game of bad­min­ton with his young son in their small back­yard, and then singing lyr­ics such as “Cast a spell from the wave of the wand/the depths of hell, there’s a voice from bey­ond.” But I think any­one with an even rudi­ment­ary famili­ar­ity with met­al under­stands that it’s the most form­al­ist of rock genres—you’re just not gonna cut it with singer/songwriter-esque obser­va­tions of daily life, or, say, wryly iron­ic takes on urb­an romance à la Luna. (I bring up the alt-rock band Luna because the doc Tell Me Do You Miss Me, a chron­icle of its last tour, touches on a lot of the same notes as this pic­ture does, albeit in a dif­fer­ent key—the road life is always in a sense the same, no mat­ter what kind of music you play, or if you’ve got a col­lege degree, or what.) Yeats once said that the only two sub­ject worthy of ser­i­ous artist­ic con­sid­er­a­tion are sex and death; for met­al music, with its often relent­less and some would say anti-social aggres­sion, it’s sex and Satan(!!!). (And for all that, what you don’t hear in the doc are the songs in which Kudlow does address his actu­al situ­ation in life, a bal­an­cing act between put­ting bread on his fam­ily’s table and keep­ing his rock dreams alive: “From the morn­ing until the night/Anticipation, on my nails I bite” he sings in a tune called “Should’a Would’a Could’a.”)

Another dif­fer­ence between Anvil! and This Is Spinal Tap is that Anvil’s story is actu­ally that of a pretty good band. Reiner in par­tic­u­lar is an impress­ively power­ful drum­mer, and Kudlow’s got a real way with the licks. Snob that I am, I gen­er­ally take my met­al on the more fringe‑y, avant garde side—yup, I do love me some Sunn O))) and Boris—but these guys have def­in­itely got some­thing. Not as fren­et­ic as Slayer, and not quite as pop as mid-period Judas Priest, they abso­lutely do rock out the fuck out. I like the music well enough to state that my shelling out of 25 bucks Canadian to score a copy of This Is Thirteen, the album the band is shown record­ing in the film, was maybe about 1/4^th an act of good will.