Far Out There: Character Soundtracks - Mahizam (Patreon)

Well, the previous Character Soundtrack was for one half of the Xafri Twins, so I guess it’s inevitable that the next would be about the other half. And since Mahizam is a girl who runs around in tattered jeans, leather boots, studded belts and a big ol’ biker jacket, all topped off with a massive mane of long, unkempt hair, clearly her music of choice is soft orchestral easy listening… Actually, I say it as a joke, but anybody who’s read Far Out There for any meaningful length of time knows I would totally do a stupid gag like that for real. Not this time, though. Mahizam is every bit the metalhead she looks to be.

Despite how obvious that sounds, Mahi’s soundtrack is actually one of the most heavily re-edited and modified ones in quite a while. In fact, it’s a big part of the reason why it took me so long to finally do blogs for the Xafri Girls. Maziham's soundtrack came together nice and quickly, but I knew I wasn’t happy with Mahi’s song selection, and it just felt wrong to post Mazi’s if her sis wasn’t ready to follow right behind. Even in Patreon blog form, these two are an inseparable pair. See, my original idea was to make a playlist full of Japanese Girl Group Metal bands, of which there are more than enough to work from. If you’re unfamiliar, Japan blurs the line between “Manufactured Pop” and “Heavy Metal” far more than most markets… which most of the time is to say AT ALL. (I think it helps that Japan seems to treat both Rock and Pop as two sub-forms of the shared genre “Music Foreigners Came Up With”) There’s a whole industry of female Metal bands that rock as hard as anybody else, while never the less being as heavily made up and image conscious as the cutesiest Idol group. So my first draft of this playlist was mostly those bands, with just a few token olde schoole 80s Metal songs thrown in as a bonus… but then I threw in a few more… and a few more after that. For whatever reason, I just kept getting the grove of actual vintage New Wave of British Heavy Metal type stuff, especially after I actually DREW Mahizam for the first time and wound up with what was essentially a roadie for Saxon. I’d still like to draw up a character based on JRock Girl Groups some day, but that character would have to be way more of a cosplayer than this warrior of leather and denim.

Granted, there’s still a FEW of those original picks to be found here. I mean, I gotta fill my “at least one Japanese song” quota somehow, right? Thus, “Fenixx” by Destrose and “Through The Fire And Desire” by Cyntia still made the cut, on the grounds that they feel the least out of place amongst the slabs of vintage Metal. There’s still a case to be made that they’re a bit out of place here, especially compared to the other two tracks of Japanese origin: “Jack The Ripper” and “1999 Secret Object” by actual 80s band Seikima-II. But to be honest, I’m worried that’s a valid criticism for the soundtrack as a whole. Here’s the thing: Mahizam’s actually the third Far Out There character to have a strong Metal presence on her soundtrack, following Bridget’s heavy use of Motörhead and Stilez’s strong Power Metal preference. As a result, a number of songs I otherwise would have given to Mahizam were already taken, and still more felt a bit too close for comfort to use in this context. All that to say, if you think this set of songs bounces around between meaty NWOBHM to polished JRock to scuzzy Hair Metal and back… yeah, it probably does. A real Metal purist probably wouldn’t make a playlist like this… but you know what? For as much as she dresses the part, I don’t think Mahizam is that much of a Metal purist. Much like her sister's calculated coolness, I think Mahi puts on the act of being a brash, confident wild child to hide how shy and introverted she REALLY is. She probably WOULD have overly-eclectic tastes in music just as a result of trying to please too many subcultures all at once.

Anyway, even after the Girl Groups started to slip out of this soundtrack, I’d still sort of expected there to be a decent mix of modern revivalist bands mixed in with the vintage stuff. At various points there was some Steelwing or Dream Evil being tested out, but in the end only “Over the Top” by White Wizzard made the final cut. It’s a pretty dang decent slice of wannabe Iron Maiden, which it’d have to be to survive being sandwiched between two ACTUAL Maiden tracks: “2 Minutes to Midnight” and “The Trooper.” These are also the two best-known songs on this whole soundtrack, rivaled only by “Seek and Destroy” by Metallica. In retrospect, maybe it’s a GOOD thing that those other Character Soundtracks raided several more famous songs, otherwise Mahizam’s would be VERY heavily skewed towards boringly-familiar tunes. Instead we have a pretty decent collection of deep cuts and obscurities to choose from here.

In ascending order of least-to-most well-known artists, we start with a track that’s kind of looped back around to a sort of “so bad it’s good” infamy: “Devil’s Son” by DC Lacroix. The only Western female artist to be found here, most folks today only know the song or artist thanks to an appearance in the trash-tacular 80s film Hack-O-Lantern… and by “most people” I only mean people who consider the words “trash-tacular” to be a glowing endorsement. Comparatively speaking, NWOBHM band Dark Star are only remembered by serious metalhead historians, but without any “so bad it’s good” qualifiers. Their song “Lady Of Mars” is one of the many songs to turn a lot of heads when included on multi-artist collections, only for label/management difficulties to prevent it from ever becoming a true “hit.” Similarly, “Lucifer’s Hammer” was a major compilation standout for LA band Warlord, but they too were never able to translate that into a sustainable career until 21st-century nostalgia kicked in. Speaking of later-day nostalgia, we have the sludgier side of the Metal spectrum represented by “Sign Of The Wolf” by Pentagram. A band best known for their 70s-era Black Sabbath soundalike singles, Pentagram never managed to record its first album until the 80s, by which point they sounded more like Danzig than Sabbath. I'm generally a much bigger fan of OG Pentagram, but the 80s-era sound still works pretty darn well in this context.

Moving up from “obscurity” to just “forgotten by the passage of time,” we have a couple NWOBHM tracks that genuinely were modestly successful during that scene’s height. No Iron Maiden-level success, obviously, but at least Tokyo Blade, Tygers of Pan Tang and Angel Witch managed to release more than one album during their initial decade of existence, and sometimes even for actual real record labels that could get them on the charts! Angel Witch provides the song “Angel Witch” off of the album Angel Witch, and if you’re already sick of seeing the words “Angel” and “Witch” used in this sentence, then you’ll probably get really sick of the song well before it’s done. Aside from repeating its title roughly a hundred times over the course of three and a half minutes, “Angle Witch” is one of those fist-pumping anthem songs that’s basically just a single riff played over and over at considerable speed. Tokyo Blade’s “Night Of The Blade” is a bit less repetitive in that it only used HALF the band’s name in its title, and is significantly more complex musically. “Gangland” by Tygers of Pan Tang is probably the most technically polished of all the NWOBHM songs here that don’t have the Iron Maiden name attached to them. They’re also the only band out of this crop of artists to have had a real legit contemporary hit… though “Gangland” isn’t it. But I don’t think Mahizam would be listening to a novelty cover of “Love Potion No. 9” anyway, “Gangland” fits this soundtrack much better.

And then, we have Motörhead. To my great shame, even though Mahi clearly takes all of her fashion cues from Lemmy, her soundtrack actually didn’t have ANY Motörhead on it for the longest time. “Ace Of Spades” obviously would have been the most likely inclusion… except that I’d already used it on Bridget’s soundtrack, along with “Dead Men Tell No Tales” and “Heart of Stone” as well. I think I just got pouty over having already used my first choice and gave up trying to include a Motörhead track at all. But COME ON, dude! Just look at Mahizam! You just KNOW she wants to be Lemmy when she grows up! I couldn’t put her soundtrack out with at least ONE Motörhead track. Eventually I came to my senses, and we ended up with “Overkill” off of the album of the same name.  Let’s all be honest here: “Overkill” is basically just the first draft of “Ace Of Spades” anyway, so if anything is gonna pinch hit for that song, it’s gotta be “Overkill.”

And there ya have it! Yet another lengthy blog post and curated soundtrack for a character who has only appeared in a few pages and barely anybody cares about! Oh, but if you think these last two soundtracks went obscure, just you wait until you see what’s coming next. Not only do we have some characters I guarantee most people forgot even existed, but at least one of them will be dedicated to music I pretty much guarantee nobody will even want to hear! I’m literally pleasing no one but myself at this point! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!

(This is another one of those soundtracks where I expected to have a much harder time finding YouTube posts than I ended up having. I guess 80s Metal is another one of those sub-genres that hits the sweet spot of having obsessive archivist fans to post stuff but minimal record label interference to take stuff down. Even the Japanese tracks were mostly easy to find… MOSTLY. On the one hand, the non-region-locked post I found of Cyntia’s “Through The Fire And Desire” is the official video, even if it’s not on an official account. On the other hand, said video is a “live” version of the song… which is totally just the studio recording with some extra reverb on the vocals and crowd noises dubbed over. It totally gets the point across, but… I mean… WHY? Even if you don’t already know what the studio version sounds like, it’s still blatantly obvious that the live footage and the audio aren’t syncing up. And there’s plenty of other officially released live performances by Cyntia, so it’s not like they couldn’t play live. Just use all-live audio or all studio, trying to fake it just draws needless attention to the fact that you did it in the first place! Speaking of videos, I was tempted to use the music videos for Destrose’s “Fenixx” and Seikima-II’s “1999 Secret Object,” since both bands relied pretty heavily on the visual aspect of their identities, but I guess the record labels though so too, because the only copies of those videos were much lower quality than the audio-only posts. Also, the video for “Fenixx” is just a lot worse then I remembered in general. Like, the whole thing is clearly shot in somebody’s furnished basement, and makes the band look kinda pathetic. They’ve got this whole Steampunk/Pirate costume thing going, and as so many cosplayers learn the hard way, a costume can go from looking really cool to IMPOSSIBLY lame if it’s shot wrong. Of course, it’s also possibly to go so far into lame that it comes back around as wildly entertaining, which brings us to “Devil’s Son.” I actually found an audio-only post of the song, on the assumption that the scene in Hack-O-Lantern surely MUST edit part of the song out or dub extra sound effects over or something… but no! Looking back, it turns out the movie plays the whole song totally clean! And really, I can’t not show the deliriously stupid dream sequence in full if I can get away with it, so that’s what you’re getting. Just… I dunno, trigger warning if you have a phobia of obviously fake severed heads.)

Mahizam's YouTube Playlist