Nighthawk - Vampire Blues (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Hard/Glam Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

While I may well have heard something from this album on Chris Franklin's stellar Raised on Rock radio show, I came into it blind labelled as melodic rock and found it quite the hard rock discovery. In fact, the opener is called Hard Rock Fever and it rolls along like Kickstart Your Heart but with a sleazier tone that reminds of earlier Crüe albums and a powerful lead vocal. Given the overt ties to glam metal, I took that vocal to be male but it's quite clearly female on Generation Now, just a raucous voice in the tradition of Stevie Lange or Joanna Dean. It turns out to be Linnea Vikström from Thundermother and Nighthawk is a sort of supergroup.

The original idea belonged to Robert Majd (the bassist in Captain Black Beard, who I've definitely heard on Raised on Rock; he's also on the first Fans of the Dark album), during the COVID-19 pandemic, so that he could play guitar for a change and work with a variety of different musicians. It clearly proved to be such a valuable experience that he's continued it. This is their third album and a fourth is apparently already recorded. Their description of their sound is that these are "fast paced, spontaneous, action rock n roll songs", a far better take on this music than melodic rock. Sure, it's highly melodic, but I'd call this hard rock first and foremost, with melodic rock, glam rock, heavy metal and even punk aspects.

For a start, this is much faster paced than melodic rock tends to be, blistering along with attitude, not only coming from Vikström. They simply aren't hanging around on any of these songs, even on a Sam and Dave cover like Hold It Baby, which is bluesy and soulful. Everything is urgent, as if they have a gun to their collective heads to knock out all ten studio tracks in under half an hour or pay a serious price, like losing their souls or some such. I'm sure the use of "spontaneous" doesn't mean that they just walked into the studio, plugged in and plucked ten songs out of thin air, down to the lyrics, but the urgency of them suggests that we could believe it. And only two are covers.

I've mentioned the Sam and Dave cover, which wraps up the ten, with Danny Hynes from Weapon joining Vikström to perform it as a duet, and it's hinted at by the blues on The Pledge, which slows things down just a little a couple of songs earlier, at least for a while, without losing any urgency. The keyboardist is Richard Hamilton from the band Houston and he delivers plenty of wonderful seventies style organ, not for the first time on this album, though it's not as obvious on the other songs as it could easily have been, perhaps one reason this finds its place in time a little later.

The other cover is S.O.S. (Too Bad), a deep cut from Aerosmith's Get Your Wings album, now fifty years old. It's the most seventies song here, but it fits the Nighthawk style well, and just like Hold It Baby, it's set up by an original song situated before it, which is Living It Up. Introduced by Doc Brown from Back to the Future this time, it's full of Aerosmith style sass, but it seems to me that, their choice of cover aside, Nighthawk are more influenced by the Aerosmith of the eighties than their earlier form in the seventies.

That's echoed by other influences. Save the Love is another stormer, with a Rainbow vibe to it that comes from Graham Bonnet's era rather than Ronnie James Dio's. There's some Lost in Hollywood in this one, though it's in the riffs and flow rather than the vocals, because, of course, Vikström is a long way from both of them in style. She's closer to Kelly Johnson of Girlschool on a few of these songs and the band back her up. There's Girlschool on Turn the Night and The Pledge and even my standout favourite, Burning Ground, which almost feels like a Girlschool cover of a Fleetwood Mac song, given how every aspect just harmonises seamlessly together like something off Rumours.

I had a blast with this album, though I can't see the point of the hidden track at the end of the live version of Just Let Go that wraps it up, even if its manipulations loop nicely back into the opener. What shocks me is how quickly it's over, given that there are ten fully formed tracks before we get to that live bonus, but that's due to the urgency. These are all lean and mean songs that blister in and blister out again and, a bunch of sampled intros from movies aside, they have no intention of outstaying their welcome. Everything is urgent and that's why only Hold It Baby makes it to even the three market mark. The opener is done in under two and a half.

With two previous albums available, Midnight Hunter and Prowler, and that promised fourth just around the corner, I have a feeling it would be very easy indeed to just dive into their music as an energy shot on a regular basis. Sure, the line-up changes because it's less of a band and more of a project, but I have a feeling that won't matter. Or maybe it will. Does the sound vary across these albums? I think I need to find out.

Snarm - Till the End (2024)

Country: India
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 Jul 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Here's another submission from India. I'm always happy to see these, given that it's a huge nation with a huge musical heritage, but so little of it ever seems to fit into the rock and metal vein. This particular band are Snarm, from Guwahati in Assam, and they call what they do progressive glam/arena rock. It's especially heartening to see a female drummer, which feels odd to call out in 2024 with so many entirely female bands or female musicians playing every instrument imaginable in a wealth of different genres, but is still pioneering in India. So kudos to Arju Begum; may you break that glass ceiling.

Unfortunately, she's part of the most obvious flaw but it isn't her fault. Every time the first track proper, Someday Somewhere, kicks in, my brain screams at me that the production is too thin. Her drums ought to be much beefier than they are and so should the bass of Anurag Gogoi. However, I do have to acknowledge that I'm listening on YouTube, because I don't have an album download. I have no doubt that there's compression involved so this isn't quite how the album should sound, but I found it relatively easy to adjust anyway. By the time that Sky High arrives at the very heart of the album, I've almost forgotten the thin production and I'm just listening to the music.

Initially, it's the arena rock aspect to their sound that's most obvious. Someday Somewhere plays in radio-friendly territory, even at five minutes in length, with AOR vocals from Tsooraj and a tasty fluid guitar solo from the band's founder, Shihan Bhuyan. Rarest of Pearls follows suit with softer vocals and a seventies rock feel. Till the End is good old fashioned hard rock that doesn't seem to do anything flash but flows really well and seeps into our soul because of that. It's the title track and it's the first obvious highlight the album has to offer. No Rain Can Wash Away is a ballad that shifts from delicate piano and soft orchestration to power ballad midway through. Again, there's some tasty guitarwork when it's time for Bhuyan to solo.

Sure, there's a little of their progressive edge late in Rarest of Pearls and there's definitely some glam rock on Someday Somewhere, but these don't come close to dominating the album, at least until One More Lonely Night shows up as the bonus track. That's pure glam rock with metal edges. It's a slick and commercial single but it doesn't really do anything that any other slick commercial glam rock single does, so it ends up feeling like a single that would surely get airplay but wouldn't be particularly remembered after its moment in the spotlight is up.

Mostly, this plays to me like good old fashioned hard rock, mostly seventies but with touches that are pure eighties, and enough AOR to make it totally viable as arena rock. And, while the first half is pretty solid, the second half ups the ante considerably. While Till the End is excellent and all the more memorable with each further listen, Sky High is easily the album's highlight for me. It starts out like another piano-driven ballad, but kicks in hard after a minute to become a seventies hard rock stomper. Sure, I'd like a beefier sound for the bass and drums on one, but it's a gem anyway, right down to a delightful drop into flamenco guitar with handclaps during the second half. Other than that section, somehow it feels Japanese to me, like Bow Wow covering Iron Maiden.

I didn't identify any particular influence on Till the End or Sky High, though there are elements of a lot of different bands discernible. The overt influences kick in after them. This Rock 'n' Roll Ride opens up with a guitar riff that's surely borrowed from Maiden's Back in the Village, but it has a strong Deep Purple sound otherwise. Rain and Thunder features lots more eighties metal guitar, but then it gets Michael Jackson funky and then shifts into European power metal, just in a hard rock framework. It's like Uli Jon Roth covering Helloween. Then there's Reignite, an interesting ballad that's not only folky because of an overt flute. Its sweep is reminiscent of Rainbow Eyes by Rainbow but with Mark Knopfler guitar and a vocal melody that I know I should recognise.

Oddly, while these three songs are the easiest to locate sources for, they're three of the best that the album has to offer, Sky High and Reignite above Till the End and Rain and Thunder for me and This Rock 'n' Roll Ride and No Rain Can Wash Away behind them. That's a lot of songs to call out on an album that's an intro and eight songs, plus a bonus single, which bodes well for Snarm's future, as they develop their own style and hopefully lead the way for Indian hard rock in the 2020s.

This is an easy album to like and also a comfortable album to listen to a lot. There are albums that sound amazing on a first listen, only to fade away after a few more times through; and albums that don't sound like much at all until we dig into them and realise just how amazing they are. This is an album that sounds good immediately and continues to sound good however many times we listen. I doubt it'll top anyone's lists of the best albums of the year, but it's an album even jaded critics are likely to pull back out every once in a while as a reliable old favourite. Thanks for sending this one over to me, Shihan!

Lipz - Changing the Melody (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Glam Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Mar 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Lipz have been around since 2011 but it took them a while to get an album out, Scaryman not arriving until 2018. I haven't heard that one, but I've heard tracks from this, their follow-up, on Chris Franklin's joyous Raised on Rock radio show. They're on Frontiers now and, for some reason, that label is calling this heavy metal. It isn't close to heavy metal, even if there are hints of Shout at the Devil-era Mötley Crüe on the opener, I'm Going Under, as that buzzsaw riff is straight out of Looks That Kill. This is far closer to the smooth glam rock that Tigertailz played on songs like Livin' without You, shorn of the early punk influence but before they got a little edgier on later albums.

While I'm Going Under is probably my favourite song, it's not a particularly representative one. I would suggest that the title track is far more typical of the rest of the material here, featuring a more subdued guitar and a more obvious melodic rock outlook. Its bombastic chorus seems right out of melodic rock, merely put through a sleaze filter, and that seems to be what Lipz are aiming for with these songs. They want to play melodic rock with strong melodies and huge choruses but to sleaze it up with a glam rock look and feel, so that there's an edge to it all.

There are a few songs that take a slightly different approach. While the focus is always on vocals and huge choruses, for instance, the guitarists do get work to do. There's that underpinning Crüe riff on I'm Going Under and more eighties glam metal guitar throughout I'm Alive, the closest on this album that Lipz get to that heavy metal tag Frontiers is using. Freak could have been a glam metal ballad back in the day, kicking off with a tasty slow blues guitar solo, but it's a heavier song here. The real ballad is I Would Die for You, which dips all the way into tinkling ivories, and it's the song where Alexander Klintberg sounds the most female.

He isn't, because he's one of the twin brothers at the heart of this band, and he sounds like a male glam rock singer across most of the album, but he gets very delicate here. It's worth mentioning to anyone new to the band that, while he was a founding member of Lipz, he never intended to be its lead singer. He's one of those two guitarists, the other being Conny Svärd, and he only took up mike duties when they couldn't find a singer who could do the job they wanted. Fortunately, he did step up and the rest is history, because it's hard to imagine this band with a different singer now.

The rest of the band are capable too, with mention here for Chris Young on bass as the remaining musician I haven't credited yet, but this isn't really about musicianship. Sure, they do the job but the job doesn't call for virtuoso theatrics. It calls for capable, albeit tight playing that underpins the lead vocals and the melodies, and that's what these musicians deliver. And, in turn, what that means is that the best songs here are the ones that stick in our head the most. The good news is that there are earworms all over the album.

The chorus in I'm Going Under is catchy, but the chorus in Changing the Melody is a real earworm and it's far from the last. Bye Bye Beautiful and Monsterz have notable earworm chorus as well, while Stop Talking About Nothing and Secret Lover are earworms right out of the gate. The latter is surely the most Tigertailz influenced song here, enough so that I had to remind myself that the chorus is "(Na Na) Secret Lover" rather than "(Na Na) Nukklear Rokket", with a heck of a lot more than two nas for audiences to get behind. This is a gift for audience participation.

So is this glam rock cleaned up to play in the realm of melodic rock or is it melodic rock with sleazy glam rock elements? Given the look, I'd lean towards the former, but it doesn't really matter. The expected audience might be a little different, but there's a huge overlap and Lipz will meet what fans of either approach would expect in the music, which is where it matters the most, regardless of what melodic rock aficionados are likely to think of their make-up and stage attire. No wonder Chris is playing them.

TAFKAVince Band - A Problematic Opera (2023)

Country: USA
Style: Garage Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 26 May 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Kudos to the Artist Formally Known as Vince for a name that grabs attention in a crowded market; it certainly elicited a smile from me when this was submitted for review. Now, it's all fine and good to get eyeballs on your product, of course, but the product has to stand for itself once it's been noticed. Fortunately, this is fun enough stuff to work and Vince isn't new at this, with releases going way back to the nineties.

They describe themselves as glam trash rock 'n' roll, which is as fair a description as any, but to me they sound like a garage rock band playing pop songs, though what precise sort of pop songs has a lot to do with whichever one we're listening to. Expiration Date is a quirky pop song in the vein of maybe Missing Persons, sans squeaky voice, but Sugar Pills ups the punk guitar, even finding what sounds very much like Rose Tattoo's Nice Boys at one point, and Conquer the World dips obviously into seventies glam rock. That's a riff we might expect from the Sweet but the vocals don't follow suit.

While Vince himself delivers the most prominent voice on Expiration Date, his is not the only voice here because Lauren Kurtz also sings lead and the pair often sing the same thing together. In some songs, it's hard to tell which is singing lead and which backup, because they're kind of both singing both. That leads me to pull in a B-52s comparison, but this is rock music just as much as it's pop and the B-52s never quite went there. Maybe this is the B-52s with a little Cramps thrown into the mix. However, each song, for all that they play consistently together, generates different comparisons.

There's some straight up rock 'n' roll soloing on Magazine Pages but it approaches rock 'n' roll the way the Beatles did, so it's very much a pop song rocked up. This would be an easy song for a bunch of different bands to cover and put their own very different spins onto it. The title track, even with that nod to opera in its name, is old school British punk in the Buzzcocks style but with those poppy vocals. Of course, it drops into a pop opera midway, complete with guest accordion and euphonium, of all things, and it ends, after the band have downed their instruments, in solo calypso guitar. This is agreeably unusual and highlights how Vince isn't interested in playing every song the same way.

In fact, the only song that feels pretty straightforward is Rabbit Hole, which is the closest to pure garage rock. It kicks off with drums, adds bass and unfolds exactly as we might expect for a bunch of young musicians playing in a garage with simple equipment. Except when it isn't, because they just have to throw something more unusual into the mix and here that comes in Kurtz's vocals, as she adds quirky flourishes here and there to punctuate their typical joint male/female lead.

And that's it, because this is an EP rather than a full album, with the length the most obvious flaw. There are only six tracks on offer and they're generally not particularly long, four of them ending under three minutes and the relatively sprawling Expiration Date only lasting to three and a half. That just leaves Conquer the World to stretch out to a breath over five minutes, making it almost an epic for this band. That means that this EP wraps in under twenty minutes, which isn't long for an established and experienced band. Then again, it's only $7 on Bandcamp, so it's fairly priced.

I liked this, in large part because it feels honest. I've heard a lot of very carefully produced albums in 2023, where engineers, mixers and producers have dedicated energy to making them sound exactly right. This, on the other hand, feels exactly like the five members of the band showed up, plugged in and blistered through twenty minutes of music on the spin, just for the love of performing. The only reason I know this really was produced is because there are moments clearly done in post, like the radio voices within Expiration Date.

The point is that this back to basics approach feels vibrant and refreshing. I bet they have a lot of fun on a live stage and, given that they're based out of Chicago, maybe I'll have chance at seeing them some day. Thanks for sending this over, folks!

L.A. Guns - Black Diamonds (2023)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 14 Apr 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

Ever since Phil Lewis and Tracii Guns resolved their differences in 2016 and merged their versions of L.A. Guns back into one band, they've been reasonably prolific, knocking out an album every two years: The Missing Peace, The Devil You Know and Checkered Past. That schedule means that they are due for another one and here it is, another gritty hard rock album that owes as much to bands who influenced what would become hair metal as to those hair metal bands themselves.

Mostly that means American punk because there's plenty of the New York Dolls and the Stooges in this sound, stripped of all the later excess of the eighties down to its sleazy core with a deceptively set of simple riffs and hooks, all delivered with a near garage-band level of production. Babylon is the most overt glam punk song here, right up there with anything Hanoi Rocks ever released, but Lewis snarls his way through songs like Got It Wrong just like a Dolls devotee who's just found the validation he needed after hearing Too Fast for Love on release day back in 1981 and aches to tell everyone on Sunset Strip about it from a variety of stages.

However, there's also a more traditional rock and pop sound here too. You Betray kicks everything into motion with a very Jimmy Page guitar from Guns and Lewis follows suit with a grungy Robert Plant style vocal. It all feels so down and dirty, I wanted to wipe the grime off it. There's more Zep at points throughout the album, especially on Gonna Lose, but it's shifted into an almost southern rock framework there with unusual rhythms. In a different direction, Crying sometimes sounds as if it used to be a bubblegum single from the sixties before the Guns sleazed it up.

I liked Checkered Past, but much of it didn't truly engage me. This one does much better, because many of these songs get under the skin. You Betray is engaging from moment one, as is Diamonds, which starts out like a ballad but gets tougher and more memorable as it builds. These songs have simple but highly effective grooves, whether they slide into them immediately, like You Betray, or take their time for effect, like Diamonds. With repeat listens, other songs demonstrate their own grooves and more and more of them engage each time through. I didn't find that on the previous album. I found it here and it makes it tough to move on, rather than listen through one more time to see what pops next.

While this sounds like a step up from its predecessor on a first time through, it continues to grow with repeats to the point that I started to wonder if it really counted as two steps up. I wonder how much Lewis meant a repeated line in Diamonds: "I know we're broken but we shine like a diamond now." It certainly sounds like a good way to describe the L.A. Guns of 2023. The riffs on Babylon and Wrong About You may be acutely simple but they're as effective as riffs get. The riff that rumbles under Shame fits that too; it's just more hidden under Lewis's more outrageous delivery, just as a teasing harmonica is hidden under the guitar.

But that's five winners out of five and they're followed by Shattered Glass, with an almost AC/DC riff to kick it off. I'd call the first half stronger than the second, especially with Gonna Lose turning down the emphasis, but nothing lets the album down on this one. Got It Wrong picks up the baton again, but then Crying softens things back up afresh. Lowlife and Like a Drug sit somewhere in between them with regards to intensity. I should emphasise that these are still good songs. I'd call Gonna Lose a clear highlight and Like a Drug isn't a bad closer at all, but lowering the energy level changes the impact of the second half.

And so this is easily a 7/10 but it deserves more than that. I'm not sure it does enough to warrant a highly recommended 8/10, but it's pretty damn close. Suddenly I wonder why I don't use half point ratings again. This is the epitome of a 7.5/10 album and it bodes very well for the Guns' next album, presumably due in 2025. At least I hope so. Their website seems to have mysteriously vanished.

Wig Wam - Out of the Dark (2023)

Country: Norway
Style: Glam Rock/Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 10 Feb 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

I mentioned last time out, when I reviewed Wig Wam's reformation album, Never Say Die, that the band had heavied up and that was a change that I firmly appreciated. Well, it seems that they are still heavying up and I'm definitely not complaining. This is still hard rock rather than heavy metal, but the opening title track runs pretty close to the elusive border between the two, closer than I'd say they've ever been. The heaviness is mostly in Teeny's guitars, but the rhythm section backs him up emphatically. That continues, most obviously on Uppercut Shazam and a little less so on High n Dry, but it never really goes away even on the most overt ballad, The Purpose.

The glam roots of Wig Wam show in a number of different ways. Forevermore is a lower key stalker that builds through a singalong glam chorus. Bad Luck Chuck adds in some southern rock and some old school sleaze, before finding a ruthless AC/DC-esque drive. Ghosting You swaggers the way we might expect Wig Wam to swagger and there's plenty of their patented glam stomp. Just to play a bit more with those alliterative movements, the closer, Sailor and the Desert Sun includes a neat middle eastern flavour, so that one sways. The bottom line is that we generally want to move when we're listening to Wig Wam.

There are odd songs that do something completely different and I liked all of those. The Purpose is a ballad, I guess, given that it's notably softer than anything else here and it gives far more of the focus to vocalist Glam. It builds substantially, but never to the point where it could be compared to the heavier material here. It's always the ballad, just not as soft as we might expect. 79 is a guitar instrumental that feels like it waltzed in from an instrumental album. It's a tasty piece, a lot more akin to something Gary Moore might have recorded than, say, a Vai or a Satriani, let alone Yngwie Malmsteen.

Mostly, though, this is just a heavier take on glam rock with chunkier riffs, heavier production and all those glam elements layered over the top. However close to metal it gets, and let's face it, it's over that line on Uppercut Shazam, with razorblades in Teeny's guitar riffs that we might expect from Megadeth, we're never far from a strong hook or a singalong chorus. They're merely laid over chunkier grounding as if this has to be played louder than you're playing it. However old you are or aren't, do you remember that magic first gig when you discovered that soft rock bands aren't so soft on stage as they are on record? It seems to me that this is rather like coming back to the record and not finding it softer at all.

As much I appreciate this everything louder than everything else approach that Wig Wam seem to be firmly moving into, I'd suggest that Out of the Dark, their sixth album, is just as good as Never Say Die, their fifth, which I reviewed a couple of years ago, but no better beyond the crunch. There are still standout songs, like Out of the Dark and Ghosting You, whose lyrics talk about Vanilla Ice for some reason, but most of the album is a notch down from that level, still strong but nothing a certain superhero show would leap at. That material came a little in their career. I wouldn't raise complaints if I heard Uppercut Shazam on the next season of The Boys, but I don't expect it.

And so I wonder how this will fare in the marketplace. Sure, it's heavier, but it's still Wig Wam and I'd expect their fanbase to stay with them, whether they adore the new punchiness or bitch about how they didn't used to need it. Will it bring in anyone new? Maybe. This is all decent stuff, no bad songs among the eleven on offer and the weakest still pretty solid. Maybe it'll be a gateway to the fans of heavier music who might have looked past Wig Wam in the past, even if I don't expect them to acquire a page on Metal Archives quite yet. Time will tell. I'm interested in what they'll do next.

Andy McCoy - Jukebox Junkie (2022)

Country: Finland
Style: Glam Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 5 Aug 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

"This is the most colourful album I have ever done," says Andy McCoy, of this covers album, which I believe is his sixth solo effort, if we count a 1996 collaboration with Pete Malmi and the soundtrack to the half-fictional biopic about him, The Real McCoy, in 1999. The beauty of this one is that it's no runthrough of expected choices. I grew up listening to Hanoi Rocks so I know what they sound like and it would be trivial to conjure up a list of glam or rock 'n' roll classics that would be likely to be on the record but we'd be wrong ninety-nine times out of a hundred, as this is a deep dive indeed. In fact, I looked at the track listing and could still only place two songs.

One is China Girl, made famous by David Bowie who co-wrote it, but first released by Iggy Pop, the other co-writer, and it's that version that McCoy's covering here. The other one is Solo in Soho, the title track from Phil Lynott's 1980 solo album, which McCoy sasses up with female vocalisation and saxophone. They're both good versions, but they're not the best here. I'd be hard pressed to state which are, because this is a lively album through which McCoy brings new life to old favourites that he felt should have been hits or, at least, bigger ones than they happened to be. It's his deep joy of music that shines brightest here and it's there throughout.

The opener, I'm Gonna Roll, may be the closest to the Hanoi Rocks sound, but, like the majority of these songs, it was new to me. It was originally recorded by Rock 'n' Roll Band in 1975, but notably recorded by the Leningrad Cowboys in 1992, both bands Finnish like McCoy. It's a rollicking rock 'n' roll song and it's somehow surprising that Hanoi Rocks never covered it back in the day. Much less expected is 54-46 That's My Number, originally recorded by reggae band the Maytals in 1968. It's a song that McCoy keeps in its genre, though the vocals are more raucous.

Just to keep us on the hop, he shifts into pop music with Squeeze's debut single Take Me I'm Yours, from 1978, and then into a modern singer/songwrter style ballad, Miss Tennessee by Katie Noel, easily the most recent of these songs, originally released in 2020 with a featuring credit for Autumn Brooke. While McCoy is on half a dozen of these songs as a vocalist, in addition to slinging his guitar throughout, this isn't one of them. Jamie Hembree and Niki Westerback provide the male and female voices and I'd say they find the sweet spot between the smooth approach we expect from country and the raw one a rock album from Andy McCoy would warrant.

And so it goes, with that diversity in sound a key feature, though everything still plays consistently with the raw and emotional feel that Andy McCoy does so well. His guitar gets a workout on every track and everything seems like something that he'd have a blast playing live in a small club, with a variety of guests joining in for an even more fun time. Most are vocalists, with Sofia Zida maybe most notable for her performances, especially on Back to the Wall, which adds a Stevie Nicks vibe to a song by the Divinyls and a relatively faithful look back at Wanda Jackson.

That's one of the pop songs on offer, as is Hot Night in Texas, a heavier take on Moon Martin's Hot Nite in Dallas. There are rock songs here, of course, that we might know from original versions by people like Ron Wood (I Can Feel the Fire), the Climax Blues Band (I Couldn't Get It Right). There's a punk song, the UK Subs's Countdown, easily the heaviest thing on offer here. And there are even country songs by Juice Newton and the legendary Wanda Jackson, whose number Funnel of Love is the oldest by far, as a 1960 song. Then again, Lemmy loved her music as straight ahead rock 'n' roll and I'm not going to argue with him on that front.

I love covers albums where I don't know the originals, especially when they're deep cuts as joyous as these or those on Monster Magnet's A Better Dystopia last year. I love really unlikely ones too, such as Danzig Sings Elvis and the Die Krupps take on pop in Songs from the Dark Side of Heaven. It's the expected material that leaves me blah because my brain knows how those songs go and doing justice to them in a different fashion means something special, like Johnny Cash covering Hurt or Tori Amos taking on Raining Blood.

This is my sort of covers album, at once a glorious discovery of tracks I didn't know anything about, interpreted by someone who truly cares about them, and a new album of what appears to be new material by an artist I enjoy, because I don't have any of those reference points to stain it. And so, Andy, I hear that you narrowed this playlist down from a set of sixty or so. What else was on there and are you going to record any of them? Inquiring minds want to know.

Michael Monroe - I Live Too Fast to Die Young (2022)

Country: Finland
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 10 Jun 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

It feels like only about ten minutes since the last Michael Monroe album, One Man Gang, but it's a surprising three years and, as enjoyable as that one was, this feels more consistent and, dare I say it, more mature. And that sounds flippant of me, I know, but, while that patented Michael Monroe blend of punk and glam on offer here, the whole thing feels a little less rough and loose (crucially, though, not more polished) and more carefully thought out. The lyrics grabbed my attention last time out and they do so even more this time, starting at the very outset with Murder the Summer of Love.

That's a strong opener in every way, lyrically and musically, but things don't fade at all from there. Songs that, in other hands, could have become filler material, aren't here, merely taking different amounts of time to grow on us. I remember liking the up tempo songs more on that last album and they're surely the ones that caught me first here, like All Fighter and, most notably, Pagan Prayer, but then the sleazier, slightly laid back ones grew and eventually the ballad as well, an impressive piece in the style of Mott the Hoople that I came to really dig. Initially, it felt like an interlude but it's a real grower that has become one of my favourites. Notably, it's located right at the heart of the album and maybe that has meaning.

What I'm finding, on my fourth time through, is that every song here could well end up like that. It didn't initially feel like a great album, just a good one, but nothing fades and everything grows. I'd be as hard pressed to pick the worst song as the best one and that doesn't happen too often. Most albums have a standout or three and a couple of songs that don't live up to the rest. I'd have given you examples of both after one listen but not after three. Derelict Palace may take a little longer to stand out than the songs around it on the first half but it's just as worthy and the same goes for Everybody's Nobody. The former has a really cool groove and the latter stands out lyrically.

And, just like the Latin vibe on Heaven is a Free State last time, there are songs here that add an unusual angle to Monroe's tried and tested formulae. Sure, there are moments here that feel like they could have been on Two Steps from the Move, like the bridge in All Fighter, but there are also subtle shifts. Can't Stop Falling Apart isn't that far from his usual style, but somehow it's also half Steve Earle and half Status Quo, which is quite a cool collaboration. There's a laid back reggae vibe on No Guilt behind the alt rock and Dearly Departed is an electronic new wave song, but a very successful one. If Monroe made an album in that style, he'd find a whole new audience.

There aren't a lot of guests here and only one you'd expect me to call out. That's Slash, who shows up on the sassy title track to lend his guitar talents and to weave a solo. It's a neat team up but it's not the event that it could have been. The song is another good one, with a memorable and catchy chorus, and I'm not going to fault Slash's solo either, but it's just one of eleven tracks here. In fact, given where Dearly Departed goes after it, it doesn't hold our focus as long as you might think. It feels like another good Michael Monroe song, whereas Dearly Departed plays much more like the departure it suggests and its uncharacteristic synths seem more notable than Slash's solo.

I like this album a lot. It was always a good one and I never doubted that it would be another 7/10, just like its predecessor, but I don't think that's fair. This is an 8/10 album. It just doesn't slap us in the face with how great it is. The more I listen to it, the better it gets and the less surprised I feel about that rating.

The Mother Rockers - Kobra (2022)

Country: Canada
Style: Glam Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 5 Jan 2022
Sites: Facebook | YouTube

With a cover like that, it's completely obvious from moment one that the Mother Rockers want to channel the glam rock of the eighties, even though they're from Quebec rather than Hollywood's Sunset Strip. The immediate question I had was whether they're a pure joke band or whether the music they play can stand up on its own. Looking at song titles, not to forget the T Rex cover star, I had to wonder. Maybe songs like Hot Mom and Late Nite Struggle might be on one side of the line but She's Got a Dick and Too Hot to Fuck are on the other. There was only one way to find out and I thought opener I Can't Wait sounded decent, so I persevered.

And this isn't bad at all. Yes, it's just as obviously eighties glam rock as you imagine it is, but it had little interest in just pitching clichéd joke songs. At least, I felt that way without trying to focus on the lyrics to songs like Rivers of Slobber. The beats are decent, the musicians are capable and the hooks are as good as they need to be. No, there isn't anything remotely original here and I'm still half convinced that this album is just a pitch to land a support slot on a Steel Panther tour. I'd love to know if the musicians in the Mother Rockers have day jobs in regular bands, ones where they're not listed as Billie Ballz, Bobby Coxx or Max Shaft.

Frankly, the more the Mother Rockers rock it up, the better they sound. Lady Mary-Ann kicks with style, the guitars of, good grief, Max Shaft and Johnny Bucket, generating neat buzzsaw riffs and decent solos too. Rivers of Slobber and Runnin' Away aren't bad songs at all. I managed to avoid a definition of what Y.M.B.B. stands for but the song of that title is decent too. The first time that I couldn't avoid the stupidity of it all was She's Got a Dick eight songs in, which delivers its title like it's a refrain in a movie trailer.

Quite how much a band means this style is always a difficult question to answer. There's no reason why a band can't play eighties hair metal unironically, however hard that's becoming (ha!) to do. I liked bands like Mötley Crüe, Ratt and Kix early on, however ridiculous they looked in outrageous stage attire. I also liked where a lot of later bands overzealously caught up in the buzz went when grunge took the scene down. So ditch the make-up and stupid costumes and just play your rock 'n' roll like you mean it. Maybe it'll have rougher edges that way and you'll get more bikers than hot chicks baring their boobs in the audience, but it'll sound good.

This is nowhere near as good as the early days of glam metal, though I did appreciate how dirty a lot of the riffs managed to get. It's also nowhere near as interesting as those later bands turning the genre into something new, but it's decent stuff, at least until we get to the inevitable ballad, Since You're Gone, which is just tiresome. It's the only song I'd skip here because of its music. The lyrics, on the hand, could prompt more of that. I kept catching snippets here and there and every instance led to some serious rolling of eyeballs, the more the album ran on.

So, I ended up liking some of this but not wanting to come back to it. I certainly have no interest in checking out any of their music videos. They might be hilarious, but I'm here for the music and it's not entirely possible to just enjoy it on its own merits. C'est la vie.

The Darkness - Motorheart (2021)

Country: UK
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Nov 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

It's hard to imagine anyone not liking the Darkness because they're so infectious. They don't have a single sound, unless we can simply label them lively or energetic, so they're not pigeonholeable. And, even if that isn't a real word, it seems like one that they might use themselves, given a sense of humour that pervades everything they do. Most bands wouldn't be able to get away with a song like Welcome tae Glasgae at the beginning of the album, especially when not a single member is actually from Glasgow. I'm not sure the Darkness do either, but they come closer than they ought to.

It's a wacky song, with an overdone opening built out of bagpipes, martial drums and even wilder falsetto vocals from Justin Hawkins than usual. It settles down a little and rocks, but I can't say it's particularly coherent. Then again, I've been to Glasgow. It's a vibrant city but, yeah, I can't really say it's particularly coherent either. My biggest problem is with the lyrics, because they state "the women are gorgeous and the food is OK." I'm not going to diss on any Scottish lassie, but I have an abiding craving for the African restaurant down the stairs next to my hotel when I was there last. They're a heck of a lot better than merely OK! I hope it survived COVID.

From that opening, the band settle down a little. I emphasise a little because they veer around an array of genres while never losing their rock base. It's Love, Jim's verses seem like Britpop rocked up a few levels. There's AC/DC all over the place, most clearly on The Power and the Glory of Love, and there's Queen everywhere too, especially on Sticky Situations. Eastbound dabbles in country rock, even with prominent plugs for what I assume are favourite British pubs for the band. And it's happy to wrap up in new wave and post-punk on Speed of the Nite Time, which reminds of nobody if not Gary Numan.

That's not to forget the glam rock that underpins most of this. The band obviously grew up with a good stack of Slade records and they played them a lot. There's a nod to Rick Springfield's Jessie's Girl on Jussy's Girl, just with the Darkness's pixie-like humour: "And if you don't wanna be Jussy's girl, have you got a friend who looks just like you but maybe isn't as fussy and wants to be with Jussy?" Talking of humour, the title track isn't light years away from Tim Minchin's Inflatable You except in how much it rocks. It covers much the same ground lyrically: "I never had much luck with women so I bought myself a droid."

With such variety on offer, different song leap out for special attention on each listen through. It really is the sort of album that changes in your mind, depending on your mood at the time, which I remember well from Queen, for whom drummer Rufus Tiger Taylor still plays when needed in the place on the stage that his dad made famous. Talking of Queen, Sticky Situations keeps growing on me, and I can't resist Nobody Can See Me Cry when it simply barrels along in between verses.

However, my favourite song is consistently the title track, which was released as the album's first single in August. It has a particularly killer opening, starting out simply, adding an ethnic flavour as it builds, before getting jagged and experimental for a moment and finally sliding effortlessly into its groove. I often sat back in my chair thinking about how tight this band are, but that went double for the title track. No wonder the Darkness are so well regarded on stage.

The downsides for me are that it can be awkward to appreciate just how damn good this band are when they're messing around on their sillier songs and that Justin Hawkins's falsetto can seem a little overused. But hey, this is what the Darkness do and they've carved a considerably niche out of the rock 'n' roll genre for themselves. That's impressive all on its own but that they're still fun makes it all the better.

Electric Boys - Upside Down (2021)

Country: Sweden
Style: Funk Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30th April, 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I remember Electric Boys as a funk metal band. Their genre was kind of given away by the title of their debut album, Funk-O-Metal Carpet Ride, but it was there in the songs too. It's here as well but not to a similar degree, even on funkier songs like Never Again Your Slave and The Dudes & The Dancers. This is hard rock, with as many hints towards glam as to funk. In fact, the seven minute instrumental opener, Upside Down Theme, is often a lot closer to Boston than the Dan Reed Network. It's good stuff, don't get me wrong, with some inventive riffs and lively drums, but it's not particularly funky. There's even a section that dabbles in reggae, which is actually really cool.

The vocals of Conny Bloom kick in with Super God, the second song, and from that point, I heard quite a lot of Ziggy Stardust era David Bowie, even if it starts out funky. That's Bowie in the chorus for sure and the backing vocals underline it as they often do throughout the album. When Bloom shifts into an Ian Hunter approach on She Never Turns Around, the Beatles-esque singalong behind him is phrased just like Mott the Hoople would have done it.

I think this is why I like this so much. The band shift around rather a lot here, from Bowie to the Stones to Mott, but they do it consistently across the line-up. When Bloom goes for a Mick Jagger approach on Tumblin' Dominoes (as if the title didn't give that away anyway), the music is ahead of him, even if guitarist Martin Thomander often leads the band into more of a Hanoi Rocks cover of the Stones than a straight cover. This isn't stripped down like Tumblin' Dice; it's well crafted in the studio with layers of vocals and some neat guitar effects.

Now, this is heavier than any of those bands got and Bloom never attempts any accents, but it's fair to say that it looks back musically a lot further than I expected, with much of that in the vocal phrasing of Bloom that's recognisably that of the singers I've already mentioned and sometimes recognisably an Iggy Pop approach, especially on Interstellafella, where the snarl that was present on the more Mick Jagger songs comes out full force. However, he doesn't stay there. There's still some '80s funk metal, with its chanting and it's near rap, and the band shifts between the two eras like gears.

The funk is most obvious in the rhythm section, because when Bloom does choose to take that road on songs like Never Again Your Slave, Andy Christell's bass comes utterly to life, like a dog when you open a bag of treats, and Niklas Sigevall perks up too. Both of them are clearly capable musicians and they go wherever any of the songs want to go, but they're clearly more vibrant on Never Again Your Slave than on softer songs like She Never Turns Around that give more opportunities to Thomander for his guitar solo and to the na na na backing vocalists.

And all this leaves me torn.

As is becoming a trend, I remember the Electric Boys in their early years, from Funk-O-Metal Carpet Ride and Groovus Maximus in the late eighties and early nineties. I wasn't the biggest funk metal fan in the world, but they made good music and I liked their style. This does go there, on She Never Turns Around and Globestrutter, but mostly I think an old school Electric Boys fan might find it far too hard rock, with too much glam and without anywhere near enough funk.

However, someone open to a change in that approach ought to dig this. That funk is still there and it's done well, but the songs that play glammier or punkier or simply more rock 'n' roll are done well too. I dug songs like The Dudes & The Dancers, which runs on a mildly funky bass line and aims for talkative verses but returns to the Mott approach for another singalong chorus. It doesn't hurt that there's an inventive instrumental midsection that's almost prog jazz. It may not be funk-o-metal, but it's a damn good song. And this is a pretty good album too.

Slammin' Gladys - Two (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Glam Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 12 Feb 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

I thought Slammin' Gladys sounded familiar but I think I'm thinking of Smashed Gladys, whose singer, Sally Cato, sadly passed away last year. Slammin' Gladys do go back quite a way but not quite that far. Smashed Gladys were mid eighties, with albums in 1985 and 1988. Slammin' Gladys were nineties, their only prior album dating back to 1992, with what may be the most overt phallic symbol I've yet seen on an album cover. Almost thirty years later, the same line-up is back with a second and it's good stuff, if a little less energetic than I might expect for such a long overdue return to the studio.

They play their hard rock with a strong shot of glam and a chaser of funk, which translates to a sound that moves back and forth between AC/DC and the Faces, but with a plethora of extra influences which shake it up considerably, most obviously Extreme. Toxic Lover is like Extreme playing We Didn't Start the Fire with the AC/DC rhythm section. Dragon Eye Girl ditches AC/DC and Durango ditches Extreme too, leaving a song that could work for a smooth Rod Stewart or a less drunk Dogs d'Amour.

The best early song, though, is Lose My Mind, which is sassy, funky and neatly catchy. It's an odd song because it talks about drinking and smoking too much and going a little mad sometimes (hey, haven't you?) but it's not remotely as debauched as the Quireboys or the aforementioned Dogs. We don't buy into the band having to be propped up by roadies while they record the song, which would have been the only way to improve it. It's not squeaky clean and it's not pop glam in the way that Green Day are pop punk, but it's certainly commercial.

One reason for that may be that the mix seems very clean, not thin but emphatically not thick, with J. J. Farris's guitar dampened down a lot further than it ought to be. I like the music but I'd like it much more if it had some real oomph added in the mixing booth. A song like Lost in Texas tries, with a neat harmonica and a backing that lightens for the verses and heavies up before the chorus, but the mix is weak. This song ought to crush, but it merely entertains with the promise of what I'm sure it'll be on stage.

The most obvious sound is the voice of Dave Brooks, which is characterful and highly appropriate for funk rock, even if he obviously hasn't destroyed his throat through a life of debauchery over the three decade gap in between studio visits. His most raspy vocals are more like Axl Rose than Rod Stewart or Tyla. I don't know what he's been doing in that time because the rap on Light Up suggests that he has a taste in music that hasn't moved on from 1992. Everything in the sound here is from then or earlier, whether it's funk, glam, rock or that rap section, which is a lot closer to Blondie than Dr. Dre, not that I'm complaining about that.

Sometimes it's much earlier, like Ice Water, which is a delightfully bluesy old rock 'n' roller with nods back to Elvis and the Grand Ole Opry and, bizarrely, the mix is very different here. The guitar has a lot more oomph, the drums have a lot more oomph, we can hear Al Collins run up and down the fretboard of his bass like he's a born again rockabilly and Brooks isn't as dominant as he's been. This is a deeper sound and it's how Slammin' Gladys ought to sound throughout this album.

I feel a little bad giving this a 6/10 because I enjoyed Lose My Mind, loved Ice Water and liked Poison Arrow more and more the longer it ran. I'm sure I'd have a blast watching Slammin' Gladys live. Some songs here are weaker than others but none of them are bad. They just don't all sound as good as they should because of the mix. This ought to be a 7/10. But welcome back, folks!

Wig Wam - Never Say Die (2021)

Country: Norway
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 22 Jan 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

I wasn't going to pick up the new Wig Wam album, their fifth and first since reforming in 2019 after a five year break. After all, they're a glam band with a stupid name and overt pop sensibilities still best known for a decent showing in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2005. Now, it was a rock performance, a year before the genre broke the 2006 event by handing a win to Lordi, but, as catchy as that song was, it was generic glam rock with a serious side of cheese. I wasn't leaping at the chance to review another Wig Wam album.

However, Chris Franklin played a track from Never Say Die on Raised on Rock last week and it sounded decent to me, so I bit the bullet and I'm happy I did as they've heavied up and ditched at least some of the cheese. The cover art may count as an artistic statement, as they look like hair metallers, who have finally put the pink boas and gallons of hairspray behind them and dirtied up with an approach based on tattoos and leather. Think Dr. Feelgood instead of Too Fast for Love.

Now, everything here is still catchy. Ten of the eleven songs on offer are laden with impressive hooks, the eleventh excepted only because it's an instrumental, the epic sounding Northbound. More than a few songs are singalongs, with a memorable chorus in Kilimanjaro that's much longer than the verses, "I never did coke, never did grass, but that didn't stop me from being a jackass," being just part of it.

That one has a country edge and it's a lot more contemporary than I expected from Wig Wam, but it's followed by Where Does It Hurt, a song that kicks in so emphatically that it almost finds a Rammstein level of crunch. Dirty Little Secret does that too, ironically as these two songs act as bookends around the power ballad, My Kaleidoscope Ark, suggesting that the band are enjoying getting heavy for once. However, both these songs still feature a pop mentality of turning the guitars down in the verses, at least for a while. Wig Wam are a lot heavier here, but I still wouldn't call them a metal band, even if vocalist Glam describes himself as a "heavy metal loverboy" in Dirty Little Secret.

The most obvious influences to me come in his vocals. He shifts between a few different styles here, as easily as you please. On the more straightforward songs, he channels some Vince Neil, which isn't too surprising, even if I always thought of the band as more inspired by Kiss than Mötley Crüe. I think the best songs are the ones that combine David Coverdale's swagger with a Ronnie James Dio's belt, not a pair of approaches I thought would work particularly well together.

Hypnotized has a Whitesnake vibe from the earliest vocal moan, but it evolves. This one and Shadows of Eternity are half Whitesnake, half Dio, and that works for me. The other song that's recognisable as other borrowed styles is the album closer, Silver Lining, which starts out like the Beatles and adds an Enuff Z'Enuff vibe as it builds, along with a decent solo that hints at Dave Gilmour. I hadn't expected that sort of combo here, and it underlines that checking the album out was a good decision.

Wig Wam are still too slick and too pop-minded for my tastes, but they do what they do far better on Never Say Die than anything I've heard from them in the past. It feels much grittier than I thought it would and it also feels like they mean it. The band's name is still stupid but this isn't a stupid album. I, for one, welcome this new heavier Wig Wam and hope the reunion sticks.

John Diva and the Rockets of Love - American Amadeus (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Glam Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 15 Jan 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

John Diva is new on me, so I'm not sure quite what to think. On the face of it, this is a decent album, a trip back to the hair metal of the eighties and occasionally the glam rock of the seventies that laid its foundations. It's playful but varied and highly competent, well worth your hard earned cash. However, dig just a little into his background and you can't fail to see how tongue in cheek everything is. I have to say that I laughed aloud at the band history on his website, but it raises a serious question...

Are we supposed to take John Diva and the Rockets of Love seriously or treat them like another Steel Panther? For instance, is Soldier of Love neatly commercial single material or a jokey attempt to take the Desmond Child writing style and mimic a mid-eighties Bon Jovi song? Is Weekend for a Lifetime a modern day hair metal manifesto a little south of LA or a translation of Rebecca Black's Friday, as by a mid-eighties Alice Cooper?

That those songs work well as both their options explains to us how capable this band is, even if we're supposed to buy into drummer Lee Stingray being a former NASCAR driver or bassist Remmie Martin being a Frenchman preparing his own beauty line. The last time I heard a metal album full of so many overt takes on other artists, it was the Lordi album a year ago and that was actually structured like an imaginary collection of songs from different eras that was introduced by an imaginary DJ.

Maybe this isn't quite as overt as that one, but it's not far off. Voodoo, Sex and Vampires starts things off sleazy in Hanoi Rocks style, though there is a wild moment when it drops into bluegrass. After Bon Jovi and Alice Cooper, we find other major names like Mötley Crüe on Wasted (In Babylon), Poison on Drip Drip Baby and the Scorpions on This is Rock 'n' Roll. It's notable that Diva's vocals change just as often as the songs do, to the degree that he could be accused of doing impressions. He even puts on a German accent for the Scorpions song and an English one to become David Bowie on Movin' Back to Paradise.

That lessened the album for me. I'm not listening to find out how good Diva is at accents; I'm looking for quality music. Sometimes, though, the band escape the gimmickry and turn out something that's just good on its own. Here, that's the title track, which is slick and emphatically commercial hard rock with a catchy chorus and its own gimmick rather than someone else's. There are hints of violins, opera and harpsichord to play into that, not to forget a nod to Falco's Rock Me Amadeus. It really shouldn't work, but it does.

So, while this is very capably done, I'm going to drop my rating to a 6/10. If you're OK with the joking around, add a point back to that. I have no idea who the real musicians are behind these wacky names are—Snake Rocket, J. J. Love, Remmie Martin and Lee Stingray—let alone John Diva himself, but they are all very good indeed at this, even if the inevitable power ballad turns out to be soporific. At least it's at the end of the album, where we can skip it and start over again. OK, who's up for some more voodoo, sex and vampires?

Tremendous - Relentless (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Glam Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 May 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

It's only been a couple of months since I heard the Beau Bowen debut and it blew me away with its throwback to the glam rock of the early seventies, not least David Bowie. Now here comes another British throwback to that era with another notable debut album. Tremendous, which is a ballsy name indeed for a young band (though they are conversely on Horrendous Records), sound totally different to Bowen but they'd make for a great double bill when gigs start back up again.

What's especially interesting to me here is that the list of influences that Tremendous channel isn't remotely confined to early seventies glam rock but that's what they end up sounding like. I'd bring up the Kinks first and most often, but with Mott the Hoople almost as often and others from Oasis to the Sex Pistols fleshing out a working class singer/songwriter sound. Everything here is short and down to earth, like glam rock as garage rock and with only two of ten songs on offer lasting past the three minute mark.

With most of the songs running only two minutes and change, as singles used to be back in the day, there's hardly any time to develop musically, so the band get down to business immediately and focus closely on the central hook. Every song is built around that vocal hook and I was almost surprised when a guitar solo showed up on Like Dreamers Do. There aren't too many of those on this album.

Opener Don't Leave Our Love (Open for Closing) is a fantastic example as it starts out with solo voice, then layers in a heck of a lot before the chorus hits only twenty-four seconds in. That's a grand and impressive ramp up for a first album and it highlights just how much sheer confidence this band has in spades. By comparison, Like Dreamers Do plays it quiet one time through, then builds as they run through again. "We dream of a million things, me and you, as we stare outside and dream like dreamers do," sings Mark Dudzinski, but as he has less than three minutes to play with, he really dreams of one verse twice, a quick solo and a repeating chorus until he's out of time.

These songs are so short that Rock 'n' Roll Satellite is the unusually long song here at a breath over four minutes. It starts out like Def Leppard but quickly shifts into the Lep's key influence, Mott the Hoople. Tremendous may only be a trio but they have enough swagger to sell this song gloriously. It seems surprising that only three musicians can create such a dense sound and that's never so obvious as on Bag of Nails, once we get past the first verse which is quintessential Oasis. Then the wall of sound kicks in and we wonder how anyone can play this quietly. It's raucous and it needs serious ampage.

By this point, only four songs in, I was sold by the music and how mature it all seemed. The downside is easily the lack of lyrics, the standard approach being to repeat one verse a couple of times and let the chorus dominate the rest of the time. It's unashamedly lo-fi and as ballsy as the band name, as if they knew that they could spend time to grow these songs, write a second or third verse here and there, add a guitar solo or three and show off a bit with some clever musicality, but they just couldn't be bothered, so instead they showed up to a studio, knocked out the core of ten songs in an hour and went down the pub for a pint while the label slapped a cover on their work.

I like this band and I like this album, which seems like an effortless slab of punchy garage glam anthems. Dudzinski displays almost no polish here as a singer, his deceptively soft Donovan meets Marc Bolan take on Hell is Only a Blessing Away the most obvious, but he's insanely effective and songwriters will be jealous of how he can turn anything into a solid hook. He's also the band's guitarist and, well, the same could be said there. If he's the heart of the band, then Ryan Jee and David Lee are its backbone, handling bass and drums respectively.

I'm fascinated to see where this band go on future albums. They could shift their sound a little heavier and turn into the next Killers or deepen their sound and go pretty much anywhere they want.

Dätcha Mandala - Hara (2020)

Country: France
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 5 Jun 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter

I first saw French band Dätcha Mandala described as stoner/desert rock, but that's not strictly true, even with the fuzz on Jérémy Saigne's lead guitar that makes the stoner side of that believable. It's not remotely based in a jam mindset, so I'm not buying desert rock at all. The band describe their sound simply as heavy blues and that feels fair to me, even before Missing Blues shows up to be completely overt, though other tags on their Bandcamp page ring true too, such as hard rock and psychedelic rock.

I'd add a few labels of my own too, as there's plenty of southern rock to be found in songs like Mother God, even before the slide guitar shows up, and a majority of the album plays in mildly psychedelic pop territory. The result is that, even though Stick It Out kicks off the album like a punchy stoner rock anthem, the next few songs continue to add influences until we realise just what the band's scope is.

Mother God brings in the blues, right down to a harmonica, but adds T. Rex pop sensibilities too. With that southern rock sound that extends to slide guitar, they sound like the Black Crowes covering seventies glam rock. Who You Are is heavy blues in the way that Status Quo used to be heavy blues in their heyday but the high pitched Nicolas Sauvey adds a Budgie feel as well. Missing Blues is pure blues, drenched in harmonica, kick drum and distorted vocals.

The band's sound palette is wrapped up with Morning Song, which sounds more like the Beatles with a side of Queen. Imagine if, after Freddy died, Brian and the boys had brought in Paul McCartney to take his place. Once this sound is in place, that aspect never really vanishes from the album. Sick Machine may have strong nods to electronica and even disco but it's the Beatles at heart with dashes of Queen everywhere. Moha is looser, with Indian instrumentation like hand drums and what sounds like a sitar but probably isn't.

Even Tit's, which returns to overt blues, stays in psychedelic pop territory and it takes really heavying back up to shift more to the Budgie vibe, like On the Road. That's done with emphasis on Pavot, which closes the album out with urgent and tortured punk attitude, and on Eht Bup, which is easily my favourite song here. It has a driving riff that's as close to stoner rock as anything since the opener, but the vocals remain ever light and playful, whether they soar like Burke Shelley or harmonise right out of the Beatles textbook. It's like the album in microcosm.

Dätcha Mandala are a trio, so they have fewer musicians than the Beatles or Queen had voices but, like Budgie, they're able to generate serious power as and when they need it and always seem like there are more people than there are making their music. Sauvey is a fine lead singer who shines particularly brightly in the second half of Tit's, but he also provides harmonica, bass and acoustic guitar. Saigne handles the electric guitar while JB Mallet sits behind the drumkit, not just keeping everything lively but shifting tempo on a dime when needed.

This is the band's second album, following 2017's Rokh, which I'll now seek out eagerly. While Eht Bup is easily my favourite song here, with Tit's and Who You Are not too far behind, pretty much all the rest aren't far off the pace, making this a highly consistent and enjoyable album. I'm intrigued by what its predecessor sounded like.

House of Lords - New World, New Eyes (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 May 2020
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I remember House of Lords from their debut, which made quite an impact back in 1988. It was a major effort, the band built around Angel's Gregg Giuffria and musicians of the calibre of Quiet Riot's Chuck Wright and Fifth Angel's Ken Mary. Jeff Scott Soto sang backing vocals throughout and the songs were written or co-written by names like Stan Bush and Rick Nielsen. It was a big deal but, given how the musical landscape changed soon afterwards, it's not surprising to find that House of Lords called it quits in 1993.

However, they reformed in 2000 and they're still going, with vocalist James Christian the main man nowadays. Giuffria left in 2004 and the other three founding members followed in 2005, but current lead guitarist Jimi Bell and drummer B. J. Zampa have been with House of Lords longer than each of them, making this kind of their band now. Bassist Chris Tristram is the new fish, having joined in 2016. This makes a dozen studio albums for House of Lords and two thirds of those have come since Christian took the reins.

I liked this one on a first listen, even with the inevitable power ballad in Perfectly (Just You and I). However, it got better, albeit oddly in phases. The title track was the most immediate song, a straight ahead melodic hard rock number with hints of glam rock and southern rock. Christian has a very clean voice and, given trends, it wouldn't shock me if he decided to record a solo country album at some point instead of a straight AOR album.

The Both of Us also stood out immediately and, again, it's a catchy straight melodic hard rock song. A second time through and other similar songs leapt up to join it, like Chemical Rush and One More. They're a little more subtle but not by much. The refrains on Chemical Rush and We're All That We Got are acutely infectious and some of the lively guitarwork follows suit.

On a third listen, the less straightforward songs made their presence really known. Change (What's It Gonna Take) starts out like Boston with a long and imaginative keyboard intro, then turns into a mature Bon Jovi and bizarrely ends up in Owner of a Lonely Heart era Yes with overlays everywhere we might look. The Summit starts out like a perkier Led Zeppelin, complete with some requisite middle eastern bits.

However, none of those are the primary influence here, which seems to me to be Aerosmith. That influence shows up on One More but really gets overt on The Chase, which features a horn section and a slide guitar and sounds like Aerosmith rocking up a Robert Palmer pop hit. By this point, at four or five times through, The Chase leaps out as perhaps the best song here, but then I let it replay once more and get caught up in other songs all over again.

While this was a 6/10 on my first listen with some highlights that elevated it, it's become an album I'm tempted to give an 8/10. It grows that much. On consideration, I think I'll stay with a 7/10 because some of this is generic and some of it is overly derivative. I'd have been more sold on the Yes and Led Zep bits if they were integrated better into the album as a whole rather than their own individual songs. Also, while the power ballad is pretty good for its type, I'm not a big fan. I'm a much bigger fan of the rest of this.

Cherie Currie - Blvds of Splendor (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 28 Apr 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

It looks like Cherie Currie, best known as the lead vocalist and pianist for the legendary Runaways, got busy last year. Even though her first solo album came out as far back as 1978, it took her until 2015 to issue a follow up, a few albums with her twin sister Marie during that period notwithstanding. It seems strange that she'd suddenly reappear with not one but two new albums, but I'm happy to see new material.

In the absence of information to the contrary, these two albums technically came out last year, but this one only as a limited edition for Record Store Day in April. I'm reviewing it on its wide release, which features another three tracks, meaning fifteen on offer instead of twelve. The other album, for those eager to hear it, is The Motivator, recorded as a partnership with Brie Darling, known for her work with Fanny and American Girls, and it did see a full release in August of last year.

To complicate that further, it seems that this album was recorded quite some time ago, with a host of major collaborators, and was originally slotted for a release in 2010, soon after the film adaptation of her autobiography, Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway, but that never happened and it got bounced on down the road. I could easily see the goal as being to capitalise on a good moment in time and mount a long overdue comeback, but it seems that Currie's pretty happy with a different life as an award-winning chainsaw artist.

At fifteen tracks, this is a generous release, not just because it runs over fifty minutes but because it covers the musical spectrum, presumably to give new fans and old a good idea of just how versatile she can get. The opener, Mr. X is a rocker that gets our adrenaline pumping from moment one, but then we dip into classic glam rock with Roxy Roller, move into pop punk with You Wreck Me and add electronica for Black Magic. There's a soft rock ballad, a country pop cover and a full on grunge song. Eventually there's even a bit of reggae on What Do All the People Know?

I don't have details on which musicians Currie has to back her, but I do see a number of guests. The album opener, for instance, Mr. X, does a solid job at getting our adrenaline pumping immediately, an urgent guitar leading into a perky song. I believe the band behind her is pretty much Guns n' Roses, at least Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum, and the latter produced the album too. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins shows up on the title track. The closer, a cover of the Runaways classic, Queen of Noise, apparently features Australian singer/songwriter Brody Dalle, the Veronicas and, of all people, Juliette Lewis.

I also don't have details on just how many songs here are covers. Some are pretty obvious, though maybe not for listeners who might be a generation or two younger than me. Queen of Noise was the title track of the second album from the Runaways, which came out in 1977. Draggin' the Line is even older, as it's the Tommy James song from 1971. The Air That I Breathe may well be the most recognisable cover, originally recorded by Albert Hammond in 1972, but best known from the huge hit the Hollies had with it a couple of years later. Apparently Roxy Roller is a Sweeney Todd song (the Canadian band not the musical) and What Do All the People Know? is an eighties song by a band called the Monroes.

I wonder why Currie chose to cover so many songs, given that what I presume are originals sound fine, and why she chose to cover these. I wonder if her take on Draggin' the Line is a personal statement, given lyrics like "I feel fine. I'm talking peace of mind. I'm gonna take my time. I'm getting to good times." Neon Angel talks about a lot of what she went through. The Air That I Breathe is the oddest, because Allan Clarke's vocal on the Hollies version is so iconic. This is well done but it doesn't add anything.

Frankly, I prefer the originals, whether they're rockers like Mr. X; ballads like Shades, which she wrote with her son, Jake Hays; or unexpected grunge songs like Force to Be Reckoned With. It kicks in just as powerfully and in a rather similar way to Nirvana but gets quieter during the verses. Then again, Nirvana did that too. It's no rip-off, but it's another musical direction taken on an album full of them. I wonder who guested that time.

I quite liked this album and I appreciated Currie's versatility, though it's a little overdone. It surely does enough to warrant that potential comeback earlier in the decade, but I doubt that's the goal now and there's no movie in 2020 to tie it into. Now, it's a welcome release from a pioneer who has a surprisingly skimpy discography. She clearly still has what it takes and I'd have said the same thing even if none of the megastars she knows had showed up to help her out.

Beau Bowen - The Great Anticlimax (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Glam Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 10 Apr 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

Here's something special that's at once utterly out of time and exactly when it needs to be. Beau Bowen is a young Australian who lives in London and I'm sure he wasn't alive in 1970. Hell, his parents may not have been alive back then, but listening to this debut album feels to me rather like it must have felt back then listening to David Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World.

Now, throwing a name like Bowie's out in that context may seem like ruthless hyperbole but I think it's highly appropriate and not merely because some of it sounds like early Bowie. It's because Bowen is utterly confident in what he's doing, as vocalist, guitarist and especially songwriter, and he clearly doesn't care what he's "supposed" to sound like in 2020. The point is that I don't think anyone else sounds like this right now but, like Bowie in 1970, everyone may sound like this tomorrow. And this is a debut album.

Much of it is what might be termed singer/songwriter but rather than fitting into the usual indie/folk/country mindset, it's phrased through one of glam rock. Bowen knows exactly how to strut and swagger and he does both rather a lot here, but he's also telling stories with his voice and that often means quiet and introspective instead, crouched over a piano pouring out his soul. What makes this so special is in how Bowen transitions between these and how far he goes each way. I haven't heard dynamics like this in forever.

The Great Anticlimax and A Rock 'n' Roll Story both run the gamut from those achingly personal moments to full on glam rock belt with wailing solos. Some of it is clearly Bowie, T. Rex and Mott the Hoople, but some of it is a long way from anywhere they went, almost up to Guns n' Roses. Bowen's voice is an early Bowie echo when he's quieter, with occasional Marc Bolan touches, but he gains some of Axl Rose's twang in heavier sections. What's important is that all these songs keep that grounding in glam rock wherever they go, even when it's not overtly glam.

The guitars get heavy, for instance, but without losing that early seventies glam rock vibe, as if Queen had stayed in the style of their first couple of albums for a lot longer than they did. The Life I Chose for Myself is right out of that early Queen songbook, as frankly is all the play with dynamics, as Queen were always masters of that. There's some Guns n' Roses there too, especially on Universe in Reverse and part of Bisolar Disorder, especially the Guns n' Roses we know from their cover of Live and Let Die.

The guitar effects, which I initially thought were keyboards, cross over to space rock, especially midway through A Rock 'n' Roll Story, though nothing here turns into Hawkwind even a pair of interludes named Cosmic Renaissance. There are also dips into rocked up classical music, but they owe as much to Tomita as to Yngwie J. Malmsteen. That's evident not merely on the obvious Messianic Indulgence, but in the progression of Time is an Illusion Baby.

And there's prog everywhere here, but it's never King Crimson or Genesis or Yes, it's just glam rock progged up. It's mostly in the effects and the odd little touches like using a flamenco guitar to start A Rock 'n' Roll Story. It's there in the structure too, because there's a lot of carefully moulded music, solid riffs dancing wildly with effects but then cutting out entirely to a heartfelt piano section.

I liked this a lot, but I'm fascinated to see where Beau Bowen will go from here. He's set the bar really high, not just by making quality music but by making quality music in this particular way. There are precedents, of course, especially given that he's apparently trying to be Brian May as much as David Bowie, but the Bowie of the early seventies had pretty big boots to fill. The good news is that we can just look at the album cover to see how far Bowen is ahead of us. If he stays ahead of us, the next decade is going to be quite the ride.

Now I'm going to wander off and wonder how I'd never grasped quite how much Axl Rose took from David Bowie.

Shark Island - Bloodline (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 11 Nov 2019
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia

Latest in the seemingly unending list of wannabe comeback artists, here's a second eighties band that many remember for their contribution to the Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure soundtrack. I reviewed the new Tora Tora album in February, so now it's time for the first Shark Island album in the thirteen years since Gathering of the Faithful, which resulted from vocalist Richard Black's prior attempt to resurrect the band. The album before that was Law of the Order in 1989.

It's certainly not a bad effort either, though it aims more at the sound of the eighties than Tora Tora went for and hits less often. Make a Move opens up proceedings in a way that makes us question if Shark Island ever went away. It's a strong, if unsurprising, rocker that would have been an easy single choice back in the day. It's followed by Fire in the House, which is a stalker of a song in the Kiss style, even if it doesn't remotely like Firehouse.

It's track three where we arrive much more up to date. Policy of Truth is a Depeche Mode cover, done with some real weight. The guitars are very low in the mix and the bass (and the bass drums) very high. It's an engaging cover, albeit one that took me a while to get used to. It feels rather out of place until I remembered that it's not 1987 and my mind opened back up again.

My favourite song may be the next one, Aktion Is, though again it took me a while to get used to it. It kicks off with drums that sound very electronic and so provide the song with an odd feel for a while. Is this Robert Palmer? Is it the Bangles? Is it some modern remix of an unreleased T Rex song? It does find high gear eventually and rocks out in true LA hair metal style.

From there, things turn into a mixed bag. Some songs leap out immediately, like Rocks on the Rocks, which benefits from an AC/DC feel at the back end, that tight and incessant drive forward. Maybe it's more the Cult, as that's apparent elsewhere in more than the rhythm section. Some are enjoyable but never seem to quite shine the way they're supposed to, such as Crazy Eights. There are songs I could have done without, like the ballad, On and On, that really does go on and on as it closes out the album until a guitar solo does a little to save it.

There are songs that grow with each listen, like Butterfly, which felt like it was out of control until it came into focus on a second or third try. And there are songs that haven't found that focus yet. I'm not sure why I don't like When She Cries, because I like a lot of what happens within it and I'm not unappreciative of the rest. I think it's over-ambitious with details to the detriment of the song as a whole.

The result is that there's good stuff here but it's in small pictures rather than the big one. I'm unsure that I can recommend this new Shark Island to you because this album doesn't tell me who they are or what they're trying to accomplish. I can certainly recommend some of the songs here but that's a different thing entirely. It seems to me that the band have a hundred ideas and they've tried to cram them into eleven songs. Some of them work but some of them don't and going with eleven of those hundred ideas may have been a better choice.

Assuming that they stick around for a while, and past history suggests that they may not, I'd be interested in hearing their next album. Maybe they just need some time to gig around, realise what works and what doesn't, and focus in on a follow up. It could well be the album that this isn't.