We have hit the bottom of the barrel folks. This is hair metal in full cheese, an effort to bridge AC/DC with Motley Crue and Poison, but sadly not even landing any of those bands. Everything here is pretty ridiculous, with zero depth or significant effort. It’s really just a bunch of overwrought cliches all collected together and there’s not a single decent song on here - to think I remember having this album as an 11 year old, but really only remember Up All Night. Figures.
We have hit the bottom of the barrel folks. This is hair metal in full cheese, an effort to bridge AC/DC with Motley Crue and Poison, but sadly not even landing any of those bands. Everything here is pretty ridiculous, with zero depth or significant effort. It’s really just a bunch of overwrought cliches all collected together and there’s not a single decent song on here - to think I remember having this album as an 11 year old, but really only remember Up All Night. Figures.
My God that was bad. It’s really an argument over the least bad song. It’s quite possible I owned this album for the cover. Even for the hair metal sub-genre, this one hurts.
This sort of toes the line between the hair metal we’ve been finishing up and the late 70s arena rock, which makes sense given the lineup of musicians here. That said, it does read more Whitesnake than Foreigner. Some of this, like Coming of Age and Damn Yankees, is at least tolerably fun. It is indeed an upgrade over the last couple of albums, but nevertheless, it’s a sign off (for the most part) from the subgenre that feels quite welcome. I might have started to warm up to some of it in ‘89, but by this point the whole thing is tired for me.
The first thing that immediately jumps out at you when you start this album is that it seems way ahead of its time - maybe 5-7 years - in a world that is sort of post-grunge, even if that wasn’t even a term yet. Heavy but with that staccato guitar pattern, it seems like a lot of bands in the mid-to-late 90s found something in this and ran with it. The opening Repetition, Sinatra (a noise rock piece that’s maybe the most substantial track here), and Make Room (this one has a groove that is really killer) were my highlights, and I was sort of thankful this was 30 minutes since this is quite a heavy album and a big listening lift, even if ultimately rewarding putting in that effort.
