 Blisters on your fingers Mr Guns? Normally, when a press release goes along the premise that a band has returned to form, it's clutching at straws . . . but Waking The Dead is all that and then some. LA Guns' previous album, Man In The Moon certainly didn't do much to set my world on fire, and I think the rest of the world agreed - but now, oh how we've stumbled into a completely different ball game!
Waking The Dead stinks of sleazy clubs and cheap women. Somewhere along the line, vocalist Phil Lewis found what he once had, raised the game of Tracii Guns, and between them put together this steamroller of an album. Too little, too late? Hell no.
Whereas we've got enough Poison albums to last the rest our lives, LA Guns (whose only guilt is by association to that era) have reinvented themselves just enough to make it all worthwhile, without repeating the formula. It's incessantly heavy without losing any melody, pushing the songwriting team back to the forefront of a once more slowly growing genre - that of the real band.
Don't Look At Me That Way, the lead track, literally stomps all over most of their back catalogue - it could even have appeared on the debut album and taken the place of No Mercy, it's that fresh.
Revolution has got all the hooks and barbed-wire vocals and is eerily reminiscent of something Girl may have done . . . but this time around has big steel balls attached.
With a nod to the formula they play so well on this album, either they have settled into who they really are or the track listing is incomplete on this advance copy, because the ballad is called The Ballad. If they change it, I'll be very disappointed. A band is nothing without its sense of humour.
From here on, an album can generally go one of two ways: Usually it's mostly downhill, but Frequency and the following Psychopathic Eyes just keep on hammering the message home: LA Guns are back in business. This is one vicious rock album, made with heart and soul - quite obviously because they thought it would be fun to do so. King of the hill then. A great rock album from a band I honestly thought had seen better days - obviously not. I'm over the moon that some bands can still be bothered to prove me wrong. Third time around on the deck and now I just want to go out to a club that rocks . . . can't have everything I suppose. :: Sion Smith |
