EVERY CHEAP TRICK IN THE BOOK
Faced with decisions at BestBuy -- whether to purchase Cheap Trick's Rockford, Jethro Tull's Aqualung played live for the first time in front of homeless people, or the made-by-slave-labor in China Gibson-knockoff guitar with three broken strings for $75.00 -- I went with the first.
Rick Nielsen, the guitarist who made the Huntz Hall "look" into a trademark, had been pumping the new record on-line and in the trades. "Just wait . . . you'll fall in love again!" he posted to I Love Music on April 8th.
For Guitar World magazine, he'd lined up for the hack interview. Some of it was unintentionally hysterical. " . . . might be their finest disc in two decades" it was said of Rockford.
Not a good omen, the phrase is a music journalism bromide for when deadline looms and you can think of little to say about a legacy act's new CD.
" . . . the record industry can be brutal; haven't the ups and downs ever made you want to throw in the towel?" the writer asked. Such probing stuff. One can imagine Nielsen reaching for the bottle of aspirin on the other end of the telephone.
But Special One, from 2003 had been a halfway decent record, so Rockford deserved a chance.
As a group that's been at it for thirty years, Cheap Trick long ago achieved an elevated comfort level in the making of albums. One can't expect the first and second records, or get George Martin on All Shook Up, but you're probably not going to get The Doctor, a record one bets even Nielsen makes jokes about.
Iny case, the first six tunes from Special One were all good, and though the record takes a dive immediately after, it's over twenty minutes until you must hit the eject button. And their DVD "mockumentary" from 2004, From Tokyo to You was a hoot. At the time, Dick Destiny wrote of it in the Voice:
Anyway -- so Rockford, like Special One, is half good. The latter had all the great tunes in a row, the new one peppers them across the CD. To offset the iffy programming, it rocks harder.
"Perfect Stranger" is the best song on the CD. Cheap Trick make you wait two minutes for it, with a song about birthdays. "If It Takes a Lifetime," next up, is some treacle on love and seems to last a brief one. "Come On Come On Come On" -- c'mon, fellahs. [Cheap Trick has often done treacle exceptionally. This isn't one of those times. However, the quartet of performances -- "It All Comes Back to You/Tonight It's You/Time Will Let You Know/The World's Greatest Lover" -- at the end of the first CD included with Silver from 2000-2001, is one of the finest performances of heartbreaking rock ballad treacle you could hear.]
But "O Claire" does the patented Cheap Trick trick of playing the Beatles as a hard rock band, leading the beginning of the tune with a pooting organ. The pooting Beatles-riff is one of Cheap Trick's best tricks, and you're disappointed if they don't pull it out once, or sometimes even twice, a record. For Special One, it was played by violins on the title tune and that was just as good a song. The bonus here is that if you liked Special One, you'll play it again after Rockford.
Two pumped hard rockers follow -- "This Time You Got It" is boastfully jacked up -- and that makes three in a row before hitting skip for "One More" that shouldn't have been -- one more.
Rockford wraps with a trio of fair to really good pop songs. "Every Night and Every Day" does really seem to have Robin Zander singing about the usual spinning of "lies" every night and every day in the "key of life" -- yikes -- but listen to the hooks, the vocal zing, and it doesn't much matter. Wait a minute, those lyrics aren't even bad!
Even the filler is fair to good. The band recycles its tones and lyrics -- hey, that's Nielsen playing a variation on the "Helter Skelter" riff at the end of the first tune -- and so the result is like the Rutles' parody of the Beatles. You recognize all the old licks, vocal tricks and the mannerisms; they're just not in songs they were used best in the first time around. It's not something that looks spontaneous on the chalkboard but in execution it's pleasant enough and Rockford easily rewards repeat plays.
Good enough to "fall in love again?" My falling in love days are over, so not quite, but close enough for rock 'n' roll.
Faced with decisions at BestBuy -- whether to purchase Cheap Trick's Rockford, Jethro Tull's Aqualung played live for the first time in front of homeless people, or the made-by-slave-labor in China Gibson-knockoff guitar with three broken strings for $75.00 -- I went with the first.
Rick Nielsen, the guitarist who made the Huntz Hall "look" into a trademark, had been pumping the new record on-line and in the trades. "Just wait . . . you'll fall in love again!" he posted to I Love Music on April 8th.
For Guitar World magazine, he'd lined up for the hack interview. Some of it was unintentionally hysterical. " . . . might be their finest disc in two decades" it was said of Rockford.
Not a good omen, the phrase is a music journalism bromide for when deadline looms and you can think of little to say about a legacy act's new CD.
" . . . the record industry can be brutal; haven't the ups and downs ever made you want to throw in the towel?" the writer asked. Such probing stuff. One can imagine Nielsen reaching for the bottle of aspirin on the other end of the telephone.
But Special One, from 2003 had been a halfway decent record, so Rockford deserved a chance.
As a group that's been at it for thirty years, Cheap Trick long ago achieved an elevated comfort level in the making of albums. One can't expect the first and second records, or get George Martin on All Shook Up, but you're probably not going to get The Doctor, a record one bets even Nielsen makes jokes about.
Iny case, the first six tunes from Special One were all good, and though the record takes a dive immediately after, it's over twenty minutes until you must hit the eject button. And their DVD "mockumentary" from 2004, From Tokyo to You was a hoot. At the time, Dick Destiny wrote of it in the Voice:
Upon middle age, it's one's civic duty to look frightening and tell as many untruths as possible to the young and easily misled. Cheap Trick's From Tokyo to You is a rockumentary DVD to enjoy because they live it to the hilt, telling bizarre and amusing lies in hypnosis of the stupid. In a reversal of cosmetic fortune, entropy and gravity have made [drummer] Bun E. Carlos one of the "handsome" members of the band.
Everyone else exploits the meaning of creepy: Rick Nielsen resembles someone's dead grandma while sitting on a stool strumming a Telecaster; Tom Petersson's more like a character from The Man With the Golden Arm. And to say nothing of Robin Zander is to say everything.
The concert is fine, but inseparable from avuncular interjections in which the foursome spin out their fictions. The best comes when Petersson talks about his job as a laborer at a chicken factory, sanding the beaks off birds at a grinding wheel so they wouldn't peck each other to death on the egg production line. One suspects this might be one time there's no dissembling, and then it's back to the concert in front of very clean-looking Japanese. Campfire arrangements of "Fan Club" and "Lookout" and the unhinged shriek of "Best Friend" set the show apart sonically from the rest of recent Tricks. As a dry send-up of TV specials on semi-famously famous rock stars, From Tokyo is smashing.
Anyway -- so Rockford, like Special One, is half good. The latter had all the great tunes in a row, the new one peppers them across the CD. To offset the iffy programming, it rocks harder.
"Perfect Stranger" is the best song on the CD. Cheap Trick make you wait two minutes for it, with a song about birthdays. "If It Takes a Lifetime," next up, is some treacle on love and seems to last a brief one. "Come On Come On Come On" -- c'mon, fellahs. [Cheap Trick has often done treacle exceptionally. This isn't one of those times. However, the quartet of performances -- "It All Comes Back to You/Tonight It's You/Time Will Let You Know/The World's Greatest Lover" -- at the end of the first CD included with Silver from 2000-2001, is one of the finest performances of heartbreaking rock ballad treacle you could hear.]
But "O Claire" does the patented Cheap Trick trick of playing the Beatles as a hard rock band, leading the beginning of the tune with a pooting organ. The pooting Beatles-riff is one of Cheap Trick's best tricks, and you're disappointed if they don't pull it out once, or sometimes even twice, a record. For Special One, it was played by violins on the title tune and that was just as good a song. The bonus here is that if you liked Special One, you'll play it again after Rockford.
Two pumped hard rockers follow -- "This Time You Got It" is boastfully jacked up -- and that makes three in a row before hitting skip for "One More" that shouldn't have been -- one more.
Rockford wraps with a trio of fair to really good pop songs. "Every Night and Every Day" does really seem to have Robin Zander singing about the usual spinning of "lies" every night and every day in the "key of life" -- yikes -- but listen to the hooks, the vocal zing, and it doesn't much matter. Wait a minute, those lyrics aren't even bad!
Even the filler is fair to good. The band recycles its tones and lyrics -- hey, that's Nielsen playing a variation on the "Helter Skelter" riff at the end of the first tune -- and so the result is like the Rutles' parody of the Beatles. You recognize all the old licks, vocal tricks and the mannerisms; they're just not in songs they were used best in the first time around. It's not something that looks spontaneous on the chalkboard but in execution it's pleasant enough and Rockford easily rewards repeat plays.
Good enough to "fall in love again?" My falling in love days are over, so not quite, but close enough for rock 'n' roll.
posted by George Smith at 9:35 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home