Commercial hair rock
Welcome to 1989, get your spandex on under your carefully ripped jeans and use enough hair spray to choke the planet, yes the girls too.
I have no idea how many cigarettes you have to smoke, drinks you have to drink or glass you have to gargle to get a voice like Mark Fox, singer with Shakra but I don't think it was worth all the effort. When said voice is combined with this type of commercial rock it just makes them sound like they've timewarped here from the late eighties early nineties.
Shakra are from Switzerland which is a bit of a surprise as they come across just like an L.A. sleaze rock combo supporting enuff Z'nuff or L.A. Guns. I didn't know bands still played this stuff and it just leaves me cold. Almost every song on this album says please make me into a single, it's like they threw out anything that wasn't commercially viable. Unfortunately they missed the bit about them being fifteen years too late.
According to the press release singer Mark Fox has 'written really good lyrics this time' well all I can say is they must have been really bad last time, how can you call these really good when they serve up such gems as 'You're playing with fire, You are my desire' I mean come on for God's sake this is 2007. My wife actually made me switch this off as 'Love will find a way' was making her feel ill, she had a point.
Mark can sing in his gravel voiced way and the band can play but it's leaden riffs and basic obvious drumming combined with the whole American sleaze rock feeling just stops any interest I could have had in its tracks, the world has moved on from this stuff and I've moved with it, bands like Enuff Z'nuff are actually touring this year but who is going to see them, thirty somethings clinging to their ripped t-shirts with pants held up by a silk scarf for a belt.
Ok I've given this album a bit of a kicking so far so let me just finish by saying that if you liked and still like the L.A. sleaze rock style of music then this just might be the album for you. It has its roots planted so firmly in that era it's like Doctor Who brought them suddenly into the next century and they just carried on where they left off. It isn't badly played or sang it just doesn't do anything for me at all.