Retroactive
2010
Bass player/songwriter returns with a variety of supporting musicians to help him with his Christian hard rock album including current/former members of Def Leppard, Warrant, Stryper, Dokken, Firehouse, LA Guns and others. However one listen has me thinking of the Love Boat. You get a hodge podge of people that all did something kind of known in the past, but here they are kind of thrown together with so-so writing and not much direction. That's how much of this plays out. I read the credits to see who was coming next, but even normally good performers like Phil Lewis and Robert Mason sound less than inspired. I can't blame too much because most of the material is about as drab as it gets with plenty of warmed over riffs too. Many of the tracks are bland and they manage to seem twice as long as they really are. Out of fourteen tracks there were only two real standouts. The surprise one was "Wrestling with God" with Pete Loran and Steve Brown of Trixter plus Bumblefoot from G-n-R. Nothing wrong with Bumblefoot, but Trixter were one of the absolute worst abominations to unleash their no-talent, hair-sprayed selves on the hard rock world. However here they are part of a fairly catchy song with some striking hooks. Not bad at all. Now before I even removed this disc from it's sleeve I knew the song I was most interested in was "Drunk Dead Gorgeous" Marq Torien of the Bulletboys and Chris Holmes formerly of WASP. My interest was due to the fact that I am a huge WASP fan. Not that Holmes was ever great, but he was good and he played on most of WASP's best albums. He doesn't disappoint here either as the rhythms sound similar to WASP around the time of say "Inside the electric circus". However it's Torien who really sells this song. It's not the best written song, but he gets in there with voice, elevates the energy level and pulls everything he can from it. Fine track and performances indeed. Not a good album at all, but it was worth a listen just for that one song.
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