Album Review: Ricky Warwick - "When Life Was Hard And Fast"

 

It's been a while since we've heard from Ricky Warwick - two years since his last effort with the Black Star Riders, Another State Of Grace, and a full seven since his previous solo album of original material, 2014's Hearts On Trees and When Patsy Cline Was Crazy And Guy Mitchell Sang The Blues.

Put aside memories of the more acoustic led nature of those last two solo albums though as When Life And Fast sees Warwick back to the straightforward rock music he's excelled at with Black Star Riders - indeed, this could easily have passed as a new BSR album with the mid-paced rock of the title track and I'd Rather Be Hit definitely owing a heavy debt to that sound with the shoutalong choruses and twin guitar sound. But there's no doubt that it's done just as well as always and those hooks will take a bit of shifting once they sink into you, mark my words.

There's the odd diversion off the track here - Never Corner A Rat and Still Alive are furious punked-up assaults which pack the necessary punch to work well and the gentle acoustic ballads Time Don't Seem To Matter and Clown Of Misery along with the more mid-paced I Don't Feel At Home are a chance to get your breath back in between the guitar onslaughts, but in the main songs like Fighting Heart and You're My Rock 'n' Roll are simply the sound of Warwick doing what he does best - simple singalong outlaw rock anthems that his predecessor Phil Lynott would no doubt approve of.

Very much business as usual for Ricky here. But that's much better than no business at all and when it's carried off this well, it seems supremely churlish to complain. When Life Was Hard And Fast definitely packs the requisite punch, tunes and riffs to make it a more than worthwhile listen.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Garbage Days Revisited #74: Silverfish - "Organ Fan" (1992)

Image
  "You can't kill what you're afraid of...are you afraid of me?"  - Silverfish  - Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal I guess the obvious place to have written something on Silverfish would have been in one of the very early Sounds From The Junkshop but I'm ashamed to admit that they were a band who, while I was sort of aware of their presence at the time, I wouldn't really properly discover until well after they'd split.  I can remember the band name from the occasions they'd pop up on the Indie Top 10 on the ITV Chart Show but it was only when their singer Lesley Rankine cropped up as a guest vocalist on Therapy? 's Troublegum album (on Lunacy Booth  and Femtex ) that I decided to try and investigate their output in a bit more detail. Only to find they'd literally split up a few months before. Bugger. Silverfish hailed from Camden in the pre-Britpop days back when it was still the grimy scuzzy end of North London and the sort of place tourists would act
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #29: The Quireboys - "Homewreckers And Heartbreakers" (2008)

Image
  "I played my hand in a rock 'n' roll band, it was my ace, my jack and my king/I rolled the dice to see what Lady Luck would bring, salvation or sin..."  - The Quireboys  - One For The Road In a way, I'm quite surprised I haven't covered the Quireboys either on Sounds From The Junkshop or here on Garbage Days Revisited yet. Unlike a lot of bands who were slung in with the "hair metal" tag in the late '80s and early '90s, I actually was  aware of the band when they had their brief flirtation with chart success around the turn of that decade and had a couple of their singles in my collection - Hey You  on a Now compilation (which sounds incredibly incongruous all these years later!) and There She Goes Again/Misled  on cassette single. For whatever reason though, they never quite became the firm favourites of mine that their fellow Soho dwelling glam rockers the Dogs D'Amour did. I'm not quite sure why - I think I just thought the Dogs
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

Image
  "If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!"  - Soho Roses  - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure,
Read more