Album Review: Cheap Trick - "In Another World"

 

Back after a short break, it's good to see Cheap Trick back again. The group seemed to be on a bit of a purple patch about five years ago with two great albums surfacing in the space of 12 months (2016's Bang, Zoom, Crazy...Hello and 2017's We're All Alright!) but have been quiet since then. However, once the pure sunshine pop of Summer Looks Good On You kicks things into gear here, it's like they've never been away especially when it's followed up by the Kinksian stomp of Quit Waking Me Up and the Beatlesesque balladry of Another World.

Now I've read a couple of reviews of this album which slated it on the ground that it wasn't really breaking any new ground and sure, the templates here are fairly obvious ones such as the Stonesy strut of Boys & Girls & Rock 'n' Roll and the quite lovely Lennon-style balladry of So It Goes. But if you're one of those pencil necked geeks who've griped about this album being too obvious then I say to you - bollocks. If you're good enough at what you do and you're packing the requisite tunes and hooks (see the storming Slade soundalike Light Up The Fire or the power pop perfection of Here's Looking At You for proof) then sticking to what you're best at is something that's easy to forgive. I mean this is Cheap Trick ferfuxxake, what are you looking for, a tedious ten minute prog opus on Balinese agricultural policy? If so, enjoy that Radiohead album some more, we'll stick to the fun side of things over here.

And you know what? There's a couple of curveballs on here which do quite nicely at keeping the variety intact thank you very much such as the lurching seasick Final Days and the driving Passing Through which sounds as if it's almost genetically designed to soundtrack some laid back summer road trip. So if you've got this band pegged as a one trick pony then I humbly suggest that you probably don't know what you're talking about and need to go take a seat at the back of the class, kidder.

Overall verdict? Well, it's a Cheap Trick album, ain't it? Nothing more, nothing less and I'm happy to report it sees the band keeping the quality at the high levels of their two mid-noughties efforts which comes firmly recommended to those who haven't terminally misplaced their sense of fun. Definitely a soundtrack to the summer in waiting here I think.

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