Album Review: Michael Monroe - "I Live Too Fast To Die Young"

 

Safe to say that this might just be one of the most eagerly anticipated releases of 2022 so far. Since the Mk2 version of Hanoi Rocks called it a day, Michael Monroe has assembled an impressively talented bunch of musicians around him (Steve Conte, Rich Jones, Sami Yaffa and Karl Rockfist) and come up with a consistent run of albums which have pretty much cemented his place as one of the all time sleaze rock greats.

I Live Too Fast To Die Young is thankfully everything you'll have been hoping for from a new Monroe album right from the moment the call-to-arms of Murder The Summer Of Love kicks into gear with its chorus of "They said never trust a hippie and I can't say that they're wrong/The dead ain't feelin' grateful when they're bleeding on the lawn/You want a revolution better get up off your ass". One of Monroe's strongest solo tracks to date and a great opener here.

Young Drunks And Old Alcoholics is the sort of breathless pop-punk rush that you just know Billie Joe Armstrong wishes he could write before Derelict Palace sees Mike channelling his old mate Stiv Bators during his Lords of the New Church days with its sinister guitar riff and paranoid lyrics. Which makes it all the more startling when All Fighter crashes in with its whiplash riff and old school Manics style anger. Just in those first four tracks, this album has already given more twists, turns and tunes than nearly all of its competition so far this year.

Everybody's Nobody reminds me of another of Monroe's fallen compadres, Walter Lure and the classic Waldos Rent Party album with its tales of trying to cling on in the rock 'n' roll world in the face of diminishing returns. Antisocialite is even more gentle, a sparse piano ballad which sounds like something Elton John would have come up with in one of his more thoughtful early '70s moments. Can't Stop Falling Apart keeps the '70s vibe going with a definite Mott the Hoople influence with its tinkling piano and stomping rhythms a la All The Way From Memphis.

Pagan Prayer cranks the tempo right back up with an almost Anthrax-style heavy riff before the mid-paced No Guilt is another right-on-the-money diatribe from Monroe. The title track cranks the riffs up with a Dead Boys style anthem of sheer defiance before Dearly Departed throws us one last curveball, a haunting slice of electronica regarding the burning of old bridges to bring this one to a suitably unsettling conclusion.

There's been some serious competition but I think we may just have a new frontrunner in the album of the year stakes here - I Live Too Fast To Die Young is a veritable feast of an album combining everything that made Monroe's previous albums great but adding in some nods to old friends and influences and the odd unexpected curveball to keep you on your toes. Put simply, it's pretty much an essential listen and I urge you to track it down pronto for some much needed rock 'n' roll nourishment in these dark times.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕 (10/10)

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