Monday reviews #6 Featuring Cheap Trick, Joe Bone & The Dark Vibes, and Peter Perrett

Cheap Trick - We’re All Alright

While other bands suffer from multiple line-up changes, losing focus, becoming stuck in a rut, internal arguments, and of course just from the ravages of time, it is unusual to find one that consistently bucks all the trends, but Cheap Trick are that band.

Of course their journey has not been hassle free, but over all - and considering the big picture - they are a wonderful constant in a world that is often chaotic.

You can always rely on them to deliver the goods.
And here we are with a new album and the faith that their fans have in them to be that constant in their lives has once again been richly rewarded.

In so many ways the sound of Cheap Trick is evergreen.

They are the band that set the benchmark for melodic pop infused rock and that bold assertion is stamped with a firm authority throughout We’re All Alright.

Were does their enthusiasm comes from though?

Who knows, but sonically speaking is sounds like they are supping from the fountain of youth.

Line up all their albums and pick one at random, slip it on and what you will hear is a classic, and with this release that statement still stands.

A friend once told me that they had a request to provide a list of KISS tracks for someone to listen to as they were unfamiliar with the band.

As he is a KISS fan he ended up sending them a list of over a hundred songs, and he could have added more.

I can understand that because if I was asked to provide a similar one of Cheap Trick songs I would just say start with the self titled debut and stop listening when you reach the end of We’re All Alright.

Miss nothing out because you may well regret it.

There are very few bands and artists that I could claim to love everything of. Even some of my favourite artists have on occasions left me disappointed, but not Cheap Trick.

Never Cheap Trick!

And when you consider the rabid praise that the band get from their peers you do have to ask yourself why they are so often sighted as a bands band, a musician’s band, and the answer lies in the quality of their work, but also, and this is just in my opinion, it is because Cheap Trick are at heart music fans.

Everything they do is steeped in the history of rock and roll. From the fifties through the sixties, taking in the glam of the seventies, touching on the fire of punk and tugging on the strings of so much more they are the sound of generations of music distilled down into what can only be called the Cheap Trick sound.

The only band to sound like Cheap Trick is actually Cheap Trick.

Instantly recognisable they stand alone.

They never put a foot wrong, and I don’t even feel the need to add ‘in my opinion’.

It is what it is!

With Bang, Zoom, Crazy….Hello they set out to remind everyone of their relevance and with We’re All Alright they are making sure that no one can claim that it was a fluke.

Every album is just a continuation of magnificence.

If the rule is that no one can deliver one hundred percent one hundred percent of the time then Cheap Trick are the exception to the rule.

You really need to buy this album, and everything else they have done.

Make it your mission in life and then as your last breath escapes you then you can rest easy thinking you did at least one thing well, you were a Cheap Trick fan.

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Joe Bone & The Dark Vibes – Goo Goo Shoom

Everything that Joe Bone & The Dark Vibes does should come with the warning that you should expect the unexpected.

They deal in wrong footing the listener at every turn, in taking perverse pleasure in refusing to be categorized, and while others who attempt to do this end up losing a sense of their own identity that isn’t a criticism that could be laid at the feet of this band.

Instead it doesn’t seem to matter if a song is reminiscent of an ecstasy inspired Underworld-esque dance track, or if it is slipping on a smoking jacket to deliver a goth inspired lounge lizard performance, because the songs are still instantly recognisable as being performed by Joe Bone and the Dark Vibes.

They manage to magically carry a sense of their own individuality through all their conflicting musical personas.

Goo Goo Shoom, in its entirety, could probably be best described as the soundtrack of a yet to be released cult movie.

It has that cinematic feel to it, a bit kitchen sink with David Lynch at the helm directing, and that’s no bad thing.

Jumping from the legend of boxing hero Benny Lynch to the arrogance of the DWP the band are open to taking on any challenge and wrestling it into submission.

In fact it sounds as if they thrive on the challenge.

To try and offer a better description than a surreal kitchen sink drama soundtrack would be futile as with every listen it sheds a skin and becomes something else entirely.

Nothing is as it seems.

A whole new album appears again and again with each listen, and it is the gift that keeps giving.

Beautifully strange and carrying a sense of unease with it Joe Bone & The Dark Vibes band have delivered a unique album of songs that shouldn’t work, but most definitely do.

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Peter Perrett  - How The West Was Won

If a bookie offered you odds for a Peter Perret album to surface in 2017 you would have most likely have laughed and asked if they were the same as Lord Lucan being sighted in Argentina astride Shergar.

And yet this is the long shot that has come in.

Few could have predicted this.

And while a new Peter Perrett album existing is surprising enough, it’s that it shines so brightly that is the real defying of odds story.

Read the biography The Only One:Peter Perrett, Homme Fatale by Nina Antonia for plenty of examples of why a release from Perrett this late in the day is not something that could have been envisioned.

Health issues stemming from a long dalliance with drugs is just one of the stumbling blocks that have been smashed out of the way.

Musically speaking, with How The West Was Won, it sounds like Perrett is in many ways staking a claim on his own legendary status by emulating his peers such as Johnny Thunders, Lou Reed, by extension The Velvet Underground, Television, and of course his own back history of The Only Ones.

It’s a trip down his personal memory lane, but with our own knowledge of this same back history it all sounds comfortably familiar.

By referencing these other artists it is less influential and more about placing himself within their ranks, and when the context is considered as such it screams that it works.

Hopefully this is not a swam song release and we can look forward to Perrett defying the odds again and again. 

If you want to read a little more about the colourful and debauched past of Peter Perrett now rather than later when you pick up Nina's book then this interview is a good place to start.