Here’s a group I’d not heard of before, a Finnish rock band that have one foot in the Seventies glam rock era and another in the Eighties hair rock era. The glam elements are unsurprising when you realise that this album was produced by two former members of Mott The Hoople.
With names like Michael Monroe (vocals) and Andy McCoy (lead guitar) they don’t sound very Finnish, but these are stage names for Matti Fagerholm and Antti Hukko respectively. These days I think they’d get more metal cred by keeping their Finnish names rather than anglicise them, so it’s a shame that they did, really.
The era-straddling sound is most noticable on a track like Until I Get To You, for example, which has a bit of an Alice Cooper feel, while Sailing Down The Tears sounds closer to the stomping beat of a Chinni-chap production. The saxophone (played by Monroe) on Malibu Beach Nightmare is very close in sound to that of Andy MacKay on Mott The Hoople’s Mott album (and makes me wonder if MacKay was the inspiration behind Hukko's pseudonym). Tooting Bec Wreck descends into a glorious bit of drum-backed chaos (drummer Razzle (Nick Dingley) setting a simple pounding beat), with guitar soloing at the end, and is worth the price of omission alone. Back To Mystery City nicks the riff from Mony Mony, really quite blatantly.
It felt quite nostalgic to come back to this kind of music, and this is some pretty good glam rock. While it made a change from the current trends in music, it did also feel of its time. What’s odd is that musically it’s only really about 7-8 years past its date within context, and should sound no more dated to me at the start of the second quarter of the 21st Century than, say Slade or Cheap Trick, and yet somehow it does. It’s a good kind of dated though, I had fun with this.
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