When it comes to Cheap Trick, by and large, people fall into one of two groups: A) Those who buy the new Cheap Trick album because they're longtime fans and wouldn't think of not buying it, and B) those who would never buy a Cheap Trick album no matter how glowing any such review might be.
When it comes to a new Cheap Trick album, reviews come in one to two forms: A) Well-written and predictably positive screeds written by longtime fans with their own blog, and B) writers for larger publications who bang out a paragraph-long semi-rave that lauds Robin Zander's golden pipes and the band's staying power, but its debatable whether said reviewer even listened to the album.
So what's a poor Cheap Trick fan to do when trying to make up their mind whether to buy the new Cheap Trick album?
Well, they could look at the cover...full of a old photos of the band in their prime...or the title...a line from one of their most popular 70's hits...and ask themselves why an otherwise vital rock band in the year 2017 would be using forty-year-old photos and lyrical snippets to sell a new studio album.
Or they could take it as a sign that the band got the messages from fans and fellow musicians alike and made an album that brazenly reaches back to 1979 and picks up where Dream Police left off.
See, what the die-hard Trick fans will never admit publicly is that we never really got a proper follow-up to the band's breakout studio album. The album we got instead - 1980's George-Martin-produced All Shook Up - was short on material and inter-band harmony, it would appear, as Tom Petersson would leave the band before the album came out.
If we'd have gotten, say, this album instead, there would have been no need for 1982's One On One, an album that screamed "We still rock!"
Then there would have been no need for Rundgren to turn down the guitars on Next Position Please or for the suits at Epic to start suggesting Steinberg-Kelly and Diane Warren songs.
Or for Sparks' Russell Mael's talents to be wasted on a sophomoric track like "You Drive I'll Steer".
What Cheap Trick have declared with We're All Alright is that it's never too late to go back and fix a huge, glaring misstep and put the Trick trolley back on its tracks once and for all.
Toss away those copies of Special One and Rockford, ladies and gentlemen, the Cheap Trick we all fell in love with in those heady, hard-rockin' '70s has finally delivered an album we'll still be listening to six months from now.
The ONLY downside - and trust us, its a minor one - is that the band is so busy throwing in recognizable licks from their own past that the album will feel oddly recognizable on first-listen, but the huge upside is that this album's a grower and that each song's subtleties and nuances reveal themselves over time, just like the band's iconic first three albums did back in the day.
Tags:
cheap trick