It’s only February but I may be reporting history by way of this
\nreview. Over the years, I have listened to a lot of hard rock music
\nand I have seen a lot of bands progressively wither from the
\nheights that put them on the radar in the first place. I’m thinking
\nof the Metallica slide right now. It could also be the bad joke
\nknown as the post-’90s Aerosmith experiment. Can anybody name a Def
\nLeppard tune since
\nHysteria<\/i>? Surely, you catch my drift. The proverbial pots of
\ngold that these bands have been working towards may as well be
\nfilled with doo-doo as far as I’m concerned.<\/p>\n
With Gluecifer having released their fifth full length album,
\nAutomatic Thrill<\/i>, a couple of weeks ago, Oslo, Norway’s blue
\ncollar rockers are finding themselves at the same proverbial
\ncrossroad in my estimation. The band’s first three albums had
\nprogressively moved them into the stream of hard rock consciousness
\nin Europe before 2002’s
\nBasement Apes<\/i> was independently financed and recorded by the
\ngroup prior to being shopped to the two labels mentioned above. And
\nwhile the album has sold well in Norway, moving just shy of the
\n20,000 units needed for gold status, many critics including myself
\nconsider the effort as being merely an average one.<\/p>\n
So, as I have listened to
\nAutomatic Thrill<\/i> for the past couple of weeks, the first
\nthought that hits me on each listen is that Gluecifer have
\norchestrated one of the greatest about-faces in recent music
\nmemory.
\nAutomatic Thrill<\/i> is definitely a return to the band’s hard
\nrock roots and not an extension of the slow death disease that the
\nother bands I’ve just mentioned have experienced.<\/p>\n
First, I have to mention that the track “Car Full of Stash” hits
\na groove that hasn’t had me this excited since I first heard “Evil
\nMatcher” years ago. And that’s saying a lot as there have been a
\nlot of really good Gluecifer songs written since “Evil Matcher” was
\nincluded on the band’s first full-length album
\nRidin’ the Tiger<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I’ve also alluded to the fact in previous Gluecifer reviews that
\nvocalist Biff Malibu has always had a penchant for articulating his
\nwords in a cleverly witty fashion while all but straying from that
\nformula on the
\nBasement Apes<\/i> recording. But, in a notable return to form,
\nhe actually exceeds all previous boundaries in the song, “Dingdong
\nThing”. And now I’ve got to tell you with a straight face — o.k.,
\nit’s really a smirk — that a chorus with the words:<\/p>\n
“Everybody ding everybody dong everybody singing the monkey song
\nlike I do, I do, I do” “Everybody dong everybody ding, monkey boy
\ndoing the monkey thing like I do, I do, I do”<\/p>\n
actually works within the context of this album. Really! All
\nI’ll suggest is that you forget the fact that Malibu once lyrically
\nprofessed himself as a “slayer of the dorks” back in the day
\n(“Leather Chair”) as he now teeters on joining the clan
\nhimself.<\/p>\n
Since I’ve now mentioned that
\nAutomatic Thrill<\/i> has returned Gluecifer back to their
\nno-frills style of hard rock, I should also report that a good
\nfriend of mine recently asked if
\nAutomatic Thrill<\/i> brought back the call and response choruses
\nthat Malibu has successfully shared with his guitarists in the
\npast. I had to double take for a second as that was an obvious
\nobservation I had always overlooked and taken for granted. Well,
\nthe answer is no, but the no-nonsense rockers on
\nAutomatic Thrill<\/i> like the title track “Dr. Doktor” and “A
\nCall from the Other Side” do absolutely nothing to harm Gluecifer’s
\nability to captivate on this album.<\/p>\n
To the band’s credit, their return to prominence on
\nAutomatic Thrill<\/i> is done in a way that keeps the album from
\nsounding stale. For instance, the last track, “The Good Times Used
\nto Kill Me,” is a Gluecifer experiment that has to be applauded.
\nThe loose and lo-fi background guitar picking from Captain Poon,
\nRaldo Useless, and bassist Stu Manx allows Malibu to pull off a Jim
\nMorrison-esque ramble like that found on the Doors memoirist track,
\n“The End.” Reflecting on the good times of his past, an obviously
\nolder and wiser Malibu sorts through his idle thoughts as seen
\nthrough various passerby in the walk of life. The realization is
\nthat while the good times used to kill him, now he is good at
\nkilling time.<\/p>\n
The only real dent to my claims that
\nAutomatic Thrill<\/i> is everything that
\nBasement Apes<\/i> proved not to be is the fact that the song
\n“Freeride” was obviously picked up off the
\nBasement Apes<\/i> cutting room floor. It sounds like a spot-on
\nlackluster extension of any song from the last half of that
\nalbum.<\/p>\n
I’m a betting man. Gluecifer should not only find gold status in
\ntheir home country with this release but they’ll do it quickly
\nbecause they have written an album that suits their strengths. This
\nwill all but insure that they extract something out of that pot
\nwith a much more fragrant scent than some of their seasoned hard
\nrock contemporaries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":26613,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[6504],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-37860","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-gluecifer","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/37860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=37860"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=37860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}