One of the truisms of the life of an artist is that if you keep at it long enough, at some point you\u2019re bound to release a piece of work that in retrospect you really wish you hadn\u2019t. \u00a0Welcome to Ian Hunter\u2019s albumus terriblus<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Two years down the road from his superb solo debut — and two years apart from his invaluable partner on that recording, guitarist\/arranger\/producer\/creative foil extraordinaire Mick Ronson, Hunter threw together a group for this disc that must have seemed promising at the time.\u00a0 Start with returning drummer Dennis Elliott from Hunter\u2019s debut, on the cusp of hitting the big time with Foreigner, and add flashy guitarist Earl Slick and a couple of like-minded studio musicians.\u00a0 Then top things off with the production talents of notable 1970s boardsman Roy Thomas Baker, coming off a pair of hit albums with Hunter\u2019s old pals Queen.<\/p>\n
It all sounds good on paper, doesn\u2019t it?\u00a0 But\u2026<\/p>\n
Baker proceeds to take one of the frequently-brilliant Hunter\u2019s less inspired sets of tunes and dress it up with an astonishing variety of fussy overproduction until it collapses into one big blurry mess.\u00a0\u00a0 Rockers like \u201cGolden Opportunity,\u201d \u201cOvernight Angels\u201d and \u201cWild N\u2019 Free\u201d try hard to ignite, but only the latter ever breaks free (sorry) of the oppressive confines of Baker\u2019s overcrowded production.\u00a0 The title track is a complete disaster, as Baker processes Hunter\u2019s trademark, pleasantly raw vocals to the point of rendering them almost unrecognizable.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, it\u2019s not the worst track here.\u00a0 That dubious honor would have to go to the truly wretched \u201cJustice Of The Peace,\u201d whose phenomenally grating chorus background vocals are the musical equivalent of water-boarding.\u00a0 Honorable mention in the category of Truly Horrible Arrangement and Production goes to \u201cTo Love A Woman,\u201d where said background vocalists are made to sound like the Brady Bunch on helium.<\/p>\n
There are a handful of passable tunes here — \u201cBroadway\u201d is another of Hunter\u2019s passionate love letters to his adopted country, and \u201cThe Ballad Of Little Star\u201d is pretty enough in its simplicity — but more common are stumbles like \u201cShallow Crystals,\u201d a rather pedestrian ballad with distinctly Queen-like guitar crescendos erupting without warning every couple of minutes as if to shake you out of a slumber.<\/p>\n
The fact that this album has been out of print for years, other than Sony BMG\u2019s two-for-one package pairing it with All American Alien Boy<\/i>, is testament to both the quality of the finished product and Hunter\u2019s own assessment of it.\u00a0 This is one he was happy to leave in the dust.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":29842,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5920],"rating":[11205],"class_list":["post-41457","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-ian-hunter","rating-rating-d-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41457","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\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41457"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41457"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}