Bad Company isn\u2019t quite a guilty pleasure for me\u2014they\u2019re bigger and better than that\u2014but they were always one of those bands I\u2019d listen to when their singles came on the radio, without ever buying the albums.\u00a0 The appeal was simple: a memorably gritty voice fronting a muscular, guitar-heavy power trio sound, very much in the Led Zeppelin vein (which helps explain why they were the first group signed to Zep\u2019s label, Swan Song).\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The band itself was something of a supergroup, with singer Paul Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke coming from Free (\u201cAll Right Now\u201d), bassist Boz Burrell moving over from King Crimson<\/a>, and guitarist Mick Ralphs arriving from original British hooligans Mott The Hoople<\/a> and dialing it up a notch in terms of the volume and pure impact of his playing.<\/p>\n This anthology came together around the 1998-99 reunion of the band\u2019s original lineup, the first time the founding quartet had raised the flag since 1982, though Ralphs and Kirke had persisted through the \u201980s and \u201990s, achieving moderate success with a series of quickly forgotten vocalists taking Rodgers\u2019 place.\u00a0 The reunion itself was a major success, with a sold-out tour and the four all in good health and playing well, and good on them for having seized the moment, as Burrell has since passed away.<\/p>\n The anthology itself is a solid package of passionate hard rock music, delivered with gusto.\u00a0 That\u2019s almost a foregone conclusion with Rodgers\u2019 exaggerated, at times over-the-top delivery, but the band\u2019s support is dead on for most of the original eight-year run chronicled here, matching their frontman swagger for swagger.\u00a0 <\/p>\n The thing about Bad Company is that they established a sound on their debut and more or less stuck to it for the original quartet\u2019s entire run.\u00a0 It\u2019s a good sound, a powerful sound, and at times it\u2019s terrifically entertaining, but as becomes apparent on a large collection like this, it doesn\u2019t vary much.\u00a0 You\u2019ve got a fat guitar line, a thundering rhythm section behind it, and Paul Rodgers wailing his iconic blues-rock vocals over the top\u2014wash, rinse and repeat.<\/p>\n Ah, but that\u2019s all that\u2019s required to fuel immortal if by now rather hoary FM radio staples like \u201cCan\u2019t Get Enough,\u201d \u201cRock Steady,\u201d \u201cReady For Love,\u201d \u201cBad Company,\u201d \u201cMovin\u2019 On,\u201d \u201cGood Lovin\u2019 Gone Bad\u201d and \u201cFeel Like Makin\u2019 Love,\u201d all taken from the band\u2019s first two barn-burning albums, 1974\u2019s self-titled debut and 1975\u2019s Straight Shooter<\/i>.\u00a0 These are songs that you already know well if you ever turned on the radio in the 1970s\u2014or classic rock radio since the 1990s, for that matter.<\/p>\n What\u2019s always interesting about a collection like this\u2014a double-disc set from a group that only stayed together for six albums\u2014is that they delve deeper into the group\u2019s catalog, picking up plenty of secondary tunes that didn\u2019t get flogged to death by radio back in the day.\u00a0 And there are some excellent ones here: second-tier singles, album cuts, and a few unreleased tracks.<\/p>\n \u201cSeagull\u201d is a tremendous ballad, one that people have talked about a lot over the years as a potential single that got away\u2014but at that stage in their career they simply weren\u2019t releasing ballads as singles.\u00a0 \u201cShooting Star\u201d is a great song that should have charted higher than it did, as is \u201cRun With The Pack\u201d (even if the latter is simply a rewrite of \u201cBad Company\u201d).\u00a0 \u201cBurnin\u2019 Sky\u201d is in fact quite fiery, an exorcism of the jealousy Rodgers is feeling since his woman has moved on to someone new.\u00a0 From the same 1977 Burnin\u2019 Sky<\/i> album, \u201cToo Bad” is a sparkling nugget full of sass and muscle.\u00a0 <\/p>\n After that the pickings get slimmer, as the band searches for new sounds by adding keyboards and strings and comes up with their rather lukewarm 1979 album Desolation Angels<\/i>, featuring the ho-hum single \u201cRock And Roll Fantasy,\u201d as well as the one notable song that\u2019s missing from this collection, the sinuous, singalong-worthy \u201cGone, Gone, Gone.\u201d In its place, the steady-on \u201cEvil Wind\u201d features an outro solo with more swing to it than anything they\u2019ve ever done, with Ralphs sounding almost like Carlos Santana.<\/p>\n You can definitely sense the enthusiasm and vigor fading by this time, though, as the band runs out of steam.\u00a0 In particular, \u201cUntie The Knot\u201d and \u201cDownhill Ryder\u201d from the original lineup\u2019s 1982 swan song Rough Diamonds<\/i> verge on unlistenable; they\u2019re limp, ineffectual shadows of what went before, with awful \u201980s synthesizers polluting tracks by a band that more or less defined the raw, organic blues-rock sound in the \u201970s.<\/p>\n Fortunately, as you move into the four new songs that were recorded for this collection, two penned by Rodgers and two by Ralphs (who typically split the main songwriting duties), the old magic reasserts itself.\u00a0 It\u2019s just the four guys with no synthesizers or strings, the original power trio with Rodgers out front.\u00a0 The new material feels a little more mature, as one would expect, but \u201cHammer Of Love\u201d has that old snap and thunder, and \u201cHey Hey\u201d sounds like the middle-aged man\u2019s version of \u201cCan\u2019t Get Enough\u201d\u2014\u201cHey, hey, I\u2019m in love again,\u201d delivered with fire and conviction.<\/p>\n Unlike many of its peers, this anthology actually delivers almost every track that a casual fan could ever want from the band.\u00a0 I might never have bought a single studio album by the group, but The Original Bad Company Anthology<\/i> has found a happy home in my CD collection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":30436,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5720],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-42099","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-bad-company","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42099","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=42099"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52070,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42099\/revisions\/52070"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42099"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=42099"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=42099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}