True story: When I was a little kid, my father was purchasing manager for a lift truck company in Lincolnwood, Illinois. One of his suppliers happened to be the father of, I believe, Tom Petersson of Cheap Trick. One day, Dad brought home a copy of their new album Dream Police<\/i> that he had been given, along with a copy of the tour program from Japan. Of course, being young and dumb, I didn\u2019t take proper care of either; the program ended up shredded in the back of Dad\u2019s Chevy Citation.<\/p>\n
Dream Police<\/i> marked a turning point for Rick Nielsen and crew. After several years of slugging it out with minimal attention in the States, their previous album Cheap Trick At Budokan<\/i> proved to be the key to knocking down those doors, and they finally tasted success. However, they were left with the ineviable task of following that up\u2014and, honestly, most bands would have had a problem doing so.<\/i><\/p>\n
Dream Police<\/i>, thus, was the Stone of Sisyphus for Cheap Trick\u2014and, at times, it feels like they\u2019re going to be able to get that boulder to the top of the hill. Unfortunately, they were not able to maintain that energy for the entire album.<\/i><\/p>\n
The bulk of the first half of the album features a band that can do little to no wrong. The title track alone has rightfully become an anthem on classic rock radio, and remains quite possibly one of the best songs in the Cheap Trick arsenal. \u201cWeight Of The World\u201d and \u201cThe House Is Rockin\u2019 (With Domestic Problems)\u201d both prove that, at least in 1979, Cheap Trick had made a rightful claim for the arena rock throne.<\/i><\/p>\n
And then, there is \u201cGonna Raise Hell.\u201d An ambitious song, to be sure, but one that just seems to drone on well past what would be an expected ending point, and it dares to undo the successes of the preceding songs.<\/i><\/p>\n
The problem is that Dream Police<\/i> was knocked off its equilibrium with \u201cGonna Raise Hell,\u201d and it\u2019s not until the Petersson-led track \u201cI Know What I Want\u201d that things finally start going Cheap Trick\u2019s way again. It\u2019s not that songs like \u201cVoices\u201d or \u201cI\u2019ll Be With You Tonight\u201d are bad; they simply don\u2019t live up to the same level of excellence that the opening tracks do.<\/i><\/p>\n
If Dream Police<\/i> proved anything, it\u2019s that the band’s magic sauce might not have existed with Nielsen\u2019s guitar work and songwriting, or the steady backbeat from Bun E. Carlos. The 12-string bass work from Petersson proves to add a significant amount of texture to these songs, providing an almost synthesizer-effect to his bass lines. Thus, he could quite possibly have been Cheap Trick\u2019s secret weapon.<\/i><\/p>\n
Dream Police<\/i> is not a bad album by any stretch of the definition, but it does commit the misdemeanor of not living up to the expectations for following up a smash release. It\u2019s still worth checking out, but tread carefully.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35235,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5736],"rating":[5614],"class_list":["post-47119","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-cheap-trick","rating-rating-c-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/47119","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/47119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=47119"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=47119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}