Blog Post
SKID ROW – 'THE GANG’S ALL HERE'
Ross Macdonald • 24 October 2022
Album Review
Look, here’s the thing…I’ve not managed to listen to a full Skid Row album since the great Kiss tour huffathon incident in 1996. It wasn’t because I was some big Baz fan and refused to listen to anyone else fronting the band it just didn’t sound like Skid Row to my ears. Said ears were fourteen when they were first caressed with the radio friendly melodic debut, they were sixteen when ‘Slave’ flat out assaulted them with a sound that I don’t ever think will be recaptured. Days before my 21st birthday in 1995 I saw them absolutely destroy the Glasgow Barras and when I woke up still drunk the following morning, I swore concerts were never going to bettered so I walked into the nearest barbers and got my arse long hair shaved off…don’t ever do that my friends, don’t ever do half cut haircuts!
Some two plus decades, three albums and four frontmen later I may just have ‘my’ Skid Row sound back! Musically this probably sits somewhere between the debut and Slave with the occasional tip of the hat to the industrial leaning Subhuman Race. If you’ve seen or heard new frontman Erik Grönwall prior to this then you’ll know what to expect, he was conceived right around the time the debut Skid Row album was being recorded, rumours that he was the result of a ménage à trois involving Bach, Ulrika Jonsson and the Energiser Bunny have never been proven!
This is not an album you ease into, there’s no soft intro, no gentle parting of curtains nor warming up of the audience. From the opening kick drum of ‘Hell or High Water’ this is four pissed off and re-energised Yanks and one cyanide second chance Swede kicking your musical door clean off the hinges and swaggering in like they own the place. The opening eight tracks are just one big, brilliant blur of hard rock heaven. Track after track just explode out of the speakers as Sabo and Hill trade riffs and solos like a guitar version of top trumps, Bolan anchors the whole album with that trademark bottom end brilliance whilst Grönwall explodes his vocal pyrotechnics all over the top of it. It’s not perfect, personally I could have done without the teenage lyrics on ‘Time Bomb’ but I’m being really picky about something that I love dearly. Highlights are many but for me the opening intent of ‘Hell or High Water’, the anthemic we’re back anthem of ‘Resurrected’ and the fabulously furious ‘Nowhere Fast’ are the high-water marks.
The gang is indeed all here, they’ve brought the big guns, the slaves and they’re still beyond the reach of gods faith. Welcome back old friend….I remember you!
Much Love
Ross Macdonald