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From the first riff, which hasn’t come to make small talk, Cheap Trick are plainly here to do what they do best. Punkily raucous but never losing control, these septuagenarians are still tapped into the motherlode of rock, 48 years since their debut. They’re still bright beasts who understand its essence: they know it, own it, like Parliament knew funk, like ABBA knew pop, like Hank knew country.
Decades on from the moment in Surrender when they were startled to discover their mom and dad getting high to Kiss records, they’re delivering their turbocharged power pop so purely that multiple generations will be able to roll on the couch to the ageless thrill of someone getting classic rock right. All Washed Up? They’re a clean machine.
If they’re less about straight lines than AC/DC, happy to allow the noise to spill outside its structures at times, they – and long-time producer Julian Raymond - are shrewd enough to know Route One still gets you there fastest. Home run single Twelve Gates flirts with The Beatles’ Rain (its harmonies especially), before blowing the doors off.
Robin Zander, who hits his marks throughout this humdinger, sings of a ‘brand new start’ and ‘a new taste coming’. In truth, anyone looking for those things is in the wrong place. Nobody here wants to reinvent any wheels. They just want to assert that their electricity is evergreen, their chests are puffed out and their libido – one of many things Oasis lack – is extant. Like we said, it’s rock.
Everything pounds excitedly, Rick Nielsen’s guitars garrulous, until the inevitable slow one halfway through as a token nod to light and shade. That’s left in the dust as the pace again picks up. Glimmers of Aerosmith, The Cars, The Knack and even The Sweet can be discerned, but the best comparison point is probably Big Star on beer.
Bands are often, tiresomely, described as being like another “on acid”. That wouldn’t work here. No one’s wigging out or wandering off or thinking deep thoughts during titles like The Riff That Won’t Quit or Bad Blood. That would dilute the direct crunch of the punches. Cheap Trick just aim to fizz.
And so, still singing of wanting to touch you and be touched, of getting it on and whamming and booming and banging, Cheap Trick stay eternally youthful, loyal servants of a genre which is lucky to have their priceless magic.
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