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Cheated
All Day And All Of The Night
Running For Tomorrow
Lovers To The Grave
Panic In The Streets
Beads Of Ebony
Flirting With Suicide
Children Of The Earth
Praying Mantis were always at the more melodic and thoughtful end of the NWOBHM spectrum, and their debut album Time Tells No Lies (1981) sported an eye-catching Rodney Matthews-drawn sleeve to match breathtaking multilayered songs such as Children Of The Earth, Rich City Kids, Flirting With Suicide and Lovers To The Grave.
It has become acknowledged as a classic of the NWOBHM, although a review in Sounds by Paul Suter at the time blew hot and cold, praising its “power and class” but lamenting "that none of Praying Mantis can sing.” Unfortunately, their all-time classic song, Captured City, isn’t on here.
Seeking the elusive hit single, Mantis began to record a cover of the Russ Ballard-written I Surrender, only to learn that Rainbow had beaten them to it and had taken the song to No.3 in the UK chart. The band also briefly attracted the attention of manager Peter Mensch, but he opted for Def Leppard instead.
“Everything that could go wrong did go wrong,” band founder Tino Troy told Classic Rock.
Every week, Album of the Week Club listens to and discusses the album in question, votes on how good it is, and publishes our findings, with the aim of giving people reliable reviews and the wider rock community the chance to contribute.
Other albums released in April 1981
- Modern Times - Jefferson Starship
- Fun in Space - Roger Taylor
- Prayers on Fire - The Birthday Party
- Faith - The Cure
- Come an' Get It - Whitesnake
- The Flowers of Romance - Public Image Ltd.
- Don't Say No - Billy Squier
- Of Skins and Heart - The Church
- Go for It - Stiff Little Fingers
- Hit and Run - Girlschool
- Twangin... - Dave Edmunds
- Fair Warning - Van Halen
- Bad For Good - Jim Steinman
- Dedication - Gary U.S. Bonds
- The Nightcomers - Holocaust
- Punks Not Dead - The Exploited
- Spellbound - Tygers of Pan Tang
- Waiata - Split Enz
- Zebop! - Santana
- The Completion Backwards Principle - The Tubes
What they said...
"Praying Mantis's 1981 debut Time Tells No Lies is a minor New Wave of British Heavy Metal classic. The album showcases the band's effective use of harmony vocals and guitars, as well as their knack for catchy hooks and choruses. Nowhere is this more successful than on lead-off single Cheated, featuring a fantastic dual guitar harmony straight out of the Thin Lizzy handbook." (AllMusic)
"Tracks such as the urgent Flirting With Suicide, strutting opener Cheated, haunting Children Of The Earth or smouldering Lovers To The Grave showcased a band with the potential to transcend rigid genre boundaries and take their message to a huge audience. Characterised by plenty of layered vocal harmonies and intricate riffs, Time Tells No Lies still stands out as one that got away. (Metal Invader)
"The whole album is just a fantastic listen, it is melodic hard rock at its best, having a NWOBHM influence rather than the FM Radio take of other bands of the genre, an element of crash-bang-wallop that works well. And the anthemic Children Of The Earth (a live favourite) closes with aplomb. (Get Ready To Rock)
What you said...
Mike Canoe: I thought I had tried to listen to Time Tells No Lies when I was going through a NWOBHM phase and was immediately assaulted by overripe 80's keyboards. Obviously, I had the wrong album or it was a different band entirely. Maybe I'm getting my excellent Rodney Matthews sleeve art mixed up.
Praying Mantis's debut falls in with early Leppard, Lizzy, and Tygers. Solid hard rock lifted by excellent guitar and vocal harmonies. I'm always interested in bands with multiple songwriters and lead vocals, and Praying Mantis ticks both those boxes, too. Current favourites include opener Cheated, closer Children of the Earth, and the manic Panic In The Streets and Lovers to the Grave from in between. Good fun.
Bill Griffin: I was not impressed, and the Kinks cover was lame.
Gary Claydon: As with quite a few of their contemporaries, Praying Mantis had already been around for quite a while by the time they were corralled under the NWOBHM banner. Like Iron Maiden before them, their first decent break came when a copy of their demo tape found its way into the hands of the inimitable Neal Kay. The regulars at the Bandwagon Heavy Metal Soundhouse lapped it up, which prompted the Mantis boys to self-finance their vinyl debut, namely The Soundhouse Tapes Part 2 in both 12" & 7" versions.
It wasn't long before they started garnering wider attention, scoring a session on Tommy Vance's Friday Rock Show, a track from which was included on a subsequent BBC sampler album Metal Explosion. They also appeared on the famous EMI sampler Metal For Muthas, but did have a tendency to use the same few tracks.
Given their burgeoning popularity among the punters (they gigged hard around this time and were always an excellent live band, including a storming Reading Festival set) it was somewhat surprising that they weren't snapped up by a label during the fairly short-lived but frantic feeding frenzy around unsigned bands.
The Gem label released a 7" of the eponymous Praying Mantis single but it wasn't until Arista came a-calling that the band scored an album deal. By the time the debut long player was released, it did feel as though some of the Mantis momentum had been lost, with several of the NWOBHM's leading lights having already moved onto bigger and better things.
Which was a shame because what the boys came up with ( and by now the band's lynchpins, the brothers Neophytou, Tino and Chris, had changed their surname to Troy for artistic purposes) was an assured set of highly competent hard rock.
Veering more to the melodic side, Time Tells No Lies nevertheless packed enough punch and displayed some intelligent songwriting, tending to eschew the standard heavy rock tropes of fast cars and fast women.
Unfortunately, the album fairly limps out of the blocks thanks to the lightweight Cheated (which also made for a poor choice as lead-off single) and a woeful cover of the Kinks standard, All Day And All Of The Night. Given that the latter also saw daylight as a 7", it's fair to say that whoever was in charge of selecting the singles wasn't doing Praying Mantis any favours.
From there, though, proceedings took an appreciable upward turn. Tracks such as live favourite Panic In The Streets, Running For Tomorrow, Lovers To The Grave (with a distinct Wishbone Ash feel to it), Flirting With Suicide and Children of The Earth. If I have any criticism it's that, overall, the album feels a little one-paced and although the (shared) vocals are perfectly serviceable, it would have benefited from having a dedicated vocalist.
Time Tells No Lies sold well and is (rightly) highly regarded among fans of the NWOBHM period. Unfortunately for Praying Mantis, it didn't prove to be the launchpad they hoped for. The band went on to have a long but pretty convoluted career (including a deal of popularity in Japan). Soon after Time Tells No Lies was released, they went down the road of hiring a vocalist. Initially, that didn't go too well, but they did eventually hook up with erstwhile Grand Prix (and future Uriah Heep) frontman, Bernie Shaw. I always thought that the likeable Canadian was a really good fit for Mantis and their increasingly AOR-leaning material but, alas, that incarnation of the band didn't amount to much.
Martin Cross: A good album, it suffered from the competition at the time. It's what you would expect from the NWOBHM era: good guitar and drums, and the vocals are really good. Flirting With Suicide, Lovers To The Grave and Cheated are the standout tracks for me.
I listened to a couple of the live bonus tracks, and they sound good for a night out. 6.5/10.
Chris Elliott: This is one of the earlier albums I bought as a 14-year-old. It's still an album I play quite regularly. And it's well written, just catchy enough to leave songs on repeat in your head afterwards. The drawbacks are the typically rushed NWOBHM production, which captured the energy but left it sounding like a demo.
It's also a great pity that not one of them can actually sing. Given it's a melodic album with vocal harmonies, that's a bit jarring these days.
Always the what-could-have-been band for me.
Greg Schwepe: Labels, categories, lists, classifications. Nowhere are these used more than in the music world. We want to be able to put bands into these nice little boxes. And these labels come with preconceived notions that are highly arbitrary and subjective. There have been bands I never checked out because they were labelled (Incorrectly? Correctly? Who’s to say?) in a genre I didn’t like. Only to listen later and like the band and realise
“Heck, they’re not [insert name of incorrectly labelled genre]. But on the flip side, I’m just as guilty of labelling bands when asked for a recommendation. “Oh, you’ll like this band, trust me, they’re considered [insert name of Greg’s own labelling criteria and biases!].
Upon seeing this week’s selection of the Praying Mantis album “Time Tells No Lies” and “NWOBHM” in the description, I realised this would be an interesting choice. For one, here in my musical corner of the U.S., radio stations didn’t really play a lot of these NWOBHM bands or even use the “NWOBHM” term at all.
After learning later about the whole NWOBHM concept and who’s considered in or out, my own labelling instincts came into play about 30 seconds into the opening track, Cheating. “Hmmm…I wouldn’t consider this NWOBHM…”
As Cheating made way to All Day and All of the Night I could almost envision the discussion that might have taken place with their A&R person. “Well, Van Halen hit it big with a cover version of a Kinks song on their debut, so I say we give it a go!” And my initial take on that; “Hmmm…definitely not NWOBHM…”
But as I got deeper into Time Tells No Lies, I then started to hear my own preconceived notions of what NWOBHM is. Running For Tomorrow, Panic In The Streets, and Beads of Ebony checked the NWOBHM boxes for me. Then I realised I should just listen and not try to see if a song checked the box!
After multiple listens, I found this to be a decent, listenable album with songs that held my attention with “musical velcro” that caused the music to stick around a bit. Did I enjoy this enough to listen for this week’s review? Sure did. Will I go about checking out more of the Praying Mantis catalogue? Probably not. 7 out of 10 on this one for me. Listen, don’t label.
Steve Jenner: A decent debut album, but the band were far better live. The album got stronger as it went on, I suspect the record company were putting pressure on for a hit, hence the slightly lacklustre opening songs. Still, I have many fond memories of seeing the band at the Marquee Club back in the day. An eight out of ten for me.
Adam Ranger: The name and logo hint at metal, the cover hints at prog rock, but in actuality, you get a slice of AOR.
The album starts a bit slow and disappointing a pedestrian rocker in Cheated, and then a pointless, boring cover of All Day And All Of The Night. Things pick up a bit after that, with more AOR melodic rock in the vein of Thin Lizzy as opposed to Saxon or Maiden. So not really NWOBHM in style,
There are some nice touches and solid rhythm, and nice guitar work on several late songs and by the closer Children Of The Earth I was quite enjoying the sound. But it didn't leave a lasting impression. No one song really stood out as a classic, despite some of these aforementioned nice touches.
Enjoyable, but not essential British 80s rock
John Davidson: I bought a lot of singles and a fair few albums during the days of NWOBHM, but I was never really tempted by Praying Mantis.
The first song, Cheated, provides the reason. It's pretty pedestrian. There's no strong identity in either the vocals or the music. Worse still, the cover of All Day And All Of The Night isn't a patch on the original. There's no attempt to rearrange it and make it their own (which is the mark of a worthwhile cover).
They do start to hit their stride as the album progresses through track three and beyond. There's good guitar work throughout, and Lovers To The Grave has a Wishbone Ash vibe. Three of the band take turns at vocals, which doesn't help give the band a distinct identity, though the harmonies on the likes of Flirting With Suicide work well.
It's not a bad album, but there's no real killer songs and nothing special about the band that makes them stand out from the crowd.
Warren Bubb: It's not hard to see why Praying Mantis got left behind by Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and Saxon. After the promise of the single Captured City this is pretty dull fare, and not up to the standard of those band's debut albums. I lost interest after a few tracks. Praying Mantis did go on to make better albums than this one, but could only ever hope to cling to the coattails of the big three NWOBHM bands listed above. They were also hampered by many lineup changes and record label misfortunes. Only 3 or 4 for this one, I'm afraid.
Philip Qvist: I always saw Praying Mantis as a temporary home for former Iron Maiden members, and I knew it was formed by brothers Tino and Chris Troy. I also knew that they were supposedly part of of the NWOBHM movement, but after listening to Time Tells No Lies I would put them squarely in the AOR and hard rock category. It definitely isn't heavy metal.
Opener Cheated is standard stuff from the early 80s, while their cover All Day And All Of the Night is average at best. Still, things do pick up afterwards, and there is some good stuff on the album, including Lovers To The Grave, Flirting With Suicide and Children of the Earth.
All four band members do receive writing credits on the album, and having guitarist Steve Carroll as the third vocalist, along with the Troy Brothers, does add some variety along the way. It's a decent album, and it does deserve a spin or two. Just don't expect a heavy metal onslaught, though. A 7 from me this week.
Mark Herrington: Friday night, early 80s and I’m rushing home after last orders in the pub to tune in to The Friday Rock Show on the radio. Hosted by legend Tommy Vance (TV on the Radio), who championed a multitude of rock/metal bands old and new - one of those being Praying Mantis.
I enjoyed it when they featured, having a more traditional sound with echoes of Thin Lizzy, Magnum and others. Their 1981 debut album Time Tells No Lies is a good melodic heavy rock album with classic songwriting and vocal and guitar harmonies. Remarkably, 44 years later, they are still around and currently playing on a UK tour.
The album kicks off a little weakly with the catchy Cheated and an unnecessary cover of the Kinks All Day And All Of The Night. The third track, Running For Tomorrow, a fan favourite, raises the bar with great melody and guitar. The theme continues with upbeat Rich City Kids and the classic, slower-paced Lovers To The Grave. Another banger, Panic In The Streets, is followed by the Boston-sounding Beads of Ebony. Flirting With Suicide’ is next, followed by the more epic album closer, the classic Children of the Earth.
A mostly good album, with great harmonies and guitar, pegged back by a weak opening two tracks - 8/10.
Final score: 6.83 (36 votes cast, total score 246)
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