You can trust Louder
Robin Beck will forever be known as ‘the singer from that Coca-Cola ad’. While The First Time remains an 80s AOR classic, she’s had a hard time matching that song’s success in the ensuing decades.
New album Love Is Coming is unlikely to shake off the ‘One Hit Wonder’ tag, but she can take solace in the fact that it’s a fine record in its own right. Beck’s fine-grained voice has lost none of its belting power – On The Bright Side is four minutes of melodic rock brilliance. Better still it has the kind of meaty production (courtesy of Beck’s husband James Christian) that many latter-day hard rock records lack.
It doesn’t always hit home – the cheese-ball funky rock of Me Just Being Me veers too close to Shania Twain territory – but there’s enough here to indicate that things don’t always go better with Coke.
Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.