You can trust Louder
Now on to their fifth album, The Treatment would have been forgiven for experimenting. Instead they seem to have focused on their core strengths and simply tried even harder not to bore us, and to get to the chorus.
The opener’s hook ‘We’re in the rat race, and there ain’t no escape’ won’t win any literary prizes for lyrical wit. But when it’s performed like Def Leppard without the production sheen, and then followed with Take It Or Leave It’s defiant determination to sound like a hairsprayed headliner at the Sunset Strip Cathouse in 1985, you’ll have no qualms about signing up for some dumb fun.
The boogie-infused romp of Lightning In A Bottle, built around funky Aerosmith-style riff knots, is also hard to resist.
In truth, not all these dozen songs can match that opening trio for immediacy, but they’re still served well by similarly unpretentious trad-rock tricks, most memorably on No Way Home’s chunky swagger.
Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.