Setting out their stall by completely lifting Van Halen’s Hot For Teacher for their opening track, Frivolous Franny, Vanderbuyst are an exercise in unreconstructed hard rock that you might have thought disappeared when they stopped showing music videos on MTV.
The trio’s third album will come as no surprise to people who bought the band’s first two records or have seen them supporting bands like Saxon and Judas Priest. It’s a good fit too; they’re all motorcycle jackets, vintage patches and denim cut-offs. They’re likely to have their foot on the monitor by the third song and be throwing horns before the first pyro’s gone off.
That said, the album is exactly as you might imagine: thundering hard rock on the fist-shaking Waiting In The Wings, which owes more than a nod to Y&T’s unrelenting Forever, and to run the classic 80s gamut they also make Give Me One More Shot a power ballad. The rest of the record doesn’t offer any more surprises than that. It’s not an unappealing throwback, though.
