Cherry Pie - Warrant

Provenance: I like hair metal, so what? The purchase of this album was preceded by a 'best of' collection, which I enjoyed very much. Couldn't wait to hear some Warrant deep cuts.

Review: It was a sad day when Warrant frontman Jani Lane departed prematurely from this world. Addiction to alcohol and drugs caught up with him in 2011, by which time he was living in rather straitened circumstances. Thanks to this particular album, he also had to live with the ignominy of being referred to as 'the Cherry Pie Guy' for much of the latter part of his career.

It's massively unfair, as although he did write the addictive, double-entendre laden smash hit Lane had much more in his locker. Cherry Pie is testament to this - so alongside the usual hair farmer preoccupation with sex there are finely honed, sensitive tracks about loneliness and betrayal. Whilst not quite in the same calibre as Bruce Springsteen, it's fairly indisputable that Lane wrote the greatest butt-rock song about witnessing a murder within a rural community (the track in question is the riotous 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', which has about as much resemblance to the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel as I do to Desert Orchid).

I would go so far as to say that Jani Lane was the best songwriter of the whole glam metal movement. Some of his peers have moved into writing and producing for contemporary artists, and I can't shake the feeling that a sober, focused Lane would have made a mint doing this.

It is sad, too, that 'Cherry Pie' became an albatross for Lane and Warrant. On the one hand, it was emblematic of the big, dumb, sexist rawk scene that was flourishing on the Sunset Strip. It almost acted as a semi-colon to the scene before the giant full stop that was grunge and alt-metal. Given the bleak thematic concerns of what would succeed glam, 'Cherry Pie' sounds almost impossibly airheaded and inconsequential. If I could reach back through time, I'd urge Warrant to enjoy every second about doing silly songs about sex, because you're about to get pounded by lads doing bits about school shootings and blokes getting snuffed in Vietnam.

As with every band of this ilk, Warrant always stowed one or two cigarette lighter moments onto each album. 'Blind Faith' is fairly so-so, but 'I Saw Red' - about walking in on a partner's moment of infidelity - is as good as it gets. Especially considering that it's set up, in the first verse, to sound like a panegyric. It's clever, and it packs a wallop, although I have to confess that the acoustic version on my 'best of' is even better. 'Bed of Roses' is another track that benefits from Lane's shrewdness; here, he plays the part of a lovelorn tenant of a dingy motel, dreaming of a better life for the object of his affections two doors down. Beneath the gated drums, gang vocals and squealing guitars is a very human heartbeat.

I'm also a fan of 'Song and Dance Man', which could be either a celebration of life on the road or a cry of desperation. Maybe it's both; but it possesses a brooding quality to it missing in much other glam metal (the only other hair band that does this convincingly is Ratt; Invasion of Your Privacy might well be the only properly existential album from the spandex brigade). Nonetheless, it's a welcome note of ambivalence in a genre that is generally averse to notions such as introspection and equivocation. Imagine Bread's 'Guitar Man', except it's for people who say 'dude' a lot.

What more is there to say? It's well sung, well played, the hooks are chunky and it sounds exactly like a glossy MTV metal release from 1990 should do. Cherry Pie does feature a banjo on one track, I grant you that, and a version of Blackfoot's 'Train Train', bringing my personal 'Train Train' collection up to two (I've got the Blackfoot joint it where it first appeared). As a sting in the tail, Cherry Pie rounds off with a cheeky little spice called 'Ode To Tipper Gore', essentially a supercut of profanity uttered by Lane in live settings. Completely puerile, but it must've seemed a tad daring given the political climate of the time (and the outrageous actions of Tipper Gore and her troupe of self-appointed moral arbiters, the Parents Music Resource Center). Inside the liner notes, 'Ode To Tipper Gore' sports the caption "Freedom of Speech...What a concept!", making Warrant one of the unlikelier upholders of the First Amendment flame.

The bottom line is this - if you don't like glam metal you won't dig Cherry Pie. However, if you've got any regard for the genre, i.e. you're an individual of refined sensibilities, not only will this hit all the usual marks, but it'll give you just a bit more juice than usual in the songwriting department.

Now, just for the record let's get this story straight; me and Uncle Tom were fishing, it was gettin' pretty late...

Hot In The Shade - Kiss

Provenance: Another piece of shit I paid a quid or two for.

Review: This is rancid even by Kiss' standards. No mucking around this week with some convoluted preamble about how Bruce Kulick got me dumped or whatever, I'm going straight in on this abomination. I realise now that at the time I should've taken one look at that dorky sphinx and spent my money on a can of Pepsi.

I've been suckered by Kiss before now. I got their Double Platinum greatest hits collection as a teenager, which is bulging with catchy, if clunky, nuggets of escapist rock 'n' roll. A band that can come up with glorious trainwrecks like 'Detroit Rock City' and 'Black Diamond' had to be worth a deeper dive, right?

Eh, perhaps not. Certainly not, on the basis of Hot In The Shade (ooh, look, when you make an acronym of the title it spells 'hits' - clever boys! It's also an anagram of 'shit').

Now, even thought Hot In The Shade is an absolute goat rodeo for the most part, there are a couple of songs that aren't as unlistenable as the rest. The opener - 'Rise To It' - is serviceable single-entendre stadium fodder (the gag is that Paul Stanley can maintain an erection) and 'Hide Your Heart' is a hysterical slice of melodrama with a lyric that would embarrass a pre-verbal child, but gets by on conviction and a chorus. That's it. And those are tracks number one and three on a fifteen song slalom down Mt. Shitass. It's January, I've got the heating on low but this album has got me sweating like I'm allergic to it.

Speed up the opening riff to 'Black Diamond', tack on a terrible chorus and complain about paying taxes and you've got the essence of 'Betrayed'. I suppose it would be passable if you've never heard rock music before, or indeed, any music, ever. Try to imagine a song considered too dumb for ZZ Top's Recycler but have Gene Simmons sing it instead, and voila! You've conjured up 'Prisoner of Love'. Can it get worse? Yes. If you've ever wondered what Kiss what sound like if they did a cover of Def Leppard's 'Pour Some Sugar On Me', but somehow made that wretched ditty even more pathetic, then look no further than 'Read My Body'.

It goes on. Hitherto I've been running down the tracks in order, but really once you're past the relative highlight of 'Hide Your Heart' you can pick a song at random and I guarantee you that it'll be so bad that you will feel your IQ dropping in real time. 'Boomerang'? 'Cadillac Dreams'? 'Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell'? 'The Street Giveth and the Street Taketh Away' (yes, really)? This is the kind of music that drives people otherwise disposed towards guitar or drums to rediscover the lost art of mime.

It's not as if Kiss ever did anything revolutionary in their career - musically speaking, that is. 'I Was Made For Loving You' was a bit of a curio as a disco-rock fusion that actually works, but the real genius of Kiss lay in their onstage presentation and the way this was subsequently monetised. Chalk that up to the naked avarice of Gene Simmons and the sheer bloody-mindedness of Paul Stanley, the combination of which ensures Kiss chug on profitably to this day. Yet even though their paleo-rock of the 1970s was derivative and silly, it was distinctive. Probably the biggest crime of Hot In The Shade is that Kiss stopped playing Kiss songs and instead churned out bad parodies of songs whose formulae had proved successful for other bands. I've already mentioned Def Leppard and ZZ Top, but 'Love's A Slap In The Face' could be a Ratt outtake and 'Forever' is, ahem, "inspired" by Cheap Trick's 'The Flame'.

Alright, I've had enough. If I'm going to be charitable, I didn't cringe too much at 'Little Caesar' and whilst 'Silver Spoon' is mostly bobbins I cracked a smile at the "whoa-oh-a-whoah" chorus. If earlier in the decade (Hot In The Shade came out in 1989) Kiss revived flagging interest in their career by unmasking, this is the album that should've seen them committed to a witness protection scheme.  Hot In The Shade saw Kiss trying to play catch-up with the hairspray crowd - a mob that they could legitimately claim to have inspired - and failing miserably, depressingly. Alice Cooper pulled off this ruse (and pretty much everything else, come to think of it) much better. Utterly charmless.