Lonesome Crow - Scorpions

 

Provenance: Got this as a part of a 'twofer' deal along with Lovedrive, which was the album I was actually after. I did something similar with Gerry Rafferty as I had coveted City To City, but ultimately found myself enjoying Night Owl more. 

The packaging for this collection only depicts the original album cover artwork on the inner sleeve, which in Lovedrive's case is just as well (albeit it's not the most flagrant crime committed by the band in this department).

Review: The version of Scorpions I'm most familiar with spans the era from Lovedrive through to Love At First Sting - an era where the band had turned into a chrome-plated hard rock machine, albeit with the ability to throw the odd curveball every now and again. Klaus Meine's idiosyncratic yelp may take some getting used to, but the riffage served up by Rudolf Schenker, his brother Michael and latterly Matthias Jabs was often of the highest order.

However, Lonesome Crow was the debut, and although it features a sixteen year-old Michael Schenker, this release came about prior to his elevation as one of the more melodically astute hard rock soloists of the era. The younger Schenker would depart for UFO, paving the way for headband, Hendrix and moustache aficionado Uli Jon Roth to join the band, remaining until Lovedrive. At this point, Michael Schenker makes a brief return, long enough to play on Lovedrive before flouncing off to form the Michael Schenker Group. I saw MSG supporting the Scorpions once - Michael had a strop, stopped playing and then tried to attack his brother with a guitar.

Ah, where was I? Oh yes, Lonesome Crow. I'm expecting this to be a bit of a formative stab, and early indications are that this isn't going to be the piston-pumpin' headbanger's ball of their prime years. First impressions are that it's a bit hippie-dippie, closer to the heavy psychedelia of, say, Edgar Broughton Band or early Alice Cooper. Though, it has to be said, not quite as accomplished. Opener 'I'm Going Mad' is mostly a Michael Schenker guitar showcase, which I don't mind one bit, plus there's a little taste of the famous Meine wail on display; but its successor, 'It All Depends', already sounds quite dated for the early 1970s. Perhaps because Cream got there first with 'SWLABR'?

I shouldn't be too harsh, as plenty of bands go through the kind of metamorphosis that the Scorps would go on to do. Contemporaries UFO and Status Quo would begin as space-rock and psychedelic bands respectively before going on to toughen up their sound - and the gulf between Judas Priest's bluesy debut Rocka Rolla and the thrash metal insanity of Painkiller just sixteen years later is quite something to behold.

(I also happen to think Rocka Rolla is quite crap - sample lyric: "She's a classy flashy lassy / Imitation sapphire shine" - in contrast to the affection for Quo's early stuff I possess for material like 'Pictures of Matchstick Men', 'Ice In The Sun' and such. Nonetheless, Judas Priest are pretty cool inasmuch as they just seem to get harder and heavier, the obverse of the journey taken by most metal acts).

So it begs the question - what exactly were Scorpions attempting with Lonesome Crow? Judging by the phasing, flanging and wah-wah that abounds, I reckon we're looking at one of those joints that's meant to be deep, man. It's heavy on the atmospherics and wig-outs, every tom-tom sounding like it was recorded from the back of a cave. Are we meant to think of Scorpions as a troupe of mysterious psychedelic goblins? Because that's the overall vibe. If you encountered Lonesome Crow era Scorpions, you'd half expect to come away with a quest involving potions or amulets.

Do I hate this? No. Yes. Bits of it, certainly. I think 'Action' is about the clumsiest thing they ever committed to tape. It's like listening to a Wishbone Ash track from Argus, but it's shit. By the time one gets to the 'creepy' birdsong effects in the intro to the title track, I think one has probably had quite enough. Little of Lonesome Crow is outright terrible, but by the same token there's little to charm or wow the listener. A curio, a line in the sand, the genesis of a band that would go on to do bigger and better things - but no more than that.

Unbreakable - Scorpions

Provenance: I've had the singular pleasure of being rocked like a hurricane on numerous occasions. Numerous occasions.

Review: It must have been a strange moment to have been a Scorpion in 2004. Twenty years earlier you were rocking the world like a hurricane. A mere fifteen years ago you singlehandedly brought down the Berlin Wall with the whistled intro to 'Wind of Change'. Just over a decade ago you still manage a US top thirty album with the awful Face the Heat. What next? Create some of the worst album art in rock history? But you've already done that. Metal bands now wear tracksuits and feature DJs and something called a 'Fred Durst'. So what do you do?

Well, if you're the Scorpions, you sort-of join the nu-metal crowd for about half a song. Then you go back to being the Scorpions.

So we start proceedings with a faintly embarrassing song called 'New Generation', which has an introduction that sounds like it was devised by someone who has never actually listened to nu-metal but is going to have a go anyway. There's a bit of static, and some disjointed vocals echo about the place before a big, crunching, down-tuned riff bursts through. However, unlike Alice Cooper's Brutal Planet the commitment to trying to keep up with the backward-cap brigade begins and ends here. The rest of the song unfurls to reveal itself as a mid-placed plodder with a children's chorus singing the outro. Ho hum.

And that's it. Because next track, 'Love 'Em Or Leave 'Em' (a sentiment born of the finest of sensibilities) could've come straight from Breakout. Thusly the tone is set for the rest of the disc, whose tracks all sound like the Scorpions between Lovedrive and the moment they put paid to Communism in Eastern Europe. The only discernible difference between Unbreakable and the Scorps' eighties output is the punchy digital production, a sound that I tend to dislike.

However, in this instance it sounds perfectly good. Partly, I think, because the Scorpions never had a really 'organic' feel to much of their material anyway. So if you don't really trade off on 'feel' or the ability to swing a beat in the first place, one can almost see the precision engineering of a Pro Tools production as a virtue, or at least a cleaving of style and medium. There has always been something slightly cold and mechanistic in the Scorpions' most successful stadium rock offerings, and foregrounding this aspect does the music no harm. The freeze-dried slabs of guitar that dominate Unbreakable are impressively tough, standing out in bold contrast to the muddy and ill-defined sound that seemed to prevail at the time.

But is it any good? Well, if you like the Scorpions there's no reason dislike this offering. Having tinkered with the formula on the preceding two or three albums, this one sounds reassuringly old school, 'New Generation' excepted. Common to many albums produced at the turn of the 21st century it's too long (the imperative to fill every minute of a CD seemed endemic at the time) and inevitably some filler creeps in.

That said, Matthias Jabs and Rudolf Schenker are reliably good at writing fist-pumping rawk choruses, ably demonstrated on 'Blood Too Hot', 'Can You Feel It' and 'Someday Is Now', even if the latter features an annoyingly trebly guitar pattern in the verse. Another bonus is that, at this stage, the years of hollering 'better get out of their weeeeee' had done nothing to lessen the power or presence of Klaus Meine's idiosyncratic vocals. He never sounds anything less than committed to the song, no matter how empty-headed or throwaway it may be. Even so, nothing can salvage the turd that is 'She Said', not even a 'don't walk aweeee'.

Amusingly, my version of the CD contained some kind of 'anti-piracy' technology that made it hard to copy to a computer at the time. A relic of the Napster age, one imagines, though a rather quaint attempt to command the waves in retrospect. The sleeve is also shiny, like a rare Panini sticker, and the centrefold photo depicts the band in a variety of leatherwear. Top entertainment all round, then.