Published on Feb 24, 2004
It’s only February but I may be reporting history by way of this
review. Over the years, I have listened to a lot of hard rock music
and I have seen a lot of bands progressively wither from the
heights that put them on the radar in the first place. I’m thinking
of the Metallica slide right now. It could also be the bad joke
known as the post-’90s Aerosmith experiment. Can anybody name a Def
Leppard tune since
Hysteria? Surely, you catch my drift. The proverbial pots of
gold that these bands have been working towards may as well be
filled with doo-doo as far as I’m concerned.
With Gluecifer having released their fifth full length album,
Automatic Thrill, a couple of weeks ago, Oslo, Norway’s blue
collar rockers are finding themselves at the same proverbial
crossroad in my estimation. The band’s first three albums had
progressively moved them into the stream of hard rock consciousness
in Europe before 2002’s
Basement Apes was independently financed and recorded by the
group prior to being shopped to the two labels mentioned above. And
while the album has sold well in Norway, moving just shy of the
20,000 units needed for gold status, many critics including myself
consider the effort as being merely an average one.
So, as I have listened to
Automatic Thrill for the past couple of weeks, the first
thought that hits me on each listen is that Gluecifer have
orchestrated one of the greatest about-faces in recent music
memory.
Automatic Thrill is definitely a return to the band’s hard
rock roots and not an extension of the slow death disease that the
other bands I’ve just mentioned have experienced.
First, I have to mention that the track “Car Full of Stash” hits
a groove that hasn’t had me this excited since I first heard “Evil
Matcher” years ago. And that’s saying a lot as there have been a
lot of really good Gluecifer songs written since “Evil Matcher” was
included on the band’s first full-length album
Ridin’ the Tiger.
I’ve also alluded to the fact in previous Gluecifer reviews that
vocalist Biff Malibu has always had a penchant for articulating his
words in a cleverly witty fashion while all but straying from that
formula on the
Basement Apes recording. But, in a notable return to form,
he actually exceeds all previous boundaries in the song, “Dingdong
Thing”. And now I’ve got to tell you with a straight face — o.k.,
it’s really a smirk — that a chorus with the words:
“Everybody ding everybody dong everybody singing the monkey song
like I do, I do, I do” “Everybody dong everybody ding, monkey boy
doing the monkey thing like I do, I do, I do”
actually works within the context of this album. Really! All
I’ll suggest is that you forget the fact that Malibu once lyrically
professed himself as a “slayer of the dorks” back in the day
(“Leather Chair”) as he now teeters on joining the clan
himself.
Since I’ve now mentioned that
Automatic Thrill has returned Gluecifer back to their
no-frills style of hard rock, I should also report that a good
friend of mine recently asked if
Automatic Thrill brought back the call and response choruses
that Malibu has successfully shared with his guitarists in the
past. I had to double take for a second as that was an obvious
observation I had always overlooked and taken for granted. Well,
the answer is no, but the no-nonsense rockers on
Automatic Thrill like the title track “Dr. Doktor” and “A
Call from the Other Side” do absolutely nothing to harm Gluecifer’s
ability to captivate on this album.
To the band’s credit, their return to prominence on
Automatic Thrill is done in a way that keeps the album from
sounding stale. For instance, the last track, “The Good Times Used
to Kill Me,” is a Gluecifer experiment that has to be applauded.
The loose and lo-fi background guitar picking from Captain Poon,
Raldo Useless, and bassist Stu Manx allows Malibu to pull off a Jim
Morrison-esque ramble like that found on the Doors memoirist track,
“The End.” Reflecting on the good times of his past, an obviously
older and wiser Malibu sorts through his idle thoughts as seen
through various passerby in the walk of life. The realization is
that while the good times used to kill him, now he is good at
killing time.
The only real dent to my claims that
Automatic Thrill is everything that
Basement Apes proved not to be is the fact that the song
“Freeride” was obviously picked up off the
Basement Apes cutting room floor. It sounds like a spot-on
lackluster extension of any song from the last half of that
album.
I’m a betting man. Gluecifer should not only find gold status in
their home country with this release but they’ll do it quickly
because they have written an album that suits their strengths. This
will all but insure that they extract something out of that pot
with a much more fragrant scent than some of their seasoned hard
rock contemporaries.