| Looking
like a rag tag bunch of barroom merchants are this lot from North Carolina
called Nantucket. Now lets get this straight, North Carolina and Nantucket
are quite away from each other geographically speaking. If one knows their
map of the USA, Nantucket is an island just south of Cape Cod Massachusetts.
Where the inspiration for the name comes from is a mystery from this Raleigh
N.C based band, but it sounds cool nonetheless.
'Long
Way To The Top' is Nantucket's third album, having released their debut
and 'Your Face Or Mine' the prior two years. They are coming at you very
much in a radio rock direction, with a bit more variety in their approach
(piano, sax etc), sounding more rounded out than the one-dimesnional approach
of some of their contemporaries of that same era. In vocalist Larry 'The
L Factor' Uzzell, they have a singer who straddles the fence between Steven
Tyler and Tommy Keifer (Cinderella), but in a rough-house sort of
way. The producer is Tom Allom, who has obviously added his weight behind
the band, without over-producing it.
As
for the songs, well they're a mixed bag, styles that is, and not the lack
of quality. The album opener is the aptly titled AC/DC standard
'It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll)'. Not a wise move
to open an album I think, despite the fact it's dedicated to Bon Scott
in the liner notes, but hey.. they did it anyway. Second up is 'Living
With You', which is a good party time rocker. Light and refreshing. The
quirkiness of 'Time Bomb' doesn't do anything for me I'm afraid, but they
do improve things with a better effort on '50 More'. I definitely liked
'Media Darlin' and 'Tell Me (Doctor Rhythm Method)', both great cranky
guitar workouts, whlist 'Rugburn' also a guitar based track has choruses
akin to Airborne's material. Side two's material ventures more into
the AOR/melodic rock arena, with keyboards coming to the fore. Tracks like
'Too Much Wrong In The Past', 'Over And Over Again' and 'Turn The Radio
On' all hark back to classic Michael Stanley era radio rock, though
not in the same class.
Not
exactly first division material we're dealing with here, but there are
enough moments of intrigue to generate some interest among the older melodic
rock collectors out there. I've never seen or heard of any of their original
Epic studio albums being made available in CD format, though there was
a reunion album released in 1994, of which the details escape me. Anyone
with an update please let us know - George Thatcher |
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