Review: LA Guns

LA Guns
“Waking The Dead”
(Spitfire Records)

I could make this really simple for ya.  Did you at any time say you liked LA Guns?  Yea?, cool, buy this and you’ll be impressed.  If you never liked this band, this album won’t do a thing for you.  The rest of this review is meaningless for you.  Never heard of LA Guns, aw fuck.  Now I gotta school you in timeframe of the early-mid 80’s, sunset strip, an explosion of guitar and drug fueled glam rock scene from which this band spawned from, made their mark, singer left, 15 years between then and now, a bunch of albums, singer came back… see, it’s gets too involved for a CD review.  The overall sound does smack of the 80’s, but with Tracii Guns whipping down big-ol ego commanding guitars.  Lots of lead work of course.  Lyrics are still awash with mediocre poetry of coming down to the ‘Hellraisers Ball’ and not being lost in the ‘City of Angles’.  Insert guitar solo here.  But I do approve of this.  It might be because I was one of those kids stapling glossy pages from Hit Parader, Circus and of course Metal Edge all over my bedroom.  And my walls held their share of LA Guns shots, showing their most a-rockin’ poses.  So the personal bias cannot be ignored.  A couple of track skippers that are just reworked ideas that were old a decade ago.  ‘Don’t You Cry’ should have been left off, but they apparently needed 10 tracks so they wrapped up the disk with what sounds like a throwaway from an earlier album.  I am the only one who likes this in the Modern Fix office.  I am old.

Bushman