Buckcherry- Rock n Roll (2015)

Buckcherry- Rock n Roll (2015)

“All the songs we do are basically about one of three things: booze, sex or rock n roll.”

Bon Scott

By: Ghost Writer

Hard rock definitely has experimented recently pretty good times, and more and more groups all around the world are embracing it once again after the debacle it suffered in the 90s with the arrival of grunge, these days hard rock is rawer and less image conscious, more concentrated on music, and the musical supremacy of the genre nowadays is not only not only kept in the U.S. but also Sweden is producing first rate hard rock with bands like The Hellacopters or The Hives for example.

In the U.S. Buckcherry seems to be one of the genre biggest hopes, producing real powerful and amazing records in recent years, with Rock n Roll edited this year as the next chapter in the history of this popular band.

Naming a record “Rock n Roll” is quite defiant, at least for me it means your record is going to be a relentless explosion of sound from start to finish, and opener Bring It On Back delivers the goods, it has a heavy laid back groove with singer Josh Todd injecting a heavy dose of sleaze into his vocals while guitars do an apt job at capturing the hotter than hell beats and rock hard bottom proportionated by the rhythm section.

A curious deviation into Aerosmith like stuff shows off in Tight Pants funky grooves, horn section and sexual proclamations, giving the band a welcomed addition to their sound, and leaves us ready for the massive Wish To Carry On a powerful song with an amazing sense of melody to be displayed in a really inspiring way, with the band connecting all the dots in a perfect way.

But is in The Feeling Never Dies in which the band turns off the intensity and starts showing signs of tiredness, going a little bit dangerously back to the years of the power ballad, with Todd reclining too heavy on the Vince Neil/Axl Rose persona, and them the band returning to heaviness in the groove heavy Cradle that starts losing its power after the first minute and never defining itself in a good way, leaving it up to the next song, The Madness to retake the raw intensity at the beginning of the record, following it with a fragmented hard rocking song called Wood that never happens to makes sense or go somewhere.

One thing is unfortunately evident in the second part of Rock m Rill and that is the fact that the band losses its direction and they start sounding tired and wasted as in Rain's Falling, a tune that can't produce anything else but boredom, better followed by the hard rock Sex Appeal, with Todd going really, really heavy on the Axl Rose route and the band visiting the Big Rock path Van Halen walked decades ago.

Rock n Roll isn’t exactly the kind of record that changes lives and saves souls,it is even low in energy compared to previous Buckcherry recordings as it lacks the rough edge inspired by bands like Ac/Dc or Aerosmith, and it shows the band desperate for mass acceptance, and ready to sell their soul for a couple of more bucks to spend perhaps on sex or drugs.