A Quartet of Dragons

Heavy metal has acquired a rather strange reputation these days. It is a brand of rock that never set out to be "art" and can do without intellectual and critical backgammon games, but nonetheless, rock critics seem unable to resist. One such critic, Lester Bangs, dismisses it as a "tyrannosaurus tamed into brontosaurus mild-mannered." I guess we are supposed to see the development of this genre in England in terms of the birth of a veritable fire-breathing British dragon while the noble St. George and bands like Pink Floyd, the Yardbirds, and even Led Zeppelin were occupied with the last flashbacks of acid rock or otherwise engaged. Subsequently, two mutant musical offspring of thest evolved with the Godzilla-ish anti-heroics of Deep Purple, Bad Company, et. al. and the Kong-ish comparatively well mannered Queen and various courtiers. Well, personally, I don't care much more for the sugary-coated spring-bolts of, say, Queen's music, than I do for the sight of a drooling Fay-Wray-hypnotised Kong. Give me Bad Company any day. But to get back to the unfortunately surnamed Mr. Bangs' image, I guess we're supposed to believe that somehow heavy metal has become deader than any dodo, or at least lost its teeth, claws and selfish-gene nastiness and become a lumbering, well-meaning vegetable-eater with about as much magnetism as those scurrying, tree-climbing ancestors of ours busily devouring leaves and trying not to be devoured by beasts of the jungle. Brontosaurus indeed. Junk. And forget about Mr. Bangs because Bad Company has just brought out their fourth record in what has become an annual event--Burning Sky succeeds Bad Co., Straightshooter and Run with the Pack. Their music may not be carnivorous, but it's out there in the front evolutionary line and it shows few signs of going soft.

The lead vocalist of the group, Paul Rogers, late of the no-frills early-seventies British group, Free, which sort of fizzled out following their 1973 album, Heartbreaker, and drummer Simon Kirke, likewise of that gloomily-concluded musical venture, join guitarist Mick Ralphs and bassist Boz Burrell with sax and flute icing by Mel Collins. Together they produce yet another collection of tight riffs--some might call them predictable--with a steady bass company and a highly-amplified guitar sound, usually controlled just short of distortion. They are not virtuosos in the mold of Cream members with their constant technical competition. Their compositions are hardly artistic innovations, either, with lyrical themes which don't stray far from the classic rock and roll love-them-and-leave-them (and occasionally be left by them) basics. But they are musicians who produce a great original sound and, in this age of the art rock and the message rock that you need a bookshelf full of mystical treatises to understand, that is something.

And it is spring after all, when Crimson editors wax poetical (or Disneyish anyway) over budding flowers and young love and billing Birds and buzzing bees and I dare say that this album will fill the AM bands all this summer and midnight FM specials for the more snobbish of us rock-audiences all the next year when WRKO and the like have worn out their copies of the record. This band sings "Everything I need" (and you need and they all need) and it turns out to be nothing more elaborate than the litanied spring chorus "Baby, won't you hold me tonight." And so on and so forth.

As for the title track of the disc? Uh, well, not much bigger on the sophistication but have you ever heard hard-core rock that was? "The sky is burning/I believe my soul's on fire/you're right, I'm learning the key to my desire." And it rocks steady, rolls nice and easy.

There is, however, a track that is beautiful. It's called "Morning Sun." Beautiful. Some may say that's a meaningless lable, but are you really going to go and listen to a song which I describe as harmonically complex, instrumentally balanced and rhythmically and emotionally intense? (All of which "Morning Sun" is.) But you don't really think of the song in those terms when you hear it, just as you don't usually analyse this band's lyrics. It's the old story of great music (or any art form, I guess) being that whose overall effect is greater than the sum of the parts. And here the lyrics are, for once, simple without being too simplistic:

"She moves across the room with easy grace

Mona Lisa smile upon her face

I am completely mesmerised

By the sunlight in her eyes

And the morning sun comes through my window

All night long I have been waiting..."

The rest of the album is made up of titles like "Heartbeat" or "Passing Time" or "Leaving You"--all pretty standard Bad Co. fare of fast-rocking numbers like their debut record's "Can't Get Enough" or Straightshooter "Feel Like Making Love" interspresed with slower ballads like "Seagull" or Run With the Pack's "Silver, Blue and Gold." Bad Company hasn't really developed along radically new lines, except for theri closer meshing-together as a group and a tighter control over the abrupt transitions from one volume and rhythm intensity to another that flawed passages of their first two LP's. Great band. Popular band. Great record. Should be a popular record, too. Turn it up.