Bang Tango
Dancin' On Coals

Los Angeles, late eighties, a vibrant and pulsating music scene, even though it was completely dominated by the surge of countless bands hungry for success and willing to do anything to ride the big wave of the explosion of the street/glam genre, where often image and look counted more than musical and artistic content for its own sake. A genre that, after the last punches dealt by bands like Poison and Motley Crue with their Flesh and Blood and Dr. Feelgood, seemed to have said almost everything. You can well understand that, to emerge from this sort of general chaos, alternative solutions were needed, something different, something genuinely interesting that wasn't the same old "stuff," something that would return credibility and vitality to a genre that was about to draw its last breath.

Yes, it has always been difficult to be innovators, especially in a musical genre like American school hard rock where the sound and propositional schemes always lean in one direction, even more so if you go on to record an album completely at odds with the previous one that had instead garnered maximum recognition from both public and critics and was hailed from many quarters as the example to follow to gain media support. That very success which grants you fame and popularity when you are cool but turns its back at the first sign of weakness. In short, that's exactly what happened to the great Bang Tango and their splendid "Dancin' on Coals."

Outside conventional schemes, always and continuously evolving stylistically and artistically, this is what Bang Tango were at the time, an evolution that initially made them an excellent match for acts like Cult, Cinderella, and Faster Pussycat, but eventually led them to a very personal and distant sound territory, so distant as to make them almost unapproachable. Capable of questioning themselves with every single release, reinventing and breathing new life into classical hard rock styles thanks to clever incursions into the funky field, Bang Tango, to the honor of the writer, only paid the price of not having the total support of their record label, which appeared to have believed in their potential only on the surface. Even because, as mentioned earlier, their debut album "Psycho Café" not only earned the band a platinum record in North America, with three hundred thousand copies sold in just a few months and reaching number 47 on the Billboard charts but also, and especially, an interplanetary success of the video for the single Someone Like You, which was on heavy rotation on MTV and our Video Music.

"Dancin' on Coals," or dancing on hot coals, is a somewhat prophetic title if one looks back at what happened to the band in the years to follow. This was the title chosen by the band for their second recording effort, and it's a breaking record, maybe arriving too early, representing as a whole the hard rock answer to the alternative diversions of acts like Jane's Addiction and Red Hot Chili Peppers with whom they shared a love for funk, those broken rhythms, the lifted drums, and a prominently slapping bass, distinctive elements that, combined with the street-rock excursions always in the DNA of the five from Los Angeles, created a colorful sound mix, rich at the same time with vibrant nuances.

Eleven tracks, the product of an exhausting studio work lasting a full three months, under the supervision of guru John Jansen (already working with Warrant, Faster Pussycat, and Cinderella), distinguished by mature songwriting filled with almost obsessively detailed arrangements, reaching its qualitative peak on tracks rich in feeling like the opening track Soul to Soul, permeated by an almost danceable rhythm among mainly funky partitions, with truly fantastic brass interventions by the Hollywood trumpet quartet, and hard rock diversions in a mix of EMF meets Aerosmith, or the more enticing and rhythmic I'm in Love, led by the hand to glory by bass player Kyle Kyle always at the center of attention with his magical fretless bass.
But Bang Tango also knew very well how to strike the big blow and ensure the support of their audience, thanks also to plastic poses and a vampiric look that anticipated by a decade the style of acts like 69 Eyes, Type O' Negative, and company. For this purpose, a special listen is deserved by the violent Dresset Vamp, dirty and rough hard rock among references to Generation X, The Stooges, and New York Dolls, and tracks with strong connotations with the recent past of the band like the gritty title track Dancin' on Coals, a sort of clever mix between funky, street/punk, and hard rock echoes capable of raising the dead, all surrounded by an astonishing performance behind the microphone by former L.A. Guns member Joe LeSte.

The overwhelming and catchy Last Kiss, featuring a chorus with a strong airplay heritage, is pure bubblegum/glam in the style of Cheap Trick/Poison, while if Midnight Struck is the usual ballad "breecher" and candlelight dinner worthy, Emotion Gear is yet another great maturity display from this band eager to express to the fullest of their possibilities a vast and heterogeneous musical background that surely deserved much more consideration than it certainly received.

It was 1991, the grunge phenomenon was already on the horizon, betrayed by not-so-indulgent critics before with their records, and by an audience ever more eager for dirtier and more direct sounds, "Dancin' on Coals" quickly ended up in the clearance bins, being slandered immediately when it could have had one last chance that I hope you want to give it, because although it's true that the passage of time always helps to restore true value to everything, it's good that this album might be reevaluated in the best possible way, it deserves it, I swear.