L.A. Guns
L.A. Guns

BAND: L.A. Guns

ALBUM: L.A. Guns

YEAR: 1988

Hello everyone! I have recently landed on this fantastic review site and, looking around, I noticed that not a single L.A. Guns album had been proposed, so I immediately set out to talk about their first debut CD!

Let me introduce them... asd... L.A. Guns are a Glam Metal band that originated in Los Angeles in 1983. L.A. Guns' music is often associated with the 1980s Los Angeles Glam metal scene, particularly the Sleaze Metal subgenre, of which Guns N' Roses were the most prominent exponents (three original members of the Guns, namely Axl Rose, Tracii Guns, and Izzy Stradlin, were part of it). The band was represented by the eccentric guitarist Tracii Guns, joined by the flashier English vocalist Phil Lewis, with a past as a star in the lineup of Girl alongside future Def Leppard Phil Collen. The guns of Los Angeles had among their ranks the acrobatic and quirky drummer Steve Riley, from the equally hallucinogenic WASP, an element that represented the true engine of the band alongside bassist Kelly Nichles, who was a mainstay of the American formation for years, a formation completed with the inclusion of rhythm guitarist Mick Cripps.

How nostalgic is that musical movement known as Street-Glam. It was the 80s, and on the radio you could listen to carefree, cheerful, terribly catchy songs composed of great choruses and tremendous guitar riffs! Certainly, not everything was fine and dandy, but it's undeniable that among them were some excellent musicians. As were L.A. Guns, among the first to mix glam with punk, pioneers of that exciting genre called Street-Metal. How could we forget their masterpieces? Impossible to do so. But let's get to the point...

In 1988, the debut album catapulted the band to immediate success. Dirty, sleazy, vicious—these and other adjectives wouldn't even remotely explain what L.A. Guns meant to the hardcore rockers of the 1980s, a band that, together with their "cousins" Guns N' Roses, represented the word excess in its most classical sense for years, and managed to transform sleazy from a simple musical genre into a real lifestyle. Five musicians dragging with them all the rage and despair of those who grew up in the ghettos of America's big cities, and who now found themselves battling a hostile reality marked by plagues like alcohol and drugs—this is who L.A. Guns really were, a band that would soon become a genuine symbol for a generation, perhaps adrift, but almost entirely reflected in their lyrics.

Raw, direct, and violent hard rock—these are the elements that characterize the sound of this eponymous record, a violence that up to that moment few bands in the glam field had managed to express or transmute into music. In fact, it was precisely that same boldness and artistic irreverence that brought more and more fans around the American band. Instead, here we are, served on a silver platter with a great album influenced by the hard rock injections of various Aerosmith and AC/DC, and the youthful sound enthusiasm of bands like Motley Crue. The spark is ignited by the hammering and nervous No Mercy, which in just over three minutes manages to showcase all the peculiar characteristics of the band in question, namely tight rhythms, sharp guitars, nervous yet precise drumming, a caustic vocal style, and a breathtaking shouted chorus ("show no mercy, no no mercy") truly chilling. The following and provocative Sex Action manages to replicate the feat by sinfully moving on easier sounds, dragging with it an emotional charge that, consumed in a sensual emphasis and coy vocal sections—which echo Poison and Motley Crue—propels the band into truly unreachable sound territories, thanks also to the blazing and unforgettable solos by a young Tracii Guns.

The broken rhythm of Electric Gipsy, with an occasionally irresistible driving refrain, is a fitting opener for Nothing to Lose, as dirty as it is irreverent, characterized by its uniquely wild charge, inherited from a perfect mix of punk injections and interventions in the purest rockabilly, distinguished by a sax solo that harkens directly to the lessons of the great masters, Hanoi Rocks. The provocative Bitch is Back plays an important role within the album with its pure sleazy rock stride, on which the two axemen set up a series of riffs soaked in sweat and tainted by vocals that are occasionally really bawdy, projecting a rhythm section at times devastating, giving life to a dynamic, spontaneous and at times genuinely exciting sound, while One Way Ticket, a classic atmospheric ballad, only comes in to catch your breath before the uptempo Hollywood Tease, as vibrant as it is loaded with feeling, and the compelling Shoot for Thrills, a true sleaze generation anthem with an emphatic chorus à la TNT by AC/DC, lead to the grand finale of Down in the City which has the merit of drawing an unstoppable hard trail.

One of the best albums from the band coming from the city of angels... to be listened to in one go! More than 5 stars deserved...

R&RLINE UP:

- Tracii Guns - guitar

- Mick Cripps - guitar

- Phil Lewis - vocals

- Steve Riley - drums

- Kelly Nichles - bass