Love/Hate
Blackout In The Red Room

The Cinderella of Night Songs but angrier. The Guns n’ Roses of Appetite For Destruction but more street-smart. The Poison of Look What The Cat Dragged In but more punkish. The Phantom Blue of Built To Perform but more metal. The Enuff Z’ Nuff of the self-titled album but more creative. In a dichotomy that captures the best of the debuts of the mentioned bands: Love/Hate.

Always living in the shadow of the more famous ones, this combo, marked L.A. sex/sex/sex, was the propellant of the most anarchic and fervent street glam ever heard on Sunset Boulevard. A band that circulated excellent material from 1990 to 2000 but probably served its best dish with this debut album dating back to the year of the World Cup in Italy. I was young but already doing hard rock intravenously thanks to the son of an American engineer who lived in the same city as me for two years. And it was my fortune.

I consider myself lucky to have encountered and married—yes, exactly like that—this way of life that I have carried inside me for more than twenty years now because it was exactly what could have sent me into a deep existential crisis if, absurdly, I had discovered it at a much later age. I am sure I would have missed something like the vitriolic screams of the Love/Hate vocalist (curiosity: according to strict 80s style, the three musicians on back vocals with black hair, him strictly blonde!) that could sculpt marble with micron precision. The mythological Tom Keifer and Axl Rose should have taken lessons, without taking anything away from them. The difference between cover-page bands and those that tattoo themselves on you without needing to see them on a cover lies in the fact that the first ones are everything you want but hunger for success, while the latter have the true grit that comes from the asphalt, the red bricks of any boulevard side street, the metal staircases clinging to the smoking buildings of cop chase scenes. And they want to get high on people even before on trash.

Love/Hate embodied this with honesty and spontaneity, and I am sure that if any rocker were asked an opinion on the band, they would immediately curl up simulating one of their guitar riffs. Indeed, Love/Hate is passion, groove, energy, all elements that seem sadly missing in much of today’s music.

Let’s see, instead, why they are the spices of this "Black Out In The Red Room."

As you may have already guessed, the album features a truly electrifying rock, with a fucking streetwise matrix, technically perfect, high-quality but never arrogant like many other bands, close (but a step above) even to the more inspired L.A. Guns. A kind of rock from which the Skid Row of Slave To The Grind evidently took cues, even in the production phase of their masterpiece. The vitriolic vocalist I have already instinctively introduced, but he deserves further exploration (always with comparisons to provide a minimum compass service to those who do not know the band but are still reading): he has a raspy and incredibly high voice, capable of reaching, while heavily scratching, the monolithic and stellar high notes of the singer of Steel Heart in She's Gone. And then he has the swagger of the Best Vince Neil. Working directly with a scalpel on Tom Keifer and Sebastian Bach's vocal cords, you might, with a vocal surgery intervention, arrive at something similar. He has the power to yank you out of your chair even if you're in a work meeting, make you run a sex marathon, and drag you into a neighborhood brawl. A beast. The others are all musicians with a capital M and a capital I. Sumptuous and creative (this is the second time I’ve used this adjective) interpreters of a musical current that was already threatening to implode even when it hadn’t found the fuse for the right explosion.

The album debuts with the title track, powerful street glam where the electric jolt manifests in all its catchy, leopard-patterned, and incredibly glamorous components. A rhythmic base worthy of serving as a backdrop for the walks of the worst posers, while the vocals and solos are enough to raise the humors of women.

The closing vocal virtuosity is noteworthy. The second track is Rock Queen, an adrenaline-pumping and blasting boogie woogie perfect for picking up on the dance floor or at concerts. The drumming shoots bullets, the voice sodomizes, the heavy riffs gun you down completely, and you feel tied to the chair. A bombshell, a thrilling piece. The gallery of lust proceeds with Tumbleweed, a track typically built on feline atmospheric riffs dear to bands like Motley Crue, Tigertailz, Britny Fox. Crushing and shredder-like finale. No need to reiterate the originality in the careful selection of notes that never seem copied, actually.

Following is the piece you don’t expect. Overall excellent lyrics that are never trivial as one might expect: love, sex, anger, violence, and drugs are treated here with certain, how to say, expertise...) focused on the theme of the title Why Do You Think They Call It Dope?. In this incredible and euphoric track, strange things happen from the start. After the singer's entrance and a very brief intro that seems to open a glam track, the bass takes over, setting a funky/prog rhythm which (drum roll!) reminds me of one from the album On The Corner by the sublime (start bowing and clapping) Miles Davis, in full activity as a heroin addict. All instruments follow until the drums accompany it almost in dance time. Miracles of glam also knowing how to fuse with genres seen as more important, like the funkyprog fusion! The whole continues with a punk pounding enriched with stop & go that elicits clapping. Warhol-esque. Solos and background effects are indeed of clear psychedelic matrix. The best track in their entire discography in my opinion.

Slyly enters the fifth track Fuel To Run. If I were a successful producer, I would have fed it to the Great White for a cover. Certainly, it’s a song caliber Hooked from the just-mentioned band, but I don’t believe that, at least vocally, the results would have been similar.

What to say about One More Round. Breezy hard rock that, in the backing vocals of the first part and throughout the second part, retains the aftermath of the previous track, showcasing in a hot hard rock contaminated by space (not spice, but space, you got it?).

From She's An Angel, maybe you expect a ballad. But you’ll never find it. The groovier Firehouse and L.A. Guns listening to this track must have thought "Wow these guys are good."

Mary Jane is sinuously sleazy, a song for slow dancing on the dance floor on par with the following Straightjacket, though more inclined towards under-stage crush. Who wouldn’t have fun singing it while posing dramatically as chaos ensues under the stage?

Again manual street glam in Slutsy Tipsy. But always the manual they wrote, not what other common mortals used.

The penultimate track, a strange and trippy riff-laden jewel, is Slave Girl, where they all explode together like popcorn in a pan. To close the work, there’s the rowdiest and end-of-party song on the album, which doesn’t lack rhythmically worthy passages of heavy metal, yet remaining a rubbery and well-lubricated hard rock.

Now I should write a close to conclude this work. But I’m writing and listening to the album at the same time and I feel an overwhelming urge to throw the guitar against the wall. But I don’t have a guitar, and if I had a pen I’d do it. But since I sweated, I had fun, and I have a computer in hand, I will. I hurl it at the wall and screw the world.

Yeah!