Outlaws
Playin' To Win

After the first three studio works, all remarkable and certainly the best of their career, sealed by the fourth live album collecting their most successful moments and spicing them up with the energy of the stage, the Outlaws change strategy and release in 1978 this work that sounds rather different, unfortunately for the worse, than what was done previously.

To this end, they enlist a then-emerging South African producer, one John "Mutt" Lange, who had made his first successful hit with the Boomtown Rats the year before and would soon break big by helping Ac-Dc, Cars, Foreigner, Bryan Adams, Def Leppard, and many others become what they became.

On this occasion, however, the great man fumbles, and this record sounds bad, even fairly irritating… Here is a list of the main blunders made by the producer and the band:

_Rhythm that travels by metronome, not "relaxed" and free and instinctive as is proper in classic rock and even more so in "southern" rock, which represents one of the warmest and most sincere subgenres.

_ The sound of the guitars is cold, transistorized, too rich in treble and harshness. Too processed, too "pushed," even when the instruments are acoustic as in "Dreams Come True."

_ Lange forces the lead singer Hughie Thomasson to constantly evolve to the upper limits of his range. Given the guitarist's inadequate vocal qualities, this results in a rather ungraceful and shrill delivery. The album is also full of choirs and counter-choirs that are too high, scabrous, strained, and prolix.

To all this is added, not secondarily, a decidedly exhausted vein of composition. They recycle intros and harmonic progressions from previous compositions (I am referring especially to their masterpiece "Green Grass & High Tides," which reappears brazenly in the prologue of "You Are the Show" and again in the verses of "Dirty City"). Almost nothing remains in mind between the melodic lines and the guitar work. There is little inspiration and many fillers… including two bland covers, out of a total of nine tracks.

Thus, the best piece on the tracklist turns out to be the single contribution of the latest arrival, the third guitarist Freddie Salem who joined the Outlaws bandwagon just the year before, in time for the live album. In "Falling Rain," he paints with his drawling and heartfelt voice a savory and moving ballad, in which for once the choruses surrounding the refrain have a warm and mellow effect, while the guitars roar with strength and harmony.

Perhaps it's the worst album by the Outlaws, of the twelve released in their more than forty-year career, although studded with suspensions and reorganizations. My affectionate judgment is still a 5: two and a half stars.