Pink Cream 69
One Size Fits All

The issue with unlucky bands is a serious one: they carry bad luck with them all their lives and continue to go unnoticed even when they dissolve! Luckily, a few chosen ones, like yours truly and a very few others, are here to tell you what you could really be missing out on because Pink Cream 69 are still alive and they are a great band.

After a rather raw debut, Pink Cream 69 created, two years later, a more refined and markedly successful work, namely One Size Fits All from 1991. Compared to their debut, not only is there a decisively better songwriting, but also a professional production; indeed, this album will represent a benchmark for their career (though it won’t be their best). Their sound remains a mix of American-style hard rock combined with the best elements of German power, and the lineup is the same as the previous album, namely Andi Deris on vocals, Dennis Ward on bass, Alfred Koffler on guitar, and Kosta Zafiriou on drums. 

A beautiful arpeggiated intro opens the show with "Livin' My Life For You", a very successful hard rock track, following in the footsteps of the best Dokken works, notable for choruses still distinctly from the eighties (among others, a video will also be released from the song). This is followed by one of their best-ever composed songs, the gorgeous "Talk To The Moon": a powerful hard rock riff stands prominently at the beginning of the song, then unfolds into a seemingly eternal chorus while still giving space to Koffler’s guitar harmonies. Next is the fast-paced and driving "Hell's Gone Crazy", with a rhythmic section that is nothing short of beastly, where Zafiriou lets loose frantically on the drums, with a truly surprising slow finale! "Do You Like It Like That" is another little hard rock gem of infinite beauty: the composition is similar to Talk To The Moon, but it stands out for the crescendo progression created from the beginning to the end of the song: this time, Deris has improved (albeit slightly) compared to before, and the contribution of the keyboards makes the song very appetizing.

"Ballerina" is a nice semi-ballad, but it doesn’t take off as it should. "Signs Of Danger" is of a different register (a video will also be released for this song), presenting a certain power metal style, but well mixed with the mid-tempo hard rock etched into the grooves of this album. "Walkin' Out To Heaven" is more ordinary and is redeemed by Koffler's solo. The same goes for "Stray Kid", while at the end we have the beautiful "Piggy Back Bitch", which contains one of the best guitar and bass passages ever written by the Koffler/Ward duo, and "Where The Eagle Learns To Fly", a song with great impact and truly unique magic, thanks also to the presence of the acoustic guitar and the atmosphere that Deris himself creates around his voice, as if he were singing to the world that "Where the eagle learns to fly one finds peace of their senses...": what can I say? Pure poetry and pure beauty for this song. The album closes with "We Taught The Children", another spectacular song, where Koffler’s arpeggios and Ward’s rhythms give way to sunny solutions and high-quality hard rock.

To conclude, I can safely state that despite Deris always seeming out of place in Pink Cream to me, this album is worth listening to. Of course, in my view, it’s not their pinnacle, but it is certainly one of their best performances. The true masterpiece will arrive two years later with Games People Play in 1993, the last album with Deris on vocals.