Poison
Native Tongue

A logical and natural consequence of the previous "Flesh & Blood". A luxury guitar hero for an album that would have wanted to bring Poison into the most refined elite, after so much street and glam rock. An attempt to move towards a blues-oriented market, to escape the zone subject to grunge attacks. Too much of a girl, the drummer Rikki Rockett's girlfriend, found in bed with Richie Kotzen, the guitarist mentioned earlier. Band in full nervous breakdown, the newly hired guitarist is fired putting a definitive stone on the first life of the Poison. These are the dawn and dusk of "Native Tongue", an unfortunate yet underrated launch ramp that never took off. Probably a tombstone on the music of Bret Michaels and company.

Yet it is praiseworthy - not just for the intentions - this album that, after a long time, tries to present us with a mature band - also thanks to the precious addition of six-string - that wants to prove itself over the long haul by offering songs finally longer and more elaborate than usual. From musicians to artists, from craftsmen to artists. They had been very entertaining before but had never enchanted for technique or compositional originality. They had only got incredibly fun melodies right. At that point, after seven years of career, in 1993, they tried again by being led by Kotzen who takes them on a very radical adventure. The band sheds its sequins and fluorescences, leaving room for the color of the earth. There are no more teased hair but semi-naked bodies (in addition, Bret Michaels in incredible shape) and virgin forest settings. The booklet’s presentation is not very truthful but certainly impactful. It tells a fake story.

Not fake, nor crafted at the table is instead the compositional level of the band that with Kotzen finds, in addition to a very warm sound, more articulated riffs and solos that Poison could honestly only dream of before. The musical genre thus definitively leaves glam and becomes a welcoming and slightly dark ballad-blues, enriched by sounds and choirs that could be part of a Louisiana gospel. An interesting attempt to renew their music, splendidly upheld by a golden production that duly polishes this long tracklist of 15 tracks.

After the title track – an instrumental intro based on drums and tropical forest effects – one enters directly into the scene with a piece that never made sparks in a stadium but would have deserved to. "The Scream" is a super song that highlights the new talents of the band, capable of running fast as before, adorned by a guitar worthy of competing with the other supergroups of the 80s and 90s, and with a Bret Michaels who, squeezing himself, manages to rise high, structuring his tones on those of the supporting voices/choir. The punk recklessness has vanished in the refined and engineered sounds at the production stage, to be far from the now old L.A. sound and move to cotton zones, far from the two coasts. A truly ambitious project.

So incredibly ambitious as to generate a song like "Stand," where church choirs and high profusion of Christian-American pathos atmospheres lead in the direction of the third coast, that on the Gulf of Mexico. The song is convincing because it’s as cloying as a spiritual recited in Las Vegas. Plasticized, exhilarating, American. Black voices that tend towards the skies make Michaels look great, while Kotzen plays his guitar in the shadow of a tree among the plantations. Another noteworthy track is "Until You Suffer Some (Fire & Ice)," a typically 90s ballad, also unfortunate because it could have had the success of those of Aerosmith and Bon Jovi without envying them anything. On "7 Days Over You," the horns that consolidate the blues ambition of the band dominate, combining a catchy philosophy with colorful sounds. Worth remembering is also "Bastard Son Of A Thousand Blues" which already says it all in the title. "Ain’t That The Truth" I cannot forget, a potential hits bashful as it is. As for the rest, the level remains consistently high: never magnificent but nevertheless intriguing.

When I bought this album, I wouldn’t have given it more than a two. Time – and specifically the years – have taught me to appreciate and evaluate it. Hence my vote which will surely be shared by Kotzen fans, whom I had the fortune of seeing live just under three years ago. A proper guitarist.

The band, after the obvious cheating problems generated by the latter as explained at the beginning of the review, has practically ignored this album proposing only "Stand" in their extensive Greatest Hits, which sometimes returns in live performances. But not always. A shame it ended like this because this path, albeit slightly unnatural at the start, could have been the right one for Poison, who then returned to making their usual music with few highs and many lows to forget. "Native Tongue" is a step in the dark.