Tesla
Bust A Nut

THE REVIEW

In the mid-90s, when nearly nothing was left standing of the hard rock scene that had defined an era up until a few years prior, Tesla was one of the few entities still able to gift a final, fleeting ray of light to a genre once glorious but now reduced to nothing more than a shadow.

The five (hard) rockers from Sacramento were coming off three sensational hits on as many albums, starting with their debut 'Mechanical Resonance' (dating back to 1986) and arriving at 'Psychotic Supper' from 1991, passing through 'The Great Radio Controversy' (1989) and the seminal live album 'Five Man', released a year later.

Always faithful to the motto 'a winning team doesn't change', our heroes returned to the scene with an album that roughly follows, in terms of tracklist and sound, what was likely their most successful work, and the one where they reached their full compositional maturity, namely the previous 'Psychotic Supper'. However, it's impossible to overlook that the year this platter was released was indeed 1994; and this is combined with the tensions that arose within the band, and the fact that expecting a fourth masterpiece in four releases was perhaps too much, even for a group like Tesla, who had always made passion, feeling, and harmony in their music their only creed. Unfortunately, over the 60 plus minutes that mark the 14 tracks of the album, some symptoms of 'fatigue' and flattening from a compositional point of view are quite evident, which is also understandable and physiological, as the band had spent eight years living at the maximum both in the studio and on stage, with an impressive series of consecutive nights during the tours of that period.

However, despite the level of the three previous full-lengths may perhaps never be matched by the Sacramento band again, Tesla is always Tesla, and a sublime opener of the caliber of ‘The Gate/Invited' is there to remind us; as the title of the piece suggests, we are faced with a two-faced song, where there is everything the band has always accustomed us to, namely intimate and delicate acoustic moments alternated with sudden spurts of pure hard rock. The same theme repeats itself more or less in ‘Shine Away', another engaging and inspired piece, which at times embraces sounds bordering on heavy. The memorable songs certainly don't end here, and if in ‘She Want She Want' we are even in glam territories so dear to party-metal bands such as Poison and Danger Danger; ‘Mama's Fool', with its southern style indebted to groups like Blackfoot and Molly Hatchet, tries to reconnect to 'Change In The Weather', which was the wonderful opener of ‘Psychotic Supper', but only partially succeeds in replicating its beauty. They slow down the pace with ‘Need Your Lovin', a song for ‘hard-rockers with a tender heart' (quote) which the band had already accustomed us to in the past, with more melodic and introspective interludes like ‘The Way It is', ‘Call It What You Want', ‘What You Give', and ‘Stir It Up', that broke the frantic pace imposed by most of their songs. ‘A Lot To Loose' is instead the real ballad of the album, as 'What You Give' was for its predecessor, but it proves to be even more emotional than the latter, thanks to its calm and reflective progression and its poignant and dreamy melody at the same time. Another reason not to forget this album is the presence in the tracklist of a piece like ‘Try So Hard', a ballad with strong acoustic tones and a suffering progression imbued with sweat and passion, in which singer Jeff Keith's heartfelt and emotional performance makes it probably the most beautiful slow song, and perhaps not only, of Tesla's career, alongside the unforgettable ‘Love Song' from '89.

Paradoxically, however, it's the more driven pieces, which in the past had been their real extra step, that fail to fully convince and seem almost standardized and lacking in bite in various parts, starting from the initial ‘Solution' to ‘Action Talks', ‘Cry', ‘Earthmover', and the more successful ‘Rubberband'; all songs that struggle to soar and lack precisely that ‘freshness' of composition that had always distinguished the band. From this point of view, the times of ‘Don't De-Rock Me' and the breathtaking 'Ez Come Ez Go', 'Cumin' Athca Live', 'Makin' Magic' (but the list would be much longer) seem even more distant chronologically than they actually are.

By the end of the album, Tesla opt for two episodes with more acoustic and relaxed sounds, with ‘Wonderful World', which also offers at times much more driven interludes, and finally ‘Games People Play', a cover by American singer-songwriter Joe South that, with its delicate folk-tinted chords, imbued with a veil of melancholy and slight sadness, closes the album and sadly also the first part of the band's career.

'Bust A Nut' went completely unnoticed and was the prelude to the inevitable breakup of the group, which indeed occurred during that same 1994, right after the end of the promotional tour. Seven years later, in 2001, the announced band reunion was confirmed with the release within the same year of the live album ‘Replugged Live', which presented us with a band still in great shape and still sounding like they did at the beginning, as if time had stopped, and the 80s had never ended. The subsequent album of unreleased tracks, released in 2004 under the name 'Into The Now', proved to be a good product with several noteworthy episodes, even though the shift towards more modern rock sounds partially cut ties with their great past. The following years saw first the departure of the historic guitarist Tommy Skeoch (replaced by Dave Rude), and then the release of a double album of covers ('Real To Reel', 2007) and another album of unreleased tracks, 'Forever More', dated 2008, a definitely less convincing work than its predecessor, which is also the last studio album released by the group so far. The latest albums and, above all, the latest convincing live performances have demonstrated that Tesla, even 25 years after their extraordinary debut, are a band that still has something to say. However, I, among the new ones, still prefer this 'Bust A Nut', which may not have the charge and sharpness of the best times, but definitely shows how Tesla, even at that time, despite a thousand difficulties, managed to strike the heart once again with the sincerity and passion that has always accompanied them, leaving us an album that, after each listen, cannot help but still provoke today a veiled sense of nostalgia for times gone by.

Feelin' Is Believin'