Thunder
Giving The Game Away

The fifth album by Thunder is without a doubt their least hard rock work: piano and acoustic guitars often make their presence known... never absent but this time more frequently than usual, filling the album with ballads and semi-ballads, always robust and masculine but still airy and rounded, far from the peak energy a similar band can express.

The opening pair of tracks is illustrative in this regard: it moves in that electro-acoustic territory, with the strummed guitars in full force, typical of people like R.E.M., Tom Petty... basically three-quarters rock and one-quarter pop, since Danny Bowes' strongly blues voice does not allow them to go further towards commercial. Nonetheless, the second song "All I Ever Wanted" is very beautiful, flowing very melodically, balanced, and well-arranged, in a word, elegant.

The peculiarity of the opening song, however, is that it has two titles: the original "Just Another Suicide" was censored (!) by the record label and the quintet had to fall back on the phrase from the chorus "You Wanna Know", go figure.

The title track of the album, one of its highlights, draws instead from certain Lennon material (the verse that stubbornly sticks to a bitonal nursery rhyme, as well as the bridge with the equalized megaphone-like voice, directly refer to the avant-garde masterpiece of 1967 "I'm the Walrus" by the late John) and later exhibits a delightful half funky, all-class rhythm guitar solo.

"You'll Still Need A Friend" is of rare blandness but serves to welcome the first powerful hard rock of the collection with increased pleasure, when we're already at the number 5 position. "Rolling the Dice" rocks beautifully and harks back to the formation's more typical style, a great rock blues that brings together the excellences of power, drive, swing, and fine production. Finally, Bowes lets out four of his screams and channels all his talent through his throat.

The next song, "Numb", is a decidedly piano-driven ballad, with the singer returning to the ranks but it’s always nice to listen, and Ben Mattews (the second guitarist who also handles keyboards) at the forefront. As for the lead guitarist, Luke Morley, the story is always the same: gritty, sensitive, competent, skilled and likable godson of Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Angus Young, and some other luminary of rock blues riffdom... absolutely brilliant in the rhythm phase and, conversely, anonymous in the solo phase. In Thunder, solos end up being transitional moments and certainly not songs within the songs: just like happens with the likes of AC/DC, for example.

The usual rock-funky, present on every Thunder album, this time turns out to be a cover and quite a famous one at that, namely the one-hit-wonder by Wild Cherry "Play That Funky Music", a four-minute booty-shaker that took the world by storm in the late seventies, in the middle of the dance era, only to become a classic over the years, appearing in countless films, themes, and TV series.

The rest proceeds to the end without major upheavals: the record is satisfying but not thrilling... it lacks a few more great riffs, there’s less energy than the average of the discography of an immensely energetic group like Thunder. Always class and competence to spare, however, in the realm of music that cuts to the chase and remains attached to the solid principles of British Blues, invented in the sixties but worthily brought to us by people like these five.