Thunder
The Thrill Of It All

The curiously fifties-style cover, very rock'n'roll, encompasses the usual steaming seventies hard rock album, intelligent and well garnished with melodic, semi-acoustic or funky variations, passionately executed as well as well-written and even better arranged by the Albion band Thunder. They attempt to hold on despite the fact that the multinational EMI has just dropped them: the new label feels very homegrown, but indeed the production and sounds, and especially the songwriting, are more than optimal, actually irresistible for those who are passionate about blues melodies applied to noisy and physical rock.

Una tantum, the lineup finds itself reduced to a quartet: physical problems for the Swedish bassist Mikael Höglund (who would later leave), and thus the lead guitarist and main composer of the team, the left-handed Luke Morley, assumes the role ad interim. Morley is a guitarist with obvious characteristics: an excellent writer and arranger, an anonymous soloist although precise and competent.

The album's content does not deviate one iota from the now consolidated mix of numbers all more or less gallantly endowed with big riffs and big sing-along choruses as the Anglo-Saxons say, that is, great guitar loops and big choruses that make you want to sing along.

By the fourth album (year 1997), they openly lean on already consolidated compositional schemes, but the unchanged freshness and writing ability manage to captivate the ears of the enthusiast once again, whether they are long-time fans or newly recruited... for the eternal orphan of Led Zeppelin and Bad Company the discovery of this group cannot but reveal itself as an oasis in the middle of a desert.

And so here are the resolute and bear-like hard rock tracks, with the two-guitar riff (Morley is backed by Ben Matthews, who also puts his hands on the ivory keys) plowing through the verses and then exploding into full chords on the choruses; this is the case with the opener "Pilot of my Dreams", the seventh track which titles the album, and the tenth "Cosmetic Punk", the latter not punk at all but rather with vague AOR shades.

There are also dynamic reinterpretations in the style of Led Zeppelin with those spectacular, sudden shifts from acoustic to electric guitars: they can be found in "Living for Today", one of the best and rightly placed as track two, as well as in "Something About You" further back. Also not missing are a couple of swift digressions into funky, of course always on a solid and virile blues base: they characterize the tracks "Don't Wait Up for Me" and "Hotter Than the Sun".

The timely wild and festive rock'n'roll is this time explicitly titled "Welcome to the Party", inevitably destined to open many concerts, thanks to its immediacy and incisiveness. The rest of the work consists of intense ballads or semi-blues ballads, which stretch their emotional arc along the verses, traversed by acoustic guitars occasionally doubled by the piano, then exploding into broad choruses, swollen by the organ and bombarded by the powerful rolls of the excellent drummer "Harry" James. Their titles: "Love Worth Dying For" in position three, "This Forgotten Town" in position nine, and one of the album’s peaks, the closing and captivating "You Can't Live Your Life in a Day", with its swinging and contagious refrain.