The Hooters
One Way Home
Recensione album
Casa discografica: Columbia Records
Data di rilascio: 1987
Recensione album
Something strange has come over the Hooters. Chartwise, the fab Philly five are sure to go two for two with this follow-up to 1985's platinum Nervous Night. One Way Home is a snazzy, hook-ridden reprise of their Beatlesque songwriting wiles and expansive Big Rock flourishes. Indeed, "Hard Rockin Summer," with its Indian-ghost-dance thump and brassy vocal bravado, and the bleak power blues "Johnny B" are about as lively as white mainstream rock gets these days.
This time around, though, the Hooters have made airwave magic with rather unconventional ingredients. For one thing, somebody in this band – probably the writing team of singer-guitarist Eric Bazilian and singer-keysman Rob Hyman – has been listening to a lot of "olde" English folk and Appalachian mountain music. Where they once aspired to be a kind of suburban UB40, the Hooters have dosed One Way Home with unexpected shots of back-porch mandolin and Scotch-Irish reelin'. The core riff in "Satellite," a powerful pop KO of TV pulpit pounders, is a metallic jig figure – sort of Boston meets John Barleycorn – fattened up with iron-fist guitar chords and Close Encounters synth effects. "Karla with a K" is an arena-rock two-step, David Uosikkinen's martial drum rolls anchoring the offbeat blend of Bazilian and John Lilley's six-string bravado with penny-whistle and concertina sounds.
Weirder still is the bleak lyric outlook. Most of the songs on One Way Home are about loss, confusion and betrayal. And at full throttle the Hooters can paint it pretty black, like the one-two punch of Hyman's white-knuckle organ solo and the hammer-on-anvil guitar climax in "Graveyard Waltz." Solemnity does not always suit them. The slower, more labored reading of "Fightin' on the Same Side" lacks the feisty ska bounce of the original version, on the band's '83 indie debut, Amore. At five and a half minutes, the title track is a good idea gone on a little too long, its heavy reggae-metal riddim teetering between hypnosis and monotony near the end despite a killer guitar riff and riptide organ. Yet in a field populated mostly by bloodless hacks peddling pap-by-numbers, the Hooters are at least trying to put a few new curves into mainstream rock. For a band obviously shooting for the top, One Way Home is a pretty hip detour. (RS 508)
DAVID FRICKE
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