Black Rose

“…I’m losing my mind…just can’t control…”

A four song, now hard to find ep is the choice to soupe-up Black Rose’s natural advance through Singlesville, a small and often desperate town where bands good and bad alike are regarded as unfortunate, for many find themselves rolling to slow crawls in lotsa local traffic that wasn’t well-known for getting places. This could’ve easily been the fate of these guys, but due to one of them owning a lucky rabbit’s foot or something, their crawl curiously crawled faster than most and for some reason people got outta their way. Well, there’s a swell chance that reason was being a sucker for the love of metal as it should be played.

No doubt Bullet Records had seen potential and consequently took advantage of Teesbeat’s vanishing act by pulling their four fannies outta line to stick in its label-run garage where E.F. Band, Geddes Axe, Le Griffe, and Behemoth were getting their hands dirty on their own cruisers.

Revealing a confident, anthem-styled chorus proudly chanting an expert blend of Popular Mechanics and Hot Rod, “We’re Gonna Rock You” rips the lid off this thing with two hands and heaves it into the part of the garage where older grease monkeys “Love is for Suckers” and “Knocked Out” nod and grin with as much approval as self-congrats on tutelage well given. From the ground up, the song builds a stone-solid foundation and structure, aptly worked-out wheels, and suntanned skin pulled tight by even-keeled yet noticeably ruffled urgency.

On a worldlier scale, it’s a rare example of a composition that has located heavy music’s hard to find ‘seam’. This seam serves as a neutral zone, a place where two opposing factions of heavy music have no choice but grudgingly raise white flags and come to terms. Let’s call one of these factions The Conservative Moral Majority, an up-tight group which promotes songs that are slick, polished, inoffensive, and politically correct/playable. The other can be called The Stubborn Visionary Minority, more care-free supporters of songs that are rougher, knowingly flawed, more uncivilized, more carelessly offensive, and even downright barbaric. These elusive terms of the seam demand the ideal aligning of traits each faction fights for – this tightrope a song must balance on is equal tastes of sweet and sour, equal aromas of lavender and gasoline, equal hues of pink & white and black & blue, and equally commercial and underground. Almost needless to say, it’s a pretty rare occurrence where these contrasting groups can't cling to their disapproving factors and actually see ear to ear. Got all that?

I guess what I’m trying to get the hell across is “We’re Gonna Rock You” has ‘hit’-level perseverance that can still genuinely be headbanged to, and it's important to many fans that the song arrived at this status without a color-by-numbers template which almost always insults our intelligence.

As if intent on pulling us back into Earth’s orbit, the contrived and laid-back opening bars of “Used & Abused” also brings back last year’s single, No Point Runnin’, and its baffling Jekyll n’ Hyde aggravation, and this serum infects the rest of this yawner which drools new doubt over the residual sizzle of the opener’s firework display. The solos of ‘wah wah’ Chris Watson, however, are quite good here.

Then KAPLOW! The seared-off skin of “Red Light Lady” flame-broils us gloriously back to the disc’s initial business, and before we can pull Steve ‘he’s a bard alright’ Bardsley’s concealed-‘til-now, middle stratosphere screams fully into aural focus, we hear the hiss of this hot bullet that outraces and out-aggressions “We’re Gonna Rock You” to get its asbestos mitts on “Used & Abused”, hopefully for cluelessly pissing on fires that lit up the land wonderfully less than ten minutes ago.

“Stand Your Ground” takes its message to whatever heart it has and with a sneer claims land rights in a new patch of mood, a few acres of discontention that simmers slowly in subtle menace where its lone mid-pace drags a thick double-kicked din within it almost wherever it goes. Solos of electrified, Watson-ized razor wire crisscross the grazing pasture of the ep’s undisputed dark sheep that can’t be remembered as anything less than the coolest track here.

Now, this extended play’s bedrock, rubber, and leathery flesh would be quite the mute affair if not for a certain windbag (affectionately speaking) who’s really grown on me like ivy. Mr. Bardsley’s vocals take this recording by storm not because they’re pushed close to the mix’s forefront, but by infusing these songs’ stories with ire-heightened passion, the slightly frayed ends of thug-level civility, and holds its own in its battle with impatience. Expect no hesitation from me as I say that those scarlet screams grabbing attention around the exciting third lap fling his performance pretty damned close to the pace car of first rate, at least for this hot n’ bothered style of music.

All this ep needed to slingshot it to the top of the metal galaxy would’ve been for an innocently deliberate ‘oops’ to find its way around the master tapes that with any luck would’ve lead to newly-invented questions and statements like “for the love of Pete, how did “Sucker for Your Love” get mixed in here?” and “I even ransacked the attic closet looking for the stupid thing, but it’s like “Used & Abused” just disappeared from the planet.” at the very least. At the most endearing, Black Rose would’ve swung one of the most unanticipated and alarming four-spiked wrecking balls to decimate the heat-up of 1983, and larger onlookers like Power Games, Fire in the Brain, Forged in Fire, and One Nation Underground would’ve had to get outta the way if they wanted to slap its back. Yeah, yeah, and Kill ‘em All and Show No Mercy.

I could be mistaken, but I believe this release was the finishing maneuver used to end the minor wrestling match over whether Black Rose should be inducted into the Archives. The Road Warriors should’ve been so lucky.

“…as cold as a blade and sharp like a knife…”