In Your Face

“…no sticks or stones gonna break the bones of the man who guns for you…”

While it may seem that TKO had lost contact with Earth in the really early days of the ‘80s, they were in fact supporting some pretty hefty acts (Heart, Angel, Cheap Trick, Eddie Money, Nazareth) to keep their ’79 debut, Let It Roll, part of the material world. Many a musician rotated through the band’s doors afterward, including minutely known guitarist Adam Brenner a.k.a. Adam Bomb, and supposedly in the summer of ’81 new tracks were recorded and a year later a fresh single saw daylight. “Give Into the Night” and “Danger City (Dedicated to Waikiki)”, the single’s contents, were no doubt poised to introduce the band’s latest legwork, but no other recordings strode down to the ring even as the bell of ’83 dinged into eventual silence. Nope, these guys - now a four-piece featuring two guys from Culprit (guitarist Kjartan Kristoffersen and bassist Scott Earl), one from a pre-recorded Fifth Angel (drummer Ken Mary) and the original line-up’s last man standing, Kools-voiced Brad Sinsel - and In Your Face wouldn’t hike on down to the ring ‘til some time in ’84.

Now take special note that none of the blokes in the ring above actually played on In Your Face except Mr. Sinsel, and kudos for this go to Rick Pierce (aside from Sinsel, the only debut holdover), Gary Thompson, Evan Sheeley, and Adam Brenner (who, with Sinsel, co-wrote all but one of these tracks), but since they’re only mentioned in the jacket’s thanks list, who’d even realize?

This elongated timeline questions the overall sound and style of In Your Face, as possible foreseeable trouble brewed not only from the fact it’d been recorded and released about three years apart, but also asks to what extent the debut’s mild boogie rock had been funked into its final design. The ’82 single coulda been considered outdated by ’84 even if the songs appeared exactly as on the lp, but to better solve this potential dilemma (either primarily or peripherally) an advance single/EP, I Wanna Fight b/w “Give Into the Night” (extended to an EP with “I Can Do Without You”), rounded out some radio programming where it could.

Which brings us to present day 1984, when the fairly glammy jacket either gave yer jones for a Great White/Ratt/Kix amalgam high hopes or sent you flipping past it ‘cos it’s exactly what you weren’t looking for. I kept flipping a few years afterward until it finally crossed my used $2 threshold, which is its worth to me in sound, style, rarity and playability even today, but since I have two copies I guess you can double my cut-off price.

In Your Face spends at least half of its spin time conscious of a formulaic stadium semi-sleezer rock/metal hybrid that thumps moderately not unlike Keel’s Lay Down the Law, Kick Axe’s Vices, Loudness’ Thunder in the East, Krokus’ The Blitz and too many more; that primed for mid-day MTV, mostly safe-played agenda that zings in a few cool, head-above-water rockers like “End of the Line”, “Danger City”, “So This is Rock n’ Roll” and, maybe to a more self-consumed degree, “Don’t Give it Away”. These are the fists of fury that make this ten-tracker worth at least a tenth row seat, and that doesn’t exclude one light-handed floater whose footwork of contradictory form resembles the debut’s similar tapestry of “Kill the Pain”. Too-short power ballad “I Can Do Without You” proves more extraterrestrial among the remaining songs, dwelling where predictable acoustics unpredictably scale down to a wispy posture that slowly sways within twining, anguished solos. Like its Let It Roll counterpart, its 4:22 block of time is one to remember.

Again, the only guy left from the original cast is, of course, Brad Sinsel, now less Daltry and with more his own slightly whiskey-scratched technique that’s still somewhat less severe than Ron Keel and far less than Marc Storace, but near/on par with maybe same year Dave King of Battleaxe (UK), among others.

Despite its recorded year, In Your Face relaxes quite at home in ’84. In fact, this commonly found album winds up locating a fairly common sound of the time period, which is probably how many will remember it.