Let It Roll

“…this old town bound to see some light tonight as I pour my soul into the rain…”

Like so many of their peers, TKO’s a band that’s regularly assumed to have been spawned by/within the early/mid-‘80s metal scene. Attesting to this is a commercially correct, time-zoned sound of their known ’84 In Your Face lp.

Truth is TKO is actually part of a much smaller assemblage of acts. These acts’ histories reveal a recording life born sometime in the ‘70s which could be as minute as a demo or single. This is followed by either a mysterious disappearance or an absence of significant activity, then years later their reappearance outta the blue wearing a seemingly brand new ‘80s-style bow. Hang on, there’s more. Within this group is an even more diminutive one that boasts a rarer ‘70s life as a full-length adult. So should you see this quintet sneaking into some dank fruit cellar of an old row house, a hasty window peep could bear witness to Thor, Faithful Breath, Quiet Riot, Heavy Load, Quartz, Marseille and like two others in a secret summit that’s gathered for any reason from sowing global discord to an AA-like meeting for bands that, akin to child stars, suffer the trauma of recording too early in their development.

TKO stroll a few layers of marketable medium pop rock, oftentimes with keyboard-induced pomp, sometimes boogified, and is hooky enough to retain a presence of sorts in the realm they share with second tier equals Player, Runner, City Boy, Leroux and plenty more from that playground. It’s quite deceptive really, this stroll, for with continuous spins its sum confidence grows perceptibly clearer if one bothers remaining attentive, and winds up more compellingly so beyond the title track’s too funky bounce (with a promotional single to boot), the comfortable infection of “Come a Day”, harmlessly personality-split “Bad Sister”, happy-lucky “Ain’t No Way to Be” (another promo single) and “Only Love”, and the hiked-up hardness of “Rock ‘n Roll Again”, meaning that if these same five guys had returned the following year, the stronger batch of songs that I’m fairly sure were in them would’ve made a bolder sophomore lp for fickle pop radio to ignore less.

Vocalist Brad Sinsel inflects fleetingly, though still noticeably like man-voiced Roger Daltry with a sandier edge, always unhindered by modesty, and the band, with a likewise conspicuous The Who intone, finds “Gutter Boy” juxtaposed against a piano backdrop contradicting a stonier demeanor picked from the same field as “Rock ‘n Roll Again”.

Accentuated by a choir of strings and catchy-simple chorus, heartfelt ballad “Kill the Pain” is actually too short to appropriately showcase one of the lp’s finest blocks of time, meanwhile some impressive Bortko/Pierce solos and the fluently gliding, Boston-style rhythms flow the final moments of “What in the World” and Let It Roll.

Backtracking through a band’s history doesn’t always unearth a meek beginning, however in this case Let It Roll, when plopped next to metal-infused In Your Face, is guilty as charged, but with the extraordinary circumstance that Brad Sinsel, the one returning original member, is responsible for the lp suffering its undercut status by declining a new moniker that’d match whatever newly-prescribed hardassness was going on, but I guess TKO’s as good a metal name as any, and since it was already in his pocket….

Fun Fact p-j7t: Let It Roll claimed roughly 150,000 units sold, yet this windfall wasn’t enough to save Infinity Records, which in ’79 secured a contract with the Vatican and The Pope to release a recording of his successful ’79 stadium tour, consisting of his various speeches on side one and personal renditions of popular folk songs on the flip, all to the unrecoupable bell of $6 million. Need I say the record tanked big-time.