Burning Down Paradise

Despite it's early demise in the mid-80's, NWOBHM enjoyed an undead renaissance in the 1990's. Blitzkrieg released the superbly underrated Unholy Trinity, and speaking of trinities, how about Holocaust cranking out three progressive masterstrokes in a row? Even Saxon, who had been drowning in a tsunami of unsellable commercial backwash, fought against the tide and penned one of their boldest albums ever, Unleash the Beast. Tokyo Blade had suffered many indignities throughout the 80's, culminating in a go-nowhere collaboration with some weird new wave band The Dead Ballerinas. But in the 90's, they had reunited with their original vocalist and guitarist. It looked like the NWOBHM samurais were ready to join this pantheon of Great British underdogs, with an album called Churning Out Lullabies. Er, sorry, Learning 'Bout Sacrifice. Soilin' Our Corduroys. This album is really bad.

Boy oh boy, where do I even start. Clocking in at a nonsensical sixty-three minutes, twelve songs of invariably slow tempo, plodding structure, and mind-numbing repetition await anyone brave enough to believe a hidden gem of 90's metal is hiding behind that monstrosity of an album cover. This is not even 90's metal at all, but a slow, ghetto rock album that siphons from the long-forgotten bowels of the mid-90's mainstream; a rotten cornucopia of dated, robotic ideals that ensured the Tokyo Blade reunion was doomed before clearing the runway.

Geriatric whammying affair like 'Friend in Need' and 'Papering the Cracks' are exhaustive 90's time capsules. The former is a bloated mono-riffer that sounds like an uncanny prophecy of Dokken's Shadowlife, while the latter sees vocals locked in the thrall of an impossibly annoying syncopation that sounds like a cross between Rage Against the Machine and Vanilla Ice. It's bad enough when a talented Di'Anno-style howler sounds like he's rapping, but when it's superglued to the top of dreary, mechanized radio rock, it becomes tragic. Most aggravating of all, however, are tracks like 'Hot Breath' and 'Wing and a Prayer' which drown him out with saccharine glam harmonies.

Yes, glam harmonies, in 1995; long after albums like Dr. Feelgood were considered viable cash cows. While 'Hot Breath' is obliviously hanging onto Def Leppard's freefalling coattails, other tracks like 'Only the Strong' and 'Headful of Bad Wiring' are instilled with the similarly-doomed ethos of bass-heavy 90's funk. So in essence, Burning Down Paradise is a starving vulture pecking at whatever shred of carrion it could find; most naueseating of all, the strips of tendon from US hair metal's sunbaked skeleton.

Misguided missives aside, Burning Down Paradise isn't a complete catastrophe on the same level as No Remorse. 'Flashpoint Serenade' manages to be a charmingly corny companion to Van Halen's 'Hot for Teacher', and 'Kickback', the track that immediately follows, is a guided cruiser that at least has the courtesy to throw some blues licks into its cauldron of sleaze. If I really squint hard, maybe some of this can sound like a modernistic interpretation of Night of the Blade... Which reminds me I could just be listening to Night of the Blade instead.