Meat Loaf - Bat Out Of Hell

YOURZ

My first experience with this album was as a barely 18 year old Airforce recruit.  At basic training, to reinforce our lowly status, the airmen recruits had their own 'club' (meaning a room with tables and chairs and a hole-in-the-wall bar).  But the club had a juke box with a selection of present-day hits.  This selection included just about every track on Bat Out Of Hell, the Jim Steinman penned rock opus.

We would spend many a night in various stages of drunken rowdiness singing along to these tracks, generally loudly and particularly out of tune.  Alcohol has a way, though, of tuning even the most tuneless until we all sounded like Pavarotti or maybe even Meat Loaf himself.

It had been some considerable time since I last heard Bat Out Of Hell, but I wasn't surprised I knew most of the words still.  Like The Beatles, these songs have become part of my music memory, there to be instantly recalled with the opening strains of, lets say, Paradise By The Dashboard Light.  Ask me to recall them without a musical prompt and I'd fail miserably.  Put the track on, though, and I'm right there with Meat, belting it out like I've been singing it for years.

33 years on (yes, it has been that long), this album is still selling more in any given year than most indie bands can manage in their careers.  The only question I have is when is the stage show going to happen?

VERDICT: TURN IT UP

MINE

When I was a teenager, I'd often sit up late on a Friday and Saturday night with my father, talking about everything in the world, with the radio on in the background.  For most of my teenage years we didn't have a television, because my mother objected to the fact it would suck our brains out of our eyes (read: no-one helped her with the housework) and so she got rid of it (read: hid it in the garage under a bunch of boxes.)

The local public broadcast radio station ended at midnight, and switched over to what was then Australia's only youth radio station: Sydney's Double J, later to become the national broadcaster Triple J.  In this way I got to hear some truly weird and wonderful music, given that I lived in the country backwater that was (and occasionally still is) our national capital.  I can still recall when I heard for the first time the introduction to You Took the Words Right Out Of My Mouth, and it gave me a shiver.  I was 14, and totally prepared to offer my throat to the wolf with the red roses, but unsure of what that would really entail.  I remember that moment like it was yesterday: the smell of my dad's pipe and the woodsmoke from our open fire.  I remember it had come in the middle of a short break in the conversation, and we both just listened to it until the music started, and then looked at each other and asked: What was THAT all about?

Later this album would be everywhere, and was certainly played over and over again on the cassette player in my first boyfriend's house (hi, Andrew!) along with Kate Bush and the Sweet (ah, those were the days!)  Therefore it's as much a part of my DNA as Hotel California, and will never not be a part of my life.  Especially as it'll always bring that moment back to me, a moment I treasure.

VERDICT: TURN IT UP

For more information: http://www.meatloaf.net/

Jet - Get Born

YOURZ

The deliciously derivative debut from Aussies Jet took the band to the metaphorical heights of the rock industry with tracks Are You Gonna Be My Girl and Rollover DJ.  As an album, it's further proof that the world loves and regularly needs big fat, classic-sounding rock to feed its insatiable, beer-swillling, devil-horns throwing hands-in-the-air needs.

Oh yeah, it sounds like just about any rock and roll outfit of the last 30 or so years.  And they haven't been able to repeat the success of this album.  But so what?  Who gives a fuck?  This is foot-to-the-floor, flatout rock except when it resorts to rock balladry.  But either way, it's well-played, well-polished and absolutely necessary.

VERDICT: TURN IT UP

MINE

A few days ago I was listening to the radio when the announcer was sounding off about Jet's new release - which he said was the same as all their others - ripping off classic rock riffs.  He then played a few songs to prove his point.  I remember thinking at the time - bitter much?  I mean there he is, playing tunes on a Sydney radio station that less than five per cent of the city's population listens to (according to the latest Nielsen survey) and there they are, at the start of a 33-gig national tour supporting Aussie legends Powderfinger.  I know who I'd rather be.

But I'll concede the announcer had a point, after listening to this album all the way through today.  That's something I haven't really done, becasue I put most of it on the gymPod (a Shuffle) when I first got it so I've generally only heard the songs by themselves.

So let's play the game!  Well, you can see just from the album cover this band is screaming "rip-off", as it closely resembles the artwork on the cover of The Beatles' Revolver (reviewed just a few days ago.)  Last Chance is an AC/DC riff, we all know Are You Gonna Be My Girl is Iggy Pop, while I hear some Status Quo on Roll Over DJ.  Look What You've Done is very Beatles, but with a hint of Oasis (made a fool of everyone?) and then Get What You Need moves back to a Quo-ishness.  Move On is somewhere between the Eagles and Neil Young, while Radio Song confused me because I couldn't pin it down.  Get Me Outta Here and Cold Hard Bitch are AC/DC all over, Come Around Again has has a West Coast feel (Henley?) Take It or Leave It is sorta Zeppelin, Lazy Gun is weird because it goes between T Rex and Pink Floyd (who knew that could work in a mash-up?) and then Timothy is definitely Floyd.

Wasn't that fun?  Ah, come on, Jet are everybody's favourite covers band playing their own songs.  Don't you think?

VERDICT: TURN IT UP

For more information: http://www.jettheband.com/

The Eagles - Hotel California

MINE

It's not even a guilty pleasure.  When I pushed this CD into the car player this morning and heard the opening notes of Hotel California, the only feeling that came over me was delight.  I'm sorry if that marks me as an MOR fuddy-duddy, but this album was such a large part of my teenage years I just adore it.

I think about sitting in the back room at Karen's house where we were all allowed to smoke, arguing noisily about whatever was important to us that day.  It takes me back to Durras, where we made up that really rude version of the title track.  It takes me back to school and home and hanging out with that group of friends who I'm looking forward to seeing in November at our 30-year high school reunion (and doesn't that make me feel old?)

But hopefully it'll also take me forward.  I want this album to be part of all the ages of my life.  And I love how The Last Resort  is still more than seven minutes long but it still holds my attention right to the end.  I've never liked Pretty Maids.but I listened to  Life In the Fast Lane twice. Up really, really loud.  And I might just play it again on the way home.

VERDICT: TURN IT UP

YOURZ

I wish I had some kind of wonderful story to tell about The Eagles.  But I don't.  I used to play Peaceful Easy Feeling and Lying Eyes years ago, neither of which are on this album.  As a teenager, I remember hearing them a lot, but would never have admitted liking them.  If anything, it was the opposite.  My friends and I used to put shit on them.  The Eagles represented establishment Top 40 corporate rock, the very thing that would soon bring about one of most profound schisms in contemporary music, better known to you and me as Punk.

So, if anything, I really have to be grateful to The Eagles for helping bring this about because, seriously, it makes me sick to think where modern music might have ended up if Punk hadn't shaken the foundations.  And honesty, apart from the Hotel California (the song), Life In The Fast Lane and Victim Of Love, this album makes me barf a little.

Joe Walsh, however, was nothing but a punk dressed up as a Mid-Western rocker.

VERDICT: TURN IT DOWN but only out of respect, okay...

For more information: http://www.eaglesband.com/