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If my introduction to the music of April Wine had not been through the polished pop rocker “This Could Be the Right One” in 1984 but instead just about any song off “The Nature of the Beast”, I’m certain my cassette collection would have experienced a different evolution back then. It’s only this year that I have become enamoured with the music of April Wine in a big way and most of my favourites are from the first half of the seventies. But this album here really kicks hard rocking ass better than anything else I have heard of April Wine thus far. Oh, sure there are some killer rockers on older albums, but this album just nails it for greatest number of hard hitters on a single disc.
Of course, being April Wine, there’s a stadium rock / poppy edge to some of their songs. The opening track “All Over Town” sounds like classic Cars gone over the hard rock fence with a hot-diggity-dog pop hard rock riff and some strong melodies as the band is known for. It quickly became a favourite of mine. “Tellin’ Me Lies” is more of the typical song type; nothing remarkable but good enough to keep the feel so far. “Sign of the Gypsy Queen” is a step toward something that attempts to have more meaning and a more serious tone. It was a hit single as I recall and I recognized the song once I played the CD. “Just Between You and Me” is a typical and well-done April Wine power ballad. From what I have heard in recent months, April Wine could well have been the kings of the power ballad in their heyday. “Wanna Rock” is another typical April Wine song that carries over from their previous two or three albums, and “Caught in the Crossfire” is, from a lyrical perspective, a seemingly unnecessary and out of place song about refugees on a space craft caught in a space battle. But even still, the album has made it this far with some great catchy hard rockers and some memorable melodies.
From here though, alongside more standard hard rock tunes “Big City Girls” and “Bad Boys”, come two numbers that hit really hard, heavy, fast, and furious. “Future Tense” has some heavy riffs and some excellently sung lyrics about uncertainty of the future. But it’s the ripping thundering track “Crash and Burn” that could nearly put April Wine into heavy metal. In fact, they usually have one song per album that makes them sound as though they are warning us that they may just jump the fence and land in metal territory.
The closing track features more of the party hard rock sound that almost reminds me of Slade in one part (though I really don’t know about Slade very much). This is a real party closer with some terrific fist-pumping rock, a great encore piece at a concert for sure.
The album isn’t perfect and there are at least three songs, maybe four, that I can skip. But the rest of them round this out to one darn fine piece of hard rocking work. So far, out of 10 April Wine albums in my collection now, this one ranks among the top three along with “Electric Jewels” and the very different debut, though the classic “Stand Back” does have its share of memorable tunes.