UMUR
"No Fuel Left for the Pilgrims" is the 3rd full-length studio album by Danish hard rock act Disneyland After Dark (now D-A-D). The album was released through Medley Records (and through Warner Brothers in the US) in March 1989. "No Fuel Left for the Pilgrims" was a big breakthrough for the band and sold really well. In their native Denmark alone the album has sold around 275,000 copies. A pretty good sales statistic in a country with a population of only 5 million people. But the album did well in both Asia and Europe too. The big American breakthrough never really came though.
The album´s success was helped along by the very popular single track "Sleeping My Day Away", which also opens the album, but there are several other D-A-D "classics" on "No Fuel Left for the Pilgrims" like "Jihad", "Rim of Hell" and "Girl Nation". All delivered with the trademark "gleam in the eye" humourous D-A-D hard rock style. Around this period of the band´s career, they were often lumbed in with the glam metal pack, but besides the sparse use of make up (which was something every other band did in the eighties), there´s little here that sounds like glam metal to me. This is through and through sweaty and melodic hard rock delivered with conviction (their cowpunk past is heard a couple of times during the playing time but that part of their sound is not dominant on this album). The tracks are vers/chorus stuctured and hook laden. The kind of tracks you can sing/scream along too and remember when the album is over. When that is said, not all tracks stand out equally much, but overall "No Fuel Left for the Pilgrims" is a pretty consistent high quality release.
Jesper Binzer´s raw vocal delivery and little brother Jacob Binzer´s lead guitar work are among the highlights regarding the musicianship on the album. The drumming is almost too simple for it´s own good, but that´s probably an aquired taste.
Featuring a strong (but at times almost too polished) sound production "No Fuel Left for the Pilgrims" come off as a really great hard rock album on almost every parameter. If all tracks had been of the quality of the best tracks on the album this would have been a hard rock masterpiece, but as there are a couple of more standard quality tracks featured on the album too, I´d say a 3.5 - 4 star (75%) rating is fair.