CONEY HATCH — Outa Hand (review)

Album · 1983 · Hard Rock

3/5 · 2016-05-11
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Coney Hatch returned in 1983 with their sophomore album “Outa Hand”. The band had achieved great strides of success the previous year with their debut and had opened for Judas Priest in North America for the “Screaming for Vengeance” tour. A minor hit had gotten them on American radio.

The band continued in a similar vein as on the debut, following the AC/DC-KISS riff-driven hard rock approach powered by Carl Dixon’s AO(hard)R vocals and Andy Curran’s more dirty sneering vocal style. To be truthful, Curran’s vocals have taken on more of Dixon’s AOR style. Still, right from the opener, you know that Coney Hatch are not about to haul out synthesizers in order to woo the top 40 female audience just yet. “Don’t Say Make Me” is an awesome hard rock ass kicker with a fierce eye and a fist that’s ready to be clenched. “Don’t say make me / Coz I will / I’ll make you / Don’t you push me in my own yard”. With that chorus, the lead guitar solo, and the AC/DC-like guitar riff, the band kicks off the album perfectly. The second track “Shake It” does begin a little softer with slashing guitar chords and a cool and easy opening; however, once the rhythm section comes in, we are back to killer hard rock.

“First Time for Everything” is brings the power down a bit and goes more for melody, sounding like a possible radio-friendly single. It’s in this song that a bit of trouble begins to show up on the Rock Candy remaster. After the guitar solo an echo of distortion can be heard hovering over the vocals. As the album goes back to solid hard rock with “Some Like It Hot” that echo becomes a little lost in the hard rock riffs, but for the ballad “To Feel that Feeling Again”, which is a kind of eighties Y&T type of power ballad, that echo begins to detract from the appreciation of the music.

The rest of the album sticks to that great riff hard rock but that echo becomes distracting from time to time. I swear it seems to disappear during “Love Games” but returns for “Fallen Angel” and “Music of the Night”. I believe the person in charge of the remastering levels fell asleep at the console and accidentally pushed the level switch a bit too far up the scale. It sucks because I find the echo rather distracting and the resulting inferior sound quality a disappointment. I have six albums remastered by Rock Candy and only this one and “No Rest for the Wicked” by Helix have this music distortion echo spoiling the songs. It’s very unfortunate because otherwise the album is a great hard rock offering. I sent a message to Rock Candy about this but they just replied saying that they were sorry that I was not happy with the remastering but I could expect a number of other Canadian reissues coming up. So for now I am stuck with this overly loud remastering.

The Rock Candy reissue comes with three bonus tracks which are wonderful additons with the understanding that "Fly On" is a demo and really sounds like one. Still, certainly welcome songs!

I’d gladly give this album 4 stars; however, anyone who gets the Rock Candy remaster will have to deal with this scratchy echo that’s in the recording in some places. For that I will warn you and slip the album down to three stars.