THE ALBUM OF THE DAY IS… SKID ROW, SUBHUMAN RACE
The follow-up to the classic Slave to the Grind may not be as potent a molotov cocktail as its predecessor, but that doesn’t mean it can’t blow shit up real good. Produced by Bob Rock, the swan song for the Skids’ original line-up is easily their heaviest album, proving once again that the Youth Gone Wild are the only hair metal band to ever make good on their promises of getting progressively more aggro with each release. The riff that fuels opener “My Enemy” could almost be from a Pantera song (a product of the two bands touring together, perhaps?), “Remains to be Seen” has a punky, thrashy quality to it, “Bonehead” offers everything you’d expect from a song with that title, while “Beat Yourself Blind” is perhaps the band’s most mosh-friendly track, a song actually more likely to inspire listeners to beat others than themselves. Yeah, the band indulged in a little grunginess – the layered vocals on tracks like “Firesign” and “Eileen” seem to owe a least a small debt to Alice in Chains and other bands that ruled the charts at the time – but Bon Jovi’s protégés do it with enough of a classic rock sensibility that it never feels like they were just chasing trends (unlike, say, Motley Crue or Def Leppard or Warrant). Elsewhere the band proves they still know how to write a power ballad with “Breaking Down,” a slightly more mature contribution to the cigarette-lighters-in-the-air genre (note the soothing slide solo in place of the soaring standing-on-a-moutain wail). And, of course, the inimitable Baz still has some of the best pipes in the biz. Subhuman Race felt like – still feels like – a moment of legitimate artistic growth for Skid Row, and it’s a shame that the album never really caught on. It’s a forgotten gem that all fans of the band’s previous output should own.
-AR
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