Review Summary: If Wazbones managed to combine the best of KISS and Mötley Crüe, this one combines the worst of KISS and Poison. Avoid.
Aging hard rock bands. Who doesn't love them?! Well, in fact not many people do. Still, it is fun to see the extremes these washed-up artists will go to to stay relevant. And recently, brain-damaging reality shows, reunion tours and pseudo-"modern" side projects gained a valuable new ally: free, official mp3 downloads. This new medium allowed the band to - hopefully - reach a new audience, who wouldn't buy their records at the store, but might be interested in checking out a free album. After all, everybody loves free stuff!
Hence the online appearance of titles such as Tigertailz's
Thrill Pistol. Here is a 2007 album, released by a band which was fourth-tier even back when the genre was hot; normally, it would garner about as much attention as your local Pee Wee League derby. However, throw an entirely free and official download into the mix, and this album could soar...or so the band thought.
You see, even as an entirely free product,
Thrill Pistol is pitifully poor. It takes what little ideas the band had in the past and drowns them in half-hearted songwriting and muddy attempts at a more "modern" sound, with the result coming close to what Poison also failed to achieve with 1995's
Crack A Smile...And More!. The end result is a wasteland of interest which manages to grab the listener's attention exactly TWICE in its entire, excruciating duration.
The beginning of the album is particularly dire, so much so that the appearance of the fair-to-middling title track sounds like an oasis after what we had to endure. Even when a song has an interesting detail - like the bass on
Twisted - the overall construction and execution is so poor and half-hearted that whatever potential there was is irredeemably lost.
Tigetailz's lack of real passion and effort in what their doing shines through on mandatory power-ballad
Miles Away, for the interpretation of which "disinterested" would be a compliment, "half-hearted" an exaggeration. Opener
Brain The Sucker, on the other hand, is an uninteresting song that drags on for far too long, while the seeming attempt at generating a catchphrase on
Long Live The New Flesh fails because lyrics like
these, coming from aging rock-stars, always have and always will sound phony and pathetic. The title track, as noted, is a welcome relief from the cesspool that is the beginning of the album, but it would be a lie to say there are any good songs here before track 6, when
Natural Born Animal comes in with its welcome AC/DC swagger to give the listener the only genuinely good song on the album. The only other above-average moment is the irresistibly dumb
Hangin' By The Heels, which unfortunately is immediately negated by the absolute worst thing on the album.
In fact, it would seem Tigertailz believe in the saying "always save the worst for last", as that is definitely what they do here.
Serpent Queen is an abomination previously conceivable only in Gene Simmons' twisted imaginations; to know the delusional bassist actually has a kindred spirit out there somewhere is nothing short of frightening. This undescribably bad concoction puts a fittingly dire end to what is overall an unforgivably poor album, even taking into account that it's being distributed for free.
Despite the presence of three-quarters of the original lineup, then, this album achieves nothing for Tigertailz except to prove why they were nothing but a footnote in glam-rock history. If
Wazbones, the other free album on offer, managed to combine the best of KISS and Mötley Crüe, this one combines the
worst of KISS and Poison, which, considering either band's track record, is nothing short of a feat. And while it would be tasteless to rejoice for anyone's death, if the passing of bassist Pepsi Tate means there will be no more albums like this, then it can't be entirely a bad thing. AVOID.
Recommended Tracks
Natural Born Animal
Hangin' By The Heels
Download it officially and for FREE here: www.tigertailz.co.uk/media
