Review Summary: Glamour shields this album from the public eye, and it is a crying shame.
The entire idea of what good alternative rock is supposed to be has for a long time been redefined by glamour bands who have no concept of what it's all about. This issue was present everywhere you looked at the time this album was released. Even once classic bands the world couldn't do without such as Def Leppard had become nothing more than another generic act in history. One band who stuck by everything music used to be, should be, and kept it alive even in times of seemingly hopeless return's of classic acts was Love and Rockets. Love and Rockets is simply truthful and meaningful in all of their content. With the release of their self-titled album, all the morals the band had stood by since their formation in 1985 was still circumspect in one of their greatest releases yet.
Love and Rocket's self-titled album truly showed what skill the band was capable of performing. Many if not all of the tracks in this album show all kinds of different uses of instruments you wouldn't usually find in a normal alternative rock band's discography. Fuzz bass, harmonica, and string synths among many others are all present in this album. "**** (Jungle Law)" is a song purely composed of awesome hooks at every turn and does well in keeping the tone alive. This song never gets old because nothing in it is redone. You very rarely hear the same sound in this track again. Along with this lack of boredom the album expresses, each track has some change in it to keep the album up to par with its listeners. With all these instrumental changes, even vocal changes, it could easily be mistaken that one could get lost in this act. The twisted combinations of instruments throughout the album however prove this theory to be wrong. In "No Big Deal" the vocals are of a very eerie style along with more excellent usage of the fuzz bass in the verses and bridges. "The Purest Blue" includes various acts of the saxophone and keyboards throughout the song and produces an overall excellent song. Later in the album when the track "Bound for Hell" arrives, we see some harmonica action in a mix of eerie vocal sounds and the percussions in this song, along with many other tracks in this album such as "So Alive" and "I Feel Speed" compliment the song nicely.
Overall, the album gives off an eerie feeling to it with vocals along with many combinations of sounds and beats. The tracks themselves don’t really provide the eerie feeling with the strange use of instruments so much as it is the vocals. The vocalist styles in these songs change significantly between each track. There are some songs with an indie sort of vocal style to it, while others have a dark whispery voice in them, back dropped by amazing percussions and strange guitar lines. The entire album sounds as though it were meant to be an experimental album, but ultimately comes off as just plain creative. It really is a set product by the rather obscure band Love and Rockets, and it all fits together nicely. This album is pure entertainment from beginning to end.
