Review Summary: Nope, better off going to bed instead
Forgive the glimpse into my musically foul soul, vacant with alleged shallowness, but let’s just get down and dirty, shall we? Let’s hit on the sh
it that the fans of a band like Buckcherry will crucify a writer for – if they even bother to read negative reviews. You see, it’s just too easy to pen a write-up for an album like
All Night Long. A leisure listen through every other track on this thing and –
boom: A magical, scathing review full of dear-God-not-another-isms and sad-tragic-commercial-attempts-to-sell-records stories appears on my computer. Every time. It’s like a formula. Bands like Buckcherry never surprise, perhaps if only by how they get worse as time goes on. Remember 2008’s effort,
Black Butterfly? Still trying to remove that ugly trash from your mind? Sorry, but
All Night Long is like that one - and
that one, and
that one, and
that one, come to think of it. Not sure which albums by the band that I’m referring to? It really doesn’t matter.
It never has. A few charting singles, a few successful tours, and hey, let’s get back into the studio and do the same thing all over again. That’s Buckcherry’s art in practice. “Crazy B
itch” was fun and catchy; “Lit Up” had some shelf-life – but those songs were all just part of the routine. Add to the fact that Buckcherry have failed to come up with anything as amusing as “B
itch” in close to five years, and you have a band that is well into a career of stagnation, now more apparent than ever with a handful of generic singles barely going anywhere these days.
All Night Long is a step further down into the mud. Song after boring song whiff by on some pseudo-80s hair metal spill, full of parties, women, drinking, and sloppy attempts at anthems slurred in Josh Todd’s worst Axel Rose impression. Sound familiar?
That’s Buckcherry’s career in a nutshell.
Hell, that’s Buckcherry’s discography in a nutshell. They’ve been spinning Queen-cum-AC/DC anthems like second track “It’s a Party” year after year, and when the band does try to calm down on
All Night Long, most of the time in the form of love ballads, ala “I Want you” and “Bliss”, you just can’t take Todd seriously. Are you really going to take the romantic word of a man that just spent the song before the prior, “Oh My Lord”, seducing a woman with lines like “
you got me hard like a diamond at Christmas”? The lyrics are an ironic joke, song in and song out, and it never changes. On “Our World” Buckcherry try to get environmental on us, saving the world from pollutants and such, but, like, are they serious? You guys have dug yourselves into a partyin’-sexin’-drinkin’ hole on
All Night Long, and those albums that came before it, too, and you have the nerve to rag about saving the world? Ridiculous, utterly ridiculous.
Shoot, well at least they have lead guitarist Keith Nelson, who’s able to pay some decent homage to those rippin’ 80s solos. Had it not been for his inclusion in the band, Buckcherry would be swimmin’ with the likes of Nickelback and Hinder, at least instrumentally anyway. Good for them, yeah, huge achievement, right? Now it’s time to aim a little higher than the typical, under-the-table trash they’ve been giving us for years.
All Night Long is filled with it, running at the same consistency rate of last effort
Black Butterfly, and leaving us with the same nauseating feeling akin to a hangover you might get in the morning following a wild night. Except this one will stay with us for a while. Great. Thanks, guys. Why don't you put us out of our misery and call it quits, rethink your game plan, and stop playing around. It got old with 2001’s
Time Bomb, and hey, look at the time: It’s been almost ten years since then. Turn it in, and let it go to bed, once and for all.
