Review Summary: Better than a night with Lexxi's Mom
LA’s finest glam-reviving, spandex-wearing, girlfriend-stealing outfit have returned, armed with a fresh set of 80s rock tropes and the usual Steel Panther hilarity to match. Coming off the back of last year's
Live from Lexxi’s Mom’s Garage, which featured acoustic renditions of classic material, the band have plugged back in and delivered a new studio album filled with the all bravado and crassness you'd expect. Everything on
Lower the Bar asserts itself as a Steel Panther album through and through, but in some regards it embodies its title a little too much.
A few months after releasing the aforementioned live album and at the tail end of 2016, Steel Panther announced their upcoming album and shortly after dropped the first single; a “pantherised” cover of Cheap Trick’s ‘She’s Tight’, featuring Robin Zander himself in the hook. Since then and up until quite recently the band have drip-fed a further three tracks from
Lower the Bar, and upon hearing each my hopes for the album rose and fell erratically. I must admit that when the procession of singles was helmed by a cover song, even one so enjoyable, it was a little disappointing. What I had really hoped for out of the gate was a high-energy original in the spirit of ‘Death To All But Metal’ or ‘Gloryhole, because what makes Steel Panther so successful at what they do is their special blend of immature, over-sexualised lyrical humour matched with uncompromising glam metal ridiculousness. When they skimp on either, the formula fails to land properly - and
that seems to be the key problem with their latest effort.
Now on the whole
Lower the Bar is a rockin’ glam album and a downright good time. After the roller coaster quality of the four singles, with ‘I Got What You Want’ striking furthest from the mark but ‘Poontang Boomerang’ teetering on the precipice of banger-dom, playing the album in its entirety initially forces any unintentional cynicism or possible reservations to melt away. The first half of the record boasts some of Panther’s strongest material to date, abounding in the kind of unadulterated entertainment that is promised by an outfit backed with a discography and reputation such as theirs. Opener ‘Going in the Backdoor’ kicks things off on the perfect note, balancing infectious vocal hooks with energetic lead guitar lines and a bouncy rhythm section. Contender for one of the band’s best tracks, period, is the semi-acoustic but newly energised “That’s When You Came In”, which first appeared as an unplugged iteration on
Live..., this time blending the acoustic ballad style of ditties like “Community Property” with the metallic edge of “Party Like Tomorrow is the End of the World”. In all the important ways it’s a quintessential Steel Panther cut.
Signalling the midway point is “Now the Fun Starts”, a chilled out, bass heavy number which really allows Lexxi’s playing to shine. Unfortunately, it does little else, ending up sounding nowhere near as enjoyable as their more melody driven ballad-style tracks from the past. This song genuinely feels as though it were ripped straight from the band’s favourite decade without much meddling on their part. Being this subdued and hazy isn't exactly the band’s forte, and it shows, but even more disheartening this marks the beginning of the album’s general decline.
Regrettably, side B of
Lower the Bar somewhat ironically
sounds like a string of B-Sides and lowered bars. Don't get me wrong, as a self-confessed Fanther I’ll assert that they're all decent tracks in their own right – each being catchy 80s tinged rock-cuts with some pathogen-level catchy choruses - but they're just not satisfying when put in the context of earlier material, and this realisation is made all the worse by knowing that even compared to earlier on this very album that sentiment rings true. The band have proved they're capable of so much more than they're offering which makes it harder to settle for what we get. “Pussy Ain’t Free” is a prime example as it exhausts a formula that was done much better on “Fucking My Heart in the Ass”, and while it’s certainly not
bad it’s a far cry from what could have been and has been before.
Luckily the album has a final saving grace in the closer “Walk of Shame”, a fantastic cut that features a handful of lyrical callbacks to previous fan favourites, and also includes some of the funniest lines penned by Michael Starr, not the least of which include some hilarious quips about the mother of a certain band member and her alleged promiscuity. At the end of the day, while I'd struggle to claim that
Lower the Bar was superior to any of Steel Panthers previous studio albums, it certainly earns its place among them, and taking into account the calibre of albums past, that’s good enough for this listener.
