![]() High School is more of a punk song than any other song on the album, albeit one that prominently features one of the album's hidden weapons. Blasted along by vocals that are as cheesy as you can get without being written by a man wielding an axe and singing about Vikings soaring through unknown galaxies, it also constantly sounds like it's within seconds of turning into Rockin' All Over the World by Status Quo (pretty much the highest form of praise for a band like Hanoi Rocks). Up Around The Bend is one of the two shortest songs on the album, and serves as the perfect opening track for an album like this. That's not to say that there aren't highlights though. Although the album is something of a one-trick pony with most songs being characterised by a loud, endearingly stupid guitar riff that makes Angus Young looks like a musician well schooled in the art of nuanced use of the guitar, there are no songs here that clearly let the album down. The consistency of the album is perhaps its major strength for that matter. Compared to Self Destruction Blues and Oriental Beat, the songwriting has improved beyond recognition, and it's undoubtedly a far more coherent listen than anything which they'd ever released before. Since I'm a great believer in needing to understand the context of albums, I've now listened to several Hanoi Rocks albums in full, and this belief that Two Steps From The Move is set in glam history as being an album that reveals what Hanoi Rocks could have done is completely correct. This series of events has given the album a renewed significance among fans of the band, with it being regarded by some as an album that spoke clearly of what the band could have gone on to do.Īs a brief aside, I must confess that I'd never sat through a whole Hanoi Rocks album before I issued a general plea for people to send me albums with the guarantee that I would review anything that people sent me. The death of the band's drummer, Razzle, shortly after the album's release led to the band struggling and failing to replace him, directly causing their period on hiatus until 2002, when Hanoi Rocks was reformed. Tragically, this would be Hanoi Rocks' last full-length studio album for nearly twenty years, in spite of the fact that Two Steps From The Move would see them achieving a level of commercial success for the first time in their career, thanks in part to the presence of Pink Floyd and Alice Cooper producer Bob Ezrin. As an album, it's about as subtle as you might expect from a group that featured the improbably monikered "Nasty Suicide" on guitar, and yet there's still something profoundly enjoyable about the album, in a way that's ever so slightly disconcerting if (like me) you have a deeply-rooted scepticism about anything claiming to be "glam" that doesn't involve Lou Reed or David Bowie. While it is referred to as "theatrical, rowdy, brash, boisterous, outrageous, rambunctious, sleazy and raucous", there's one adjective that sums up Two Steps From The Move better than any other, and that one word is "fun". ![]() ![]() In spite of the fact that is undoubtedly one of the premier music resources on the wonderful creation that is the Internet, it's hard not to feel that they've missed a trick when it comes to this album. ![]()
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