Album Review: Britny Fox, "Bite Down Hard"

And here it is -- sure proof that ya don't have to dress like a Regency fop to make an impact. Gone are the frilly shirts, brocade tail coats, and beauty spots (thrown out in the wake of a certain "Dizzy" vocalist, I imagine) and, boy, do the Britnys look a whole lot foxier for the change!

But less of the fashion notes. We should be talkin’ music here. I forgot who coined the phrase “chorus of controlled cacophony,” though it fits BRITNY FOX perfectly. Bite Down Hard is largely loud, lithe, n’ begging to be played live. It covers no new ground, yet never crosses into cliché-dom. Guitars weave in n' out of the punchy. hard-assed rhythm section, whilst new boy Tommy Paris's chops are convincingly corrosive -- without ever resorting to overpowering bouts of screaming.

"Over and Out" and "Look My Way" lighten their respective sides with a touch of pompous schmaltz, but otherwise yer talkin’ an air-punching, shout-it-out-loud, rock n' roll formula that'll always have its place. No specific song has beaten me about the head screaming "I'm the best!" The opener "Six Guns Loaded" and "Black and White” both boil with unleashed aggression whilst the band's reworking of ALEX HARVEY's "Midnight Moses" has an impressive final flourish of sub-SABBATH/ AC/DC -style rock drama.

I'm bitin’ so hard on this one that my jaws ache! Habits of a goodie.

Grade B

Lyn Guy

Riff Raff
January, 1992

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!