Album Review: "Welcome to the Ball," Vicious Rumors

It is my guess that Power Metal fans who like their Rock served up wailing, punchy, produced, and with fast-paced Thrash overtones will enjoy this new VICIOUS RUMORS LP called Welcome to the Ball.

It contains lots of shout-along choruses in songs like Saviour from Anger, Raise Your Hands, and Strange Behaviour that will please the punch-the-air mob. Vocalist Carl Albert sings in the traditional high-pitched, urgent, whooping, operatic Metal style. Welcome to the Ball is peppered with the competent guitar work of Geoff Thorpe and Mark McGhee, which compliments the fast Rock melodies. There are generous helpings of guitar "musical scale" riffing, like in Mastermind, that worshippers can copy in their bedrooms again and again.

Atmospheric breaks like in Dust to Dust and Children vary the conventional straight-ahead energy by adding acoustic flourishes. Not all of the songs ramble along at a fast clip though. There is the obligatory Rock ballad called When Love Comes Down, destined to be included in many homemade mix tapes across the land.

I don't find Welcome to the Ball particularly inspiring, but then I am not a rabid consumer of leather-n'-denim, bang-your-head style rock. Power metal will always have its place and its audience, and VICIOUS RUMOURS have created an LP that is a notch above the standard fare by combining talented guitar work, variety, and a strong hard rock delivery.

Grade C

Marion Garden
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!