Album Review: Love/Hate, "Wasted in America"

This is excellence with a turbo engine. LOVE/HATE came in like a whirlwind and have continued to tear houses down and uproot trees. Wasted in America is power with a capital P, spreading across a musical spectrum like the fallout from a megaton bomb. The advancement in their song-writing is quite breath-taking. Also, the performances and ideas have developed into a classy killing machine.

The whole beauty of this album is that Love/Hate haven't been afraid to contrast songs like the thunderous "Yucca Man" with the acoustic social condemnation off "Don't Fuck with Me." At times they have achieved an almost JANE'S ADDICTION originality. I still think they were misplaced in the billing when they supported SKID ROW along with L.A. GUNS last year.

Some of you who saw them at those shows, or when they played what seemed like a residency at the Marquee around 1990, will already have heard a couple of the numbers, like title track and opener "Wasted in America" and "Miss America," as well as "Don't Fuck with Me."

To choose a favourite track at this moment in time would be a hard task because there's so many, like the skull-crushing, shit kicking "Tranquillizer" or maybe even "Social Sidewinder." But this isn't a one-listen-and-you've-heard-it-all type of album. The ambiguity of the whole thing demands that you give it several lessons to catch the subtleties that exist amongst the furore. Love/Hate have delivered a class album. And I don't give two fucks if someone reckons I've been over zealous!

Grade A+

Peter Grant
Riff Raff
March 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!