Album Review: The Storm, "The Storm"

When this album first appeared in our post box, I had people screaming in my ear about how brilliant it was. So, after removing a ton of gob out of me lugs (keeping the chewy bits of course), I bunged it into the old audible neighbour annoyer... And had my ears syringed again 'cos what I heard betrayed what I'd heard.

For those of you unfamiliar with this particular gathering of the clans, it boasts three members of AOR's finest hour, JOURNEY. Greg Rolie, Ross Valory, and Steve Smith have decided to put together their own project. That's a bit like going back to a beer that you left sitting from the night before.

"You Keep me Waiting," "I've Got a Lot to Learn About Love," and "In the Raw" are everything and more from the school of formulated AOR, which was a major disappointment, believe me. Just because you're born with a pedigree doesn't mean you can sustain it.

There isn't anything particularly memorable except for two numbers, the first being "Show Me the Way," with singer Kevin Chalfant drawing on a STEVE-PERRY-style vocal that drives the lyrics home with the power of a man who "means what he says." You can picture the arteries pushing hard the already tortured flash on his neck.

We then come to "I Want You Back," which brings a feel to this album that has been sadly lacking all the way through so far. It almost sounds like they found their feet at this point, but longevity is only a word in a dictionary as far as keeping their foot in. "Still Loving You" puts me in mind of STRANGEWAYS' "Good Night LA," which is 10 times better than this. You are wondering about whether they know how to rock it out. "Touch and Go" fair pumps some, as does "Gimme Love" and the aforementioned "In the Raw".

There is a more than a prominent TOM PETTY/JEFF LYNNE influence with "Take Me Away" that could have fitted the TRAVELLING WILBURYS like a Savile Row suit. We end with "Can't Live Without Love," and there we have it, processed music just bursting with E-numbers that went in one year, out the other, missing my brain by 6 feet.

Grade C -

Peter Grant

Riff Raff

September, 1991

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!