Album Review: Gun, "Gallus"

GUN aren't the type of band that do things in half measures. When Taking On The World was released in 1989, they found themselves touring with THE STONES as well as playing stadiums alongside fellow Celts SIMPLE MINDS. Now their second album Gallus basically means 'the Best.' Nothing wrong in self belief I always say. But let's get to the guts of it, because Gun seemed to have something that was stamped all over them from the off, the potential to sustain.

Gallus was completed last September but they held back on it because of the danger of it being lost in the infamous Christmas flood that can drown anything without "Greatest Hits" in the title. The first single "Steal Your Fire" is one hell of a belting number. They've gone for a harder sound this time around, and it shows. I recommend you blast this one out really loud to get the full effect. There is a bit of a cliché with a Desmond Child sound on the chorus of freedom but I wouldn't worry about that too much.

They've gained a lot of influences and used them to the best effect without copying and inevitably trying to fit in with what's fashionable. "Long Road" has a bit of a BOWIE-style vocal happening on it, only adding to the whole song. There's a moveability about this album that makes it totally enjoyable.

Besides the already highlighted numbers, we have "Money to Burn," "Welcome to the Real World," "Borrowed Time," "Won't Back Down," and more besides. Now this is where I stick my neck out, I always thought that this band could end up doing what DEF LEPPARD have achieved. I shall wear bulletproof boots for ever more just in case I am wrong.

Grade A

Peter Grant
Riff Raff
April 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!