Album Review: Lisa Dominique, "Gypsy Ryder"

LISA DOMINIQUE, to the uninitiated the name conjures to mind a lady killer figure that has spawned a media surge in many a metal magazine. Right in your face, straight between the thighs, a picturesque Heavy Metal Beauty Queen. What all this glossy hype fails to tell us, though, is that there's musical identity behind the pouted lips and good looks, which many tend to overlook in favour of what's naturally up front. So what's she cooking?

Produced by David Prater (whose credits include SANTANA, STRAY CATS, MICK JAGGER, and more recently FIREHOUSE) and recorded in the States, Gypsy Ryder is the second LP from the Dominique camp, and mostly impressive it is too. From the FLEETWOOD MAC-ish subtleties of the title track to the ballsy, stomping rock n' roll off the immediately catchy "You Can't Replace My Face" this is an effort to move her another step up the ladder and into the mainstream of rock music.

Lisa, to her credit, has written the lyrics and music on all tracks bar one. STYX guitarist Glenn Burtnick wrote and guested on "You Can't Replace My Face," while much underrated UK axeman MARINO (check out the excellent blues for lovers album) carries out the rest of the guitar duties on the record.

What all this proves is that Lisa Dominique is much more than a media darling; there's a musical wolf in sheep's clothing lurking behind that glossy exterior. Gypsy Ryder is a well crafted, commercially astute rock n' roll album with a style all its own and certainly not what you'd expect from heavy metal's number one female pin-up by any degree of the imagination.

Open your eyes, clean out your ears... don't read into media bullshit, listen to the record, and make up your own mind!

GRADE B+

Mark Crampton
Riff Raff
October 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!