Loverboy - Loverboy
#478
By Brian Kushnir
Loverboy
Loverboy
Genre - Archetype Rock
Allen’s Rating: 4 out of 5
Brian’s Rating: 3
Highlights:
The Kid is Hot Tonite
Turn Me Loose
OK, Loverboy. You called your first album “Loverboy” which is also the name of your band and I’m calling it right here and right now - your debut is an inadvertent concept album, in which the concept was to explore a slice of the “Lover” archetype. Did you know this at the time? Would you even reveal it if it were true? I feel like a gamer who has discovered an easter egg in Monopoly and is now tasked with revealing it to the world.
Mike Reno and Paul Dean were 1970s Canadian cover band rockers when they figured out how to mine a vein of rock gold by digging deep into the color red and the universally understood Lover character. Is “Loverboy” a song cycle? A rock opera? Part one of a 3-record trilogy? For gosh sakes people it is none of these! But before you say Kushnir have you lost your rocker, just know that Loverboy out red-rockere’d the Red Rocker himself when they figured out that at the dawn of the 80s there was no-one out there taking red to its Loverboy extremes.
“Loverboy” with natch red album cover has two bona-fide classic rock staples that you will have heard and may even have fond memories of from your musical formative years; the rest is filler but I give them credit for front loading these songs, and then staying broadly on theme with the concept, working their one shtick pony to this day.
“The Kid is Hot Tonite” grabs you from the start, with a rockin’ beat that echoes The Ramones.. Bass and guitar locked in precision riffing, later even getting some galloping going in the second verse. And a whiff of modernity coming from the synth on top. Reno’s vocals are crisp, sweet and clean, talking about a “Brand new way” that you’ve heard of. All of this conspires to cause your ears to perk up. “He” has opened “a brand new door.” He rocks and he rolls. The band is daring you to imagine this character. Maybe The Kid from the song is the Loverboy that everyone is talking about. It’s anthemic! He is The Kid (da da!!!!) and he’s Hot Tonite! We don’t know where he’ll be tomorrow, and that may be of some concern, but in the meantime, he is hot tonight and that is all that matters! Who is he? Is it BIlly the Kid? The Cisco Kid? Kid Creole? Kid Congo Powers? You are left to wonder and your teenage mind is prone to fantasy. Naturally you think, could The Kid be me? Could I be the Loverboy?!?! It’s a pleasant enough thought to fantasize about for a few seconds. Let’s follow this Kid for just a bit shall we?
The second track in the maybe-a-concept album that is “Loverboy” is “Turn Me Loose,” and it is arena rockin’ disco, a 4-on-the-floor number perfect for the feathered hair set at your 1980-something high-school dance. If it wasn’t written in 1980 I would say the lyrics may have been generated by an algorithm - the main character was “born to run,” “makin’ love to whoever I please.” He unfortunately meets up with someone who has the audacity to “try to tie (him) down,” which set’s the song’s unfortunate sequence of events in motion, because of course the Loverboy has to ‘flyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy, my way….” and he has to be torn loose. Set free. amd doing it "my way." Do not try to keep the Loverboy in chains. Our friend The Kid, the Loverboy in this song is the opposite day Burger King - if you’re with him you absolutely can’t have it your way.
The rest of the album is filler, filler that stays on theme for the most part mind-you, but still, musically and lyrically, a let down following the double-barrelled hit-making prowess of the first two songs. A few highlights: “Always on My Mind” finds our hero in a wistful mood, pining for a girl he met in high-school when they were seventeen. We don’t know where he is now or at what age he is writing this but he is still seeing her every night in his dreams, because she is in fact, “Always on My Mind.” And driving him so craaaaaaaaazy, he feels the need to express this by raising the pitch of his voice to super great heights.
In “Lady of the ‘80s,” once again he is being driven crazy, wild, by someone who turns him on, and makes him go hazy. “Long, lean and oh so beautiful,” she is his “latest lady,” his “Lady of the ‘80s.” Which is fitting for a song released in 1980, it would be strange if he was singing about his Lady of the 20s or 90s at this point in musical history. And even though he’s declaring this situation about his crazy Lady of the 80s woman to you, dear listener, he also wants you to know that you better leave her alone.
“Little Girl” suggests a creepy side of the Loverboy where our Kid channels Humbert Humbert as he asks for help with strategies for how to make the “little girl” of the title “feel it,” “need it,” “lose control” and love him when she is in fact, “too little...to fall in love…”
After this point, things take a bit of a turn as the final 3rd of the album slides toward the dark side of love with “Prissy, Prissy,” “Teenage Overdose” which finds our Loverboy with ‘one foot in hell’ where he really shouldn’t be, “DOA” where the Loverboy’s girl “is not looking well” and has a potentially fatal attraction, and finally “It Don’t Matter.”
In the grand scheme of things, it don’t - but they had two big hits and were trying to create a band out of an archetype. Points for trying.
https://open.spotify.com/album/3dDzAVWr5gjvJIOTEuS309?si=KMkVpYtKTH-DJ2YK_d9P7w
No comments:
Post a Comment