The 1981 Listening Post - Chinatown - Play It to Death

 Chinatown - Play It to Death

#513

March 23 1981 LISTENING POST DISCOVERY

Chinatown

Play It To Death

Genre: NWOBHM

4.25 out of 5

Highlights:

It’s all the same metal attack throughout but it also all works.

I especially enjoyed “No Time to Kill” and the power ballad “Time Will Tell” and 

I knew these two kids in my 10th grade class, Sam and Keith, and all they talked about every day was their stereos and when the new Bruce Springsteen album was coming out. 

I didn’t have a stereo of my own, we had an 8 track in the family room downstairs. When my parents were working on the weekends I would pop an 8 track in there and crank it up loud enough so I could hear it in my room upstairs. 

After jealousy got the best of me I saved up enough to get a Technics turntable, an amplifier/cassette-to-cassette recorder and a huge pair of speakers. 

I would make my father drag those beasts up to Bar Harbor so they would be waiting for me during the summer.

Eventually dad had a cabinet built for me to hold the stereo and all my records. 

This is in my room, which is another long story for another time. (It was a barely converted attic, but really it was an unfinished room across the hall.

I would plant myself in there when they were at work and crank up the speakers as loud as they could go and I would air guitar to…well…anything.

On any given day it might be Ozzy. Or the Leonard Bernstein soundtrack to Mass. Or West Side Story. Or Queen. Or 1776. 

My mother came home one day and told me should could hear my stereo blasting as she came down the hill, two houses away.

I was pleased but embarrassed. Musical choices are kinda private, no? 

Whatever. 

I think this album is a live recording and we have a rule against that but it’s the kind of record I would have wanted to play fucking loud as hell and I had already written most of this when I realized…shit…I have a rule against live records, don’t I? But this is their only wax offering. They never went into the studio, even though it sounds like they did. Kiss Alive never sounded this good. 

Fuck it. These guys aren’t reinventing anything, they just know how to pummel and shriek. Steve Pragnell could have subbed in for Bon Scott if AC/DC had heard of them.

And I’m here for Steve Hopgood’s overblown solo in “Rock and Roll Legend”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ97jsTgPaE