Contraband - Contraband
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Music CD Cover
Artist: ContrabandEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1991-04-30
Music Label: Mca
Soundtracks:
- All the Way from Memphis
- Kiss by Kiss
- Intimate Outrage
- Bad for Each Other
- Loud Guitars, Fast Cars and Wild, Wild Livin'
- Good Rockin' Tonight
- If This Is Love
- Stand
- Tonight You're Mine
- Hang on to Yourself
Free Music Notes for Contraband
Free Music Review: Pleasant if uneventful hard rock
Hit: 3 Stars
You've gotta take a chance sometimes. A cover that catches your eye, a musician you know from another band or even a tip from the guy behind the counter. Sometimes it works (like when I bought Yngwie Malmsteens Trilogy have never heard of the guy just because the cover caught my 16 year old eye) and sometimes it doesn't (when the guy at my local metal emporium suggested Morgana Lefays' Sanctified album - yuck).
In the case of Contraband the cover caught my eye and upon checking the back cover I noticed Michael Schenker was the guitarist and so picked this album up cheap. And the result is somewhere in the middle of my Malmsteen and Morgana Lefay experience. Because in many respects this album is very much down the middle.
Ultimately this is a project band - the personnel are Michael Schenker on guitar, Bobby Blotzer of Ratt on drums, Tracii Guns from LA Guns on guitars, Vixens' Share Pedersen takes care of bass duties while Shark Islands' Richard Black is on vox. The music played is middle of the road generic hard rock in a late 80's style with no jagged edges and with nice production values especially since the budget probably wasn't that huge.
The songs themselves are mostly written for the band by various nobodies, though Dan Huff is in the mix somewhere and there is a Bowie and an Ian Hunter cover and Richard Black at least gets a co-write credit on a couple of numbers. His vocals aren't too deep, nor is he a sugar coated high end squeeler and they do fit the music rather well. Most of the tracks float by the listener - this is perfect background music in a sense - and there is a major sense of G rated fun even on tracks entitled Loud Guitars, Fast Cars, Wild Wild Livin' and Good Rockin' Tonight. Rarely do things bite and the mellower numbers aren't brilliant microcosms of human experience but then neither are they hurl inducing cliches. Schenker and Guns on guitar do some nice work though the restraint forced on Schenker here feels weird because even when his own band MSG courted hard rock there was always a sort of metallic European grandeur to tinge his playing. Here that's washed away, like he was playing stupidly and simply. But it's still Schenker so his axe shading is still pleasing to hear.
Coming out as it did in '91 this album is probably rarely seen nowadays and it's market is certainly very much a niche. But if you are a fan of the more hard rock aspects of MSG or just if you want a curio that while not brilliant, certainly isn't bad, then you could do worse than pick up this collaborative group effort.
Contraband Poster
Japanese limited edition issue of the album classic in a deluxe, miniaturized LP sleeve replica of the original vinyl album artwork.Rock Music CDs
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