Flush the Fashion - Failure Is Totally an Option (Own Label)

Danes Flush the Fashion have made an interesting album, but sometimes you feel that they’ve tried to cram too much into it, influence wise, just to prove how much they love rock n’roll. These boys can clearly play, especially guitarists Dennis Post and Rune Buck, but at times the playing gets in the way of the undeniably rock n’roll messages they are trying to get across.

Quite simply, the whole of the last forty years of rock history can be found in the grooves of Failure… starting with the band naming themselves after an Alice Cooper album and ending with… well they clearly ain’t done rocking yet so we’ll leave that bit for later.

In between you get Friedmanesque shred instrumentals (Flash the Fusion), sassy Stones tributes (the quite superb Backstage Pass), speed metal wigouts (Burn It Down wouldn’t have sounded out of place on one of those ‘experimental’ Helloween albums of the early nineties) and, rather dispiritingly, a song that sounds as if the Stereophonics might have rejected it for being a tad soporific (Letters From a Rooftop).

If all this sounds a bit much it is, but it must be said that individually, Letters… aside, pretty much every track here has plenty to recommend it. Magnus MP Möller has a great rock voice, gritty yet versatile, able to handle everything from blazing heavy rock to whimsical blues romps like Midnight Drunk at Noon, and when the band flick the switch and just rock it’s pretty hard to resist.

Last track Bullies is a rampaging synthesis of Van Halen and Guns n’Roses that surely has ‘em all a flutter in downtown Copenhagen dives, and frankly any band that slips in a cheeky Yngwie Malmsteen sample gets my vote any day of the week.

Short dosage is probably the best delivery method, then, but nonetheless dosage is required. Consult your nearest music doctor immediately and get a script sorted forthwith.