Swedish power trio Velvet Insane have been through a lot of ups and downs since their inception, which itself was steeped in sadness, with the only constant being founding guitarist Jesper Lindgren; Despite the adversity, in 2021 the band have enlisted some of the biggest names in Swedish hard rock history to produce one of the feelgood rock n’roll party albums of the year. And then some…
Put simply, R’N’RGS, as I like to call it, is like the soundtrack to some sort of yet-to-be-written rock n’roll musical set in the seventies, where songs like Sound of Sirens (itself actually heavily redolent of Hanoi Rocks in full-on, maudlin, bourboned-to-the-gills-at-3AM mode) sit in a timeless void designed to tribute the sheer ageless grandeur of top-class rock n’roll.
And so what if Riding The Skyways sounds like a distant relative of David Brent‘s Free Love on the Free Love Freeway? Both are great songs, in their own way, and both contribute to the joyous rock n’roll legacy; and when you can write songs as good as Backstreet Liberace (wherein the band are joined by legendary Swedish rockers Dregen and Nicke Andersson) then all criticism is rendered essentially just the sound of an old man shaking his fist at the clouds; this is music that defies criticism anyway. Better just to crack open a can of something cold n’frothy and get with the programme…
That programme, on tracks like Jaded Eyes and Spin On Crazy Moon, is a salivatory mix of the best late seventies/early eighties output of names like Kiss and Joan Jett, before hair metal took over; and talking of hair, the superb Sailing on a Thunderstorm sounds like something Elton John might have come up with when he was still in full possession of all of his, as a the band deliver a sagacious mix of seventies styles that’s sure to moisten the eyes of any of you out there old enough to remember the days of glam rock’s total and utter ascendancy.
Full props also have to be given to Diamond Dogs‘ legendary frontman Sören ‘Sulo’ Karlsson, who produced the whole shebang and who has left his fingerprints all over the anthemic honkfest Space Age DJ and Backstreet Liberace; the man is an absolute star, and you can’t help but feel his influence lifting all of the tracks here to the next level.
All in all then something of an unexpected triumph, and an album you have to give a spin to if dad rock in all its many and varied forms gets your afterburners glowing…
Rock ‘n’ Roll Glitter Suit releases on July 16th.
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