Roulette is a gambling game as we all know and there´s always a chance that you´re going to lose your money if you´re wanna take a chance on the spinning wheel. Now "Life line" is a pretty safe album though with a classic, solid 80´s melodic hardrock/AOR sound that you might enjoy.

This five piece band from San Francisco, California have carved a name for themselves by touring in recent years with bands such as Y&T, Keel, Ratt, Pat Travers among others and you will find some names that you might be familiar with before. The members are David Cremin - Vocals (ex.Baton Rouge keyboardist) Chuck More - Guitars, Phil Bright - Bass (Vicious Rumors) Gil Gagnon - Keys (Whitesnake) & Jimmy Rehn - Drums (ex.411)

"Rikki Roxx is a twenty year old pop-rock singer/songwriter who is seeking a record contract." This is how the bio starts but afterwards it does not contain any information about the release date of the demo or the musicians playing on it, instead of having these essential pieces of information it goes on praising the guy's look, his music and goes into details how many teenage girls loved him during his high school years. Hmmm, weird I gotta say!

Well, not being a girl I wouldn't wanna deal with his looks (he's ugly BTW gotta wonder about the taste of those girls mentioned. lol), my task is only to report about music. The musicians featured on the 3-track demo are very good, they play tight but the songwriting is lacking at times and Rikki's vocals are rather unconfident. The ideas are not bad, especially the song "The Days Of Memory" with its piano based arrangement is promising but the vocal harmonies do not shine through because of the weak performance by Rikki. "The Spotlight" is musically very well done, a laid-back rock song with a bit of funky/R&B touch in the rhythm section and the guitar work. The opening "Double Struggle" is probably the weakest track of the demo, the only memorable thing in it is the guitar riffing and some of the fill-in solo parts. I don't know who the musicians are but they are doing a good job.

Who´s been driving my Cadillac? [track#11 on this disc] Gee, I dunno... who´s been playing with my Roxx Gang CD? Featuring the uncensored version of the infamous "Star Trip" video. Including a bunch of strippers and some really 'Bodacious Ta Tas'. This 'Best Of' disc has been the talk of the town lately. What can I say? Some are easy to please!!!

"Bodacious Ta Tas" is a best of CD with a band that never released that many 'best of' songs in the first place. Don´t get me wrong, I really do enjoy their debut release 'Things You´ve Never Done Before' from 1988. And you can find a bunch of songs here from that album, including the MTV hit "Scratch My Back". But lately has this Glam-Band done a couple of average albums.

I guess you´ll have to smoke some serious crap to enjoy a tune like "Strawberry Wine". Where the psychedelic grooves are so far out, that it ain't even funny. "Mojo Guru" from the album with the same name also shows too many influences from the psychedelic 60´s. Same goes with "Tiger Lily" and believe me... it´s not a pleasure to listen to. Well, sure... if you enjoy that flower-power-smoke-me-a-kipper crap maybe. Nah, bring me the fun Glam/Party rock from the debut album anyday thanks! The new song and bonus track "Spoonful" is not too bad though. The only song I really enjoyed (except those from the first album of course) was "Hot For Love" as it's a catchy Glam Rocker. Not the best of compilations out there.

About a month ago in a review of Hollywood Hairspray II - another Perris Records album - I called the label "the nursing home for hairbands" [see the archives for the review] ... now carrying on with the idea I think we all know that death is a frequent visitor in nursing homes. And Roxx Gang is hammering the last nail into their coffin with this release. Take a 10-track, barely 36 minutes long release that features some weird 60s style rock n' roll, mixed with boring bluegrass guitar licks, simple (dare I say 'primitive'?) 1-4-5 blues circles and add some weak vocals that even good-enough production couldn't help and there you go... buried alive.

This may be fun when jamming it in a bar at 2 a.m. by the time everybody is totally drunk and you play 2 songs like these but a whole album of this is more than boring. This whole thing reminds me of David Lee Roth losing ground in the late 90s and coming up with similar releases. Kevin Steele's vocal abilities are in about the same league as Dave's, so the sound engineers were wise enough to hide the vocal tracks under a massive wall of reverbs and put it in the back of the mix. As a result of this the album sounds as if he was singing (?? - chanting) from a cave somewhere below while the rest of the band was playing on top of the hill.

There is however one diamond in the rough on the album and that would be track 3 "Spoonful", a cool little rock n' roll number with a thick enough arrangement (saxophone, honky-tonk piano, and such). The song is reminiscent of Cinderella's "Shelter Me", my fave song from their "Heartbreak Station" album. The rest of the tracks are just total shockers, if you happen to find soundbytes on the net, take a listen to "Bumble Bee" or "Raylene" or any other that I do not care to list here and you'll hear what I'm talking about. Very sad indeed.

Andre Andersen and his Merry Men take us all the way to Mars with their latest release. "The Mission" is a concept album based on Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles", so naturally it includes a suitably "space-like" intro and some odd effects. Musically the band doesn't travel that far from what we have grown to expect from them, that being slightly classically influenced and highly melodic progressive metal with Andersen's keys upfront.

"The Mission" features 7 "real" songs and 6 passages. Out of the real songs, "The Mission", "Surrender", "Out Of Reach" and the ballad "Days Of No Trust" are my favourites, great melodic tracks. The passages are mostly just "mood pieces", short instrumentals, although I have to say that "Metamorphosis" is a very impressive piece of classical piano music.

After being a little bit disappointed with "Fear", I find this album to be a much easier to digest and more accessible. "Fear" was a darker affair with a gloomy athmosphere, while on "The Mission" the focus hooks seem to be little more on the hooks and the melodies. And that, my friends, is a positive thing in my books.

Probably this is how Stevie Ray Vaughn would sound today if he were still alive and had played 10 years in the Beatles and 5 years in some psychedelic, Seattle-based band. Sounds weird? Well, the album does not. It is a good modern bluesy rock album with slight touches of different genres (little bit of soul, little bit of funky or R&B, some 90s rock) here and there. The production is surprisingly good and the song material is diverse enough.

We get mid-tempo, guitar orientated blues-rock songs here like the opening "Save A Prayer" great guitar work, a good choice for the opener or "Back To Bed", one of my personal favorites with its fun harmonica solo parts and silly funky approach. There are soulful balladesque anthems like "Tumble weed" or "Closer To Home", blues purist SRV like tunes "My Name Is Money"; moody tunes with a bit of psychedelic touch like "Tonite", "Time To Time" or "Letting Go". The most modern, almost grungy sounding track is the up-tempo rocker is "My Backyard", it sticks a bit out of the album for me but I'm no fan of modern, 90s sounding stuff anyway. The album closes with the awesome "Days Gone By", good arrangement, great riffing, entertaining harmonica solo bits based on a carefully planned, tight played rhythm section. I wish there were more of this, "Save A Prayer", "Back To Bed" and "Tumbleweed" on the album.

The release date 2003 may be lying here because it is the re-release of the band's 1978 album with some bonus tracks. I really don't know why the label decided to pick the album up 25 years after its release though I understand it has never been released on CD before. Personally I've never heard of this British band before and the only familiar name in the line-up was Dave Dowle, the original Whitesnake drummer. The band enlisted two vocalists Steve Gould and Alan Merrill who also played guitars and Mick Feat on bass.

The two vocalists are doing okay, their melodies are interesting, and the songwriting is also okay. The sound of the album is relatively good, especially if we take into account that originally it was recorded 25 years ago. The artwork of the 53 minutes long CD mentions that the disc "contains all the known studio recordings by the band". This may be my problem with it. Along with the few really good tracks like the opening "Fooling Myself", Run For Your Life", "Sooner or Later" a happy-sounding, piano-arranged rock n' roll track, or the moody "Restless Wind" lots of fillers are also included that did not stand the test of time in the first place, so I don't believe there's a chance they would make it to a new audience.

Having seen the renaissance for true, trottel metal I decided to confess that there is an old album of that kind that still makes my heart beat faster. To be honest I find the majority of today's trottel releases samey and rather boring; and I have never really been a big fan of these albums back in the 80s either but this release from one of Germany's premier heavy metal band stood the test of time and is still enjoyable today.

Germany was the cradle of trottel beer metal and Rock n' Rolf, the main man behind Running Wild has learnt the lesson well on various beer festivals, he sure knows how to write catchy, anthemic, sing- along refrains [Got the mental picture? Dozens of mustached guys with beer mugs held up high, sitting on a bench, leaning to the right, then to the left singing "March on straight to Hell"… ouch!]. Add some heavy riffing, a bombastic production, mean lyrics about pirates, wartime, etc. and you get close. What makes it different from others then? Probably the top notch performance of all the musicians, the thick guitar and drum sound, the huge chorus all over the album, and the very well written song material. This was probably the last really good album from the band that dealt with pirate stuff (some of the previous albums: Port Royal, Under Jolly Roger, etc. focused on this too) and that has made them semi-big, well at least in Europe.

Germany´s finest (?) Power Metal band RUNNING WILD who have been around since the late 70´s is back with a new album! Their first album 'Gates of Purgatory' came out in 1984 while they still had a 'Black-Metal' image. They later changed to a 'Pirate' image with albums such as 'Under Jolly Roger & Ready For Boarding" which led many to think that they were all a big joke.

But the music was/is very serious and their finest album up to date is 'Death Or Glory (1989)' an album that all fans of German Metal should have in their collection. It´s now the year 2000 and they still know how to rock, even if they kinda have the Blackie Lawless (W.A.S.P) syndrome... many of the songs sounds like something that they´ve already done in the past.

Much to our pleasant surprise The Rust is not the first band in this month that made it here among the “big guys” even though their CD was “only” released independently. This shows a very promising tendency. But on to the band and the release!

The Portland, Oregon based band delivered a diverse, professionally performed and well recorded, melodic progressive album. They managed to find the borderline between being progressive in their songwriting, showing the diversity of their influences and staying memorable and easy to digest at the same time. The diversity of the album and the arrangement ranges from an acoustic, Spanish-flavored, instrumental opener (“2359”) through mid-tempo rockers with Megadeth era Marty Friedman like tricky riffing and Queensryche-ish high-pitched vocal melodies (“Midnight Encounter”) and haunting keyboard based ballads ala Journey or Styx (“Unheard”) to Lynyrd Skynyrd flavored southern rock anthems with acoustic guitar based arrangement and some bluesy touches (“I Heard You”). Other highlights include “Never Give In”, probably the most AOR-ish track with rich vocal melody chorus, thick arrangement, and a cool progressive twist in some of the memories that recall Queensryche’s Geoff Tate. Fans of a more extraordinary songwriting (call it “progressive” if you prefer) will love “Everlasting Wave” and “Odd Sanity” too.