Label: Frontiers Music Srl.
Release date: 13.09.2019
Album length: 43.00 min
Production: Martin Sweet, Eric Bazilian (track 5) and Chris Laney (track 7)
Genre: Sleaze / Glam metal
Rating: 9.5 / 10
You know that feeling when you press play on a (great) album for the first time and it totally catches you off guard, because you went in with zero expectations? The surprise comes down to a single word, followed by three or more exclamation marks. It starts with an “F”, and three more letters follow…. The new Crashdiet! Sleaze metallers, glam metal revivalists from Stockholm. A band with at least nine lives, if not more. “Rust” is the new album, the first one after a six-year gap. Their fifth album overall, and the fourth with a different singer. A band that will probably spend its whole career living in the shadow of the unforgettable “Rest in Sleaze” (2003) and the unforgettable Dave Lepard has survived once again. Another shipwreck, another armageddon, another transformation.
It almost looked like the end, or at least it felt that way, when Simon Cruz left in 2015 and Martin Sweet started devoting himself to his new project The Sweet Creature and helping out fellow Swedes Sister on bass. Maybe it was the band’s manager Sven Morén, who obviously never stopped believing in the group, and who gets a special thank-you from the lineup in the booklet of Rust for “keeping the band together”, that was the main reason Crashdiet rose from the ashes like a phoenix once again.
Let’s be honest: Crashdiet have never put out a bad album. “The Savage Playground” maybe burned out a little in its ambition because of its marathon length, since the style and genre that have driven and guided this band from the very start don’t need any “rambling” at all. Listening to that album often got downright exhausting because of its length, which is a particularly unfortunate nuisance.
“Rust” is quite the opposite of its predecessor. It’s packed with excellent fresh ideas, tightly delivered, gets straight to the point and drives through the whole running time with high-octane hunger, keeping the listener in a state of high tension. Not only is it more than twenty minutes shorter, it also delivers exactly what we all quietly wished for. The band cranked up the guitars in the production. Until now, Crashdiet had never bitten this sharply. “Rust” is therefore very much metalized in its production. On top of that, Crashdiet serve up a string of seductive chorus melodies that ignite one after another, and between verse (pre-chorus) and chorus they deliver striking mood swings, which is a major songwriting virtue, especially for pulling off that pomp and bombast effect. The batch of songs is extremely polished, and I’ll say it without modesty: plenty of them would have become evergreen classics of the first generation of glam metal, had the band appeared on the rock map in the second half of the eighties.
What’s especially enviable about this band is its always well-honed promotional focus. As early as 2017 the band started to “tease”, not only by introducing new singer Gabriel Keyes, but also with a brand-new single, “We Are the Legion”, which was followed at carefully timed intervals by a bunch of others before the release of “Rust”. All the singles were, and still are, simply excellent, so fans got a thorough glimpse of the fact that “Rust” was going to be an outstanding achievement. At the same time, more than half the album had already taken hold among fans, so by the time Crashdiet hit the road in early October 2019, the crowd practically knew the new songs by heart.
A few more words about Gabriel Keyes. Technically, he’s without a doubt the best vocalist of Crashdiet’s career so far. He’s perfect. He kills it across the whole range, and even in the extremely high registers he dominates with confidence, carrying the power up from the mid-range. He can dial in as much rasp as he likes where it’s called for, and otherwise he rules in an explosively melodic stance. Let’s hope that with Keyes’ arrival the quartet has consolidated and that there will be no more lineup changes, because with him they’ve obviously found the right formula, the right chemistry, and it’s worth sticking with it wholeheartedly. Surviving four singer changes across just five studio albums is a great feat and a special kind of virtue. That the band endures all this, stays standing and keeps going is a matter of fate. As a rule, this kind of situation, especially with a frequent revolving door of singers, artistically buries a band. In that respect Crashdiet are a phenomenon of their own kind, and “Rust” puts the band straight back at the top and the front of the modern sleaze movement as its main showpiece horse. This is the most mature achievement of their career and a kind of new beginning. A new start. With a fresh new wind filling the band’s sails.
Besides the extremely seductive and compositionally varied singles of unbreakable sleaze / glam metal attitude, led by the opening title track, plus Idiots, the aforementioned We Are The Legion, Crazy, In the Maze and Reptile (which opens in a punky Motörhead stance), “Rust” delivers four more “overlooked singles”, led by the venomous Parasite, the especially bombastic Into the Wild with its ravenous chorus, and, at the close, the phenomenal Stop Weirding Me Out and the utterly mocking finale Filth & Flowers. In fact, the only song you could quickly do without is the calmer but dark Waiting For Your Love, where the band “plays around” with some electronic samples. It’s not bad, but the other tracks on “Rust” are so much better that this one is practically negligible.
Even though a faint “Rest In Sleaze” shadow may hang over Crashdiet forever, since we’ll never know what would have happened to the band if Lepard hadn’t taken his own life in early January 2006, “Rust” is the record with which Crashdiet have made a triumphant return to the scene, chased away all the demons of the past and completely reset themselves with the new album and Keyes in the lineup. With the excellent Keyes on vocals, who co-wrote most of the new album’s tracks alongside Sweet, this foursome must (emphasis on must) keep delighting their fans for many years to come. They’ve always had incredible potential. Let’s hope the time has finally come, after almost two decades of turbulent ups and downs and with the lineup finally settled, for that potential to assert itself and be fully realized at last.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
01. Rust
02. Into The Wild
03. Idiots
04. In The Maze
05. We Are The Legion
06. Crazy
07. Parasite
08. Waiting For Your Love
09. Reptile
10. Stop Weirding Me Out
11. Filth & Flowers
Lineup:
Gabriel Keyes – vocals
Martin Sweet – guitar
Peter London – bass guitar
Eric Young – drums
GUEST MUSICIANS
Eric Bazilian – acoustic guitar on track 5, synthesizers on track 5, piano on track 8 and electric guitar on track 8
Johnny Gunn – backing vocals on track 7
Conny Bloom – guitar intro on track 10
