Artist: Gotthard
Label: Nuclear Blast
Release: 2005
Rating: 4/5
“Lipservice” is the eighth studio album from the Swiss hard rockers, a band founded by singer Steve Lee, whose distinctive, raspy vocals are one of the group’s main trademarks. What jumps out first about this release is their move to Nuclear Blast, a label that’s pretty much pure metal. Have the guys gone “metal”? Probably a little. Lineup changes, a switch of management, a jump to a new label – this constant whirlwind of change surely didn’t leave Gotthard cold, and the guys serve up a hot, fresh bun that still belongs squarely in the ABCs of “hard rock” school standards.
What “Lipservice” delivers is what Bon Jovi should have, if they hadn’t sold their souls to chase trendiness. Steve Lee is the true prototype of a European that Americans can be downright shamelessly jealous of. The guy sounds like a born English-speaking singer, a real personification of the cross between the voices of Tom Keifer (Cinderella) and Steven Tyler (Aerosmith). The kind of vocals that make American bands like that hiccup with envy today.
With the new album, Gotthard return to their hard rock roots, the ones that marked the early albums of their career, but they haven’t gone “metal” in the slightest. So the album offers classic Gotthard. I don’t know why Bon Jovi keep running through my head while listening to “Lipservice”, but the fact is that Gotthard managed to pick up the attributes that defined the old Bon Jovi, polish them, and serve them up fresh with “Lipservice” in an updated form that’s fatally attractive and seductive at first glance, while Bon Jovi today are desperately struggling to hold on to any kind of connection with their roots, which reach back to the turn of the eighties into the nineties.
“Lipservice” opens triumphantly with the maximally anthemic sound of All We Are, and the album snaps straight up to attention in an instant! Unbelievable! Not even after Dream On and Lift ‘U’ Up does that passionate intensity, built on a classic hard rock template, let up for a second. Dream On surprises with a pulsing rhythm line. The bass literally cuts through concrete and grinds through the production’s soundscape, while the track follows an incredibly simple guitar riff that burns mainly because of its simple, clear, short and punchy structure, the backbone of the punch that grabs you by the ears in an instant. And riffs that simple are actually the hardest to write. Lift ‘U’ Up, for instance, is a prime example of an anthem that’s perfect for an arena atmosphere, where the crowd carries the band on its shoulders with hands in the air. Tracks like Cupid’s Arrow, the mid-tempo, ballad-leaning I Wonder, another classic shot at the Bon Jovi “golden era” called I’m Alive, or Anytime Anywhere, spiced up with symphonic keyboard pomp, all work instantly, one after another. Simply put, this formula of a straightforward riff, in winning harmony with Lee’s vocals, works perfectly. Every one of the tracks has that “oomph” – the effectively captured chemistry among the guys – and a performance like that, even if it brings no new invention, sends shivers down your spine. Simple and predictable, but played with real rocker fire and eroticism, woven into a production that, thanks to its convincingly polished execution and the polish of the sound, wins you over unstoppably!
The album has just one flaw. It has too many ballads. Out of fourteen tracks, there are four of them. And what bothers most is that the second-to-last and last tracks are both ballads, so the record closes at a slow tempo and the album loses the dynamism it otherwise carries at an extremely high level through most of the rest. The explanation? Gotthard want to appeal to American ears. Especially in the ballads. To that end, they keep chewing over the Bon Jovi legacy, particularly on the ballad numbers. Otherwise, though, it’s a brilliant album with incredible consistency, equal strength and expressiveness from track to track, and if it had stopped at track number 12, I could have said with a clear conscience that it’s the best Gotthard album so far. “Lipservice” is thus yet another album proving that two years in a row now, Europeans have been taking a US scalp in new “hard rock” releases like it’s nothing.
Lineup
Steve Lee – vocals
Leo Leoni – guitar
Freddy Scherer – guitar
Marc Lynn – bass
Hena Habegger – drums
Production
Leo Leoni & Ronald Prent
Track List
1. All We Are
2. Dream On
3. Lift U Up
4. Everything I Want
5. Cupid Arrow
6. I Wonder
7. I’m Alive
8. I’ve Seen An Angel Cry
9. Stay For The Night
10. Anytime Anywhere
11. Said And Done
12. The Other Side Of Me
13. Nothing Left At All
14. And Then Goodbye
Album length: 53.05
