Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Top Stripper
Label: Self-released
Released: 2016
Length: 42:36
Rating: 4.5/5
Top Stripper deliver one of the nicest surprises to the perennially underfed Slovenian hard rock scene. We’re talking about a bunch of hard/heavy rock revival bands of roughly the same vintage, like Top Stripper, Retro Cult, Deck Janiels and Tomcat, all trying to bring the hard rock legacy back to life on Slovenian soil. Every one of these outfits draws inspiration from the well-known treasure chest of eighties hard rock, and each one peddles that inspiration in its own way. Top Stripper are a band that put out their first studio record back in 2013, called »High Heels Avenue«. It has nine tracks (two of them bonus tracks). Considering that three songs from it are re-recorded on the new album and two of the nine are extras, »High Heels Avenue« is better counted as an EP than a proper studio album. »Luck Don’t Come Cheap« is therefore the band’s first real studio album.
On it, the band shows remarkable artistic growth, the fruit of quickly piling up experience and stage mileage, which in turn tightens the chemistry between the members. You hear it in the playing and in the punchy, compact (warm, live, authentic) production sound that grabs you on the very first listen. You can tell the guys have been playing these songs together for a long time, at rehearsals and on stage. They’re polished to a shine in every little arrangement detail. The vocals are outstanding: dominant, powerful, convincing in every register and every melodic line across the album, whether mid-range, high or highest. Singer Jaša Šaban glides through the different registers with feather-light ease. His timbre points back to the golden days of Jack Russell (Great White). That comparison wouldn’t come up at all if Top Stripper stumbled when laying verses over the guitar phrases, or if the vocals struggled with proper English pronunciation, which is the classic Achilles heel of a ton of new revival bands in a similar vein, especially from the Mediterranean countries (Greece, Italy, Spain), and which keeps them from developing a recognizable artistic identity of their own. Top Stripper have no such problems. That’s why, with this album alone, Top Stripper can walk onto the international stage with full confidence and no brakes on! Given how convincing this record is, the band could easily open for Alice Cooper or Whitesnake, who are announced for Ljubljana’s Hala Tivoli this summer.
The band is sworn to the tradition of the old-school American hard rock, the kind that loves to drag out the sleazy, hooligan story of the golden days of the Los Angeles Sunset Strip scene. If not the whole crew, then at least the guitar side is clearly deeply inspired by the classic Guns N’ Roses records, as confirmed right away by the opener Can’t Hear You Cryin’ and especially by the intro motif of the track right after it, The City Of Angels, which is basically an inverted version of Slash’s opening phrase from the Guns N’ Roses classic Sweet Child O’Mine. The approach to soloing, to layering decorative guitar harmonies over the phrases, and the guitar phrases themselves often bring the old Guns N’ Roses school back to life. Casting the net wider for the band’s inspirations, the album’s feel occasionally turns more retro-sounding, toward Led Zeppelin. The album is firmly propped up by a blues element, with the odd “southern rock” breeze blowing through it, without which Top Stripper’s take on hard rock and rock’n’roll couldn’t really function or ignite credibly. The songs have arranging credibility and compactness. They’re polished and tightly formatted. In delivering rock voltage, they keep up remarkable coherence across the album. As mentioned, they carry a pronounced bluesy note (which sometimes gives the songs a slight touch of darkness), effectively built up in the choruses with a surge of musicality and, as a result, catchiness. The band shows incredible confidence even in the numbers that are stripped down to a fully acoustic version.
To keep this from getting too long: »Luck Don’t Come Cheap« is an excellent achievement and really a textbook example of the real-deal hard rock and rock’n’roll album, even as a debut, showing how you have to approach songwriting, polishing arrangements, studio recording and mixing the sound so that you end up with a product where all the building blocks click into a gorgeous jigsaw, with not one elementary flaw, and a product that can challenge the band’s genre peers across the entire international scene at any moment. A record made with an incredible amount of heart, dedication, perseverance and faith in the magic of music. A record the band members breathed soul and heart into! A record they can be proud of, and one we hope will give Top Stripper wings to keep going down the path they’ve laid out. With the commitment and focus that »Luck Don’t Come Cheap« shows, the band can still seriously surprise us (on the music scene) in the future!
Top Stripper – Can’t Hear You Cryin’ (official video):
Lineup
Jaša Šaban – vocals
Jure Demšar – guitar, acoustic guitar, slide guitar, backing vocals
Rok Rožmanec – guitar, backing vocals
Rok Pavlin – bass guitar
Aleš Strnad – drums, percussion
Production
Drago Popovič
Track list
1. Can’t Hear You Cryin’
2. The City Of Angels
3. Shoot the Boy
4. Crazy Child
5. Gone with the Train
6. The Sound of the Devil
7. Why Do I Need the Rain
8. You Can All Go To Hell
9. Do You Think It’s Easy
