Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Tesla
Label: Frontiers Records
Release: 2014
Running time: 60:30
Rating: 3.5/5
The long-missed fistful of Tesla dynamite is back! San Francisco’s most famous rock ‘n’ roll “electric power distribution company” is delivering a new studio album to the market, on a quest for the fundamental axiom of rock ‘n’ roll expression: “holy simplicity.” Hence the title, “Simplicity.” A stripped-down rock ‘n’ roll record with no “hiding places” and no needless cosmetic clutter. Seventh studio album! Six years have passed since its predecessor “Forever More.” Tesla haven’t exactly been slacking in that time, though. They put together two live albums, one acoustic and one electric, last year they dropped a new single, Taste My Pain, in digital form, and they eased the months of waiting for the new album for their fired-up followers by playing plenty of shows all over the planet.
The new album brings fourteen brand-new studio tracks from the band. It’s a new album with that typical Tesla charisma. Clearly, no other rock ‘n’ roll band on the planet can sound the way Tesla sound. This is a band that, through a string of excellent studio albums, carved out a unique musical path in the rock ‘n’ roll universe. Compared with the usual genre pigeonholing of bands, Tesla have always gone their own authentic way, a path of homegrown originality that they paved completely independently and, as mentioned, unmistakably. With every album they offered a new sound, growing and maturing through experimenting with ideas. After six years since “Forever More,” the band felt it had to look back again and flirt with its musical roots. To help shape the sound they called in Tom Zutaut, who actually helped the band make its name in the eighties when, as part of the A&R staff at Geffen Records at the time, he signed them. In short, Zutaut is a man who knows the band very, very well. And to make the whole thing truly smell retro-sonically, the band brought in another legendary studio engineer, Michael Wagener, who took care of the final mix.
Fourteen different tracks. Tesla have largely held on to the gloominess of the previous album, but stripped the sound down. The days of romance are long, long gone, so why go back to them? The new album no longer has that massive wall of riffs which, in all its “fashionably crunchy fatness,” effectively held the songs together on the band’s loudest album ever (“Forever More”). The band couldn’t have showcased the musical background it grew up on any better than with the new album “Simplicity.” It has everything. The typical, strongly noticeable blues contour, the southern rock contour, the usual flirting with acoustic sounds, the usual inspiration from Led Zeppelin (the solo in Life is a River) and Lynyrd Skynyrd (the closer ‘Til that Day), plus the band’s well-known high level of musicality in the work of both guitars, especially underlined by the polished “mid eight” sections, as well as by some intros and outros of the songs (added guitar ornaments), not to mention the filigree perfection of the solos. And yet, in this burning desire to lay its musical identity as bare as possible and in the search for “holy simplicity,” Tesla have this time made things complicated.
Precisely because the album is weighed down with mid-tempo songs, ballad-leaning ones and those dominantly seasoned with acoustics, it lacks a sense of bigger rock fury and cheeky, daring swagger. One of the more successful “experiments” in fusing the band’s typical riffing with blues heaviness and southern rock is the hit in Flip Side!, which stands out conceptually on “Simplicity.” Burnout To Fade is the track that definitely grabs the attention among the “balladesque” ones on the album. The songs are confidently finished in their arrangements. The whole thing is kept at a level of constant appeal by guitarists Frank Hannon and Dave Rude, and that counts. Take the “stuffiness” of Time Bomb, which gets hauled out of the abyss precisely by the outstanding closing duel between the two guitarists. Otherwise, though, the album just doesn’t “take off.” Even the opening is “heavy” with the track MP3, which promises a lot after a promising intro but only delivers a stuffy lingering on a doom-rounded riff, and a song that, going by the track record, has no business opening an album! The feeling of waiting for the crescendo, where real rock voltage makes the hair on your skin stand up in an instant, is like having sex with a condom or licking an ice cream through glass. In other words, you never get there. The switch never flips. And that’s precisely because of this variability and switching between acoustically slowed-down and mid-tempo numbers. It needs more songs of the Ricochet or Break of Dawn kind.
A solid album. Nothing outstanding. Tesla looked back to their roots and tried to summon the symbolic value of their first three albums. And yet. Times are different and the thing just doesn’t ignite anymore. The band has changed. And so has its musical philosophy. These days Tesla write songs in a much darker spirit, which is why the decibel-heavy weight of the fashionably polished sound of “Forever More” worked so well and lit things up.
Still, devoted fans of the band will enjoy it wholeheartedly, since this is an album with the most authentic bloodwork of the band’s musical typicality. It just doesn’t deliver songs that could ever grow into staples of their ironclad live repertoire. Music gourmets will find comfort in the excellent work of both guitars and the exceptional inventiveness of Frank Hannon, who once again astonishes with his vivid solutions in weaving highly charismatic solo passages.
In this stripped-down production, Jeff Keith’s vocal shows noticeably more wear, which has simply crept into his delivery over the years. Of course Keith wisely stays in the mid-range, but when he gets to the closing repetitions of “…on and on and on….” in Break of Down, it’s impossible to ignore the fact of Keith’s vocal fatigue. Luckily the man carries that recognizable piercing, throaty contour as he shakes out his “magpie rage,” which makes him special among rock ‘n’ roll vocalists and brings along with it an important trademark of the elemental character of Tesla. In Rise And Fall, what jars is Keith’s metrical “bending” at the ends of verse stanzas because, you won’t believe it, it recalls the habits of Axl W. Rose. The song gets lifted back up from the bottom of interest again by the outstanding guitar work in its middle section.
Let’s hope that Tesla turn forward again as their career continues, leave behind the romanticism of nostalgia for bygone days, which were undoubtedly lovely, and instead charge back in at full gallop toward the modern characteristics of the rousing rock ‘n’ roll charm that “Into the Now” and “Forever More” were chock-full of!
Line-up
Jeff Keith – vocals
Frank Hannon – guitar, backing vocals, piano, bass guitar
Dave Rude – guitar, backing vocals, bass guitar
Brian Wheat – bass guitar, backing vocals, piano
Troy Luccketta – drums, percussion
Production
Tom Zutaut & Tesla
Track list
1. M P 3
2. Ricochet
3. Rise and Fall
4. So Divine…
5. Cross My Heart
6. Honestly
7. Flip Side!
8. Other than Me
9. Break of Dawn
10. Burnout to Fade
11. Life is a River
12. Sympathy
13. Time Bomb
14. ‘Til that Day
