Label: Frontiers Music Srl.
Release date: 06.06.2014
Production: Tom Zutaut & Tesla
Album length: 60.30 min.
Genre: Hard Rock
The missed fist 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, hunting for the basic axiom of rock ‘n’ roll expression. That is, “holy simplicity”. Hence the album title, “Simplicity”. A stripped-down rock ‘n’ roll record, with no hide-and-seek games and no excess cosmetic clutter. Seventh studio album! Six years have passed since its predecessor, “Forever More”. Not that Tesla were slacking in the meantime. They put together two live albums, one acoustic and one electric, and last year they released a new single, Taste My Pain, in digital form, easing the long wait 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 record 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 its own unique musical path in the rock ‘n’ roll universe. Compared with the genre pack, Tesla have always walked their own authentic road of self-made expression, paved completely independently and, as mentioned, strictly recognizable. Every album offered a new sound, and in experimenting with ideas they grew and matured, evolving along the way. Six years after “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 team 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 sure the whole thing really smelled retro-sonic, the band also brought in another legendary studio engineer, Michael Wagener, who handled the final mix.
Fourteen different tracks. Tesla have largely held on to the gloominess of the previous album, but they’ve stripped down the sound. The romantic days are long, long gone, so why go back? Gone from the new album is that massive wall of riffs which, in its “fashionably rasping fatness,” effectively held the songs together on the band’s loudest album ever (“Forever More”). Still, the band couldn’t have shown off the whole musical background it grew up on any better than it does on the new “Simplicity”. It has everything. That typical, unmistakable 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 (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 “middle eight” sections, as well as some intros and outros (added guitar ornaments), not to mention the filigree perfection of the solos. But in this fiery desire to lay its musical identity as bare as possible and chase “holy simplicity”, Tesla ended up complicating things this time.
Precisely because the album is weighed down with mid-tempo tracks, ballad-leaning songs and ones dominantly seasoned with acoustics, it lacks a sense of bigger rock bristling and cheeky swagger. One of the more successful “experiments” in merging the band’s signature riffing with blues heaviness and southern rock is the stomper Flip Side!, which stands out on “Simplicity” as an idea. Burnout To Fade is the track that definitely grabs the attention among the “balladesque” stuff. The songs themselves are confidently finished in their arrangements. It’s guitarists Frank Hannon and Dave Rude who keep it all at a constant level of appeal, and that counts. Take the “stuffiness” of Time Bomb, which gets hauled out of the pit by the outstanding closing duel between the two guitarists. Otherwise, though, the album just never “takes off”. Even the opening stretch is “heavy” with MP3, which promises a lot after an enticing intro but only delivers a stuffy lingering on a doom-rounded riff, making it a song that, by any measure, doesn’t belong in the album’s opening slot! The feeling of waiting for a crescendo, where real rock voltage instantly raises the hairs on your skin, is like having sex with a condom, or licking ice cream through glass. In other words, you never get there. The switch never flips. And that’s down to the very variability and shuffling between acoustically slowed-down and mid-tempo tracks. It needs more songs like Ricochet or Break of Dawn.
A solid album. Nothing outstanding. Tesla looked back to their roots and tried to summon up the symbolic value of their first three albums. And yet. Times are different and it just doesn’t ignite anymore. The band has changed. And so has its musical philosophy. Today Tesla write songs in a much darker spirit, which is why the decibel-heavy, fashionably bristling sound of “Forever More” felt so good and hit the spot.
Still, devoted fans of the band will enjoy it wholeheartedly, since this is an album with the most authentic blood profile of the band’s musical trademarks. It just doesn’t deliver songs that could ever grow into classics of the iron-clad live repertoire. Music gourmets will find comfort in the excellent work of both guitars and in the exceptional inventiveness of Frank Hannon, who once again amazes with colorful solutions in weaving highly charismatic solo parts.
In this stripped-down production, Jeff Keith’s vocals show 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 Dawn, it’s impossible to ignore his vocal fatigue. Luckily the man carries that recognizable contour of piercing throatiness when he shakes out his “magpie rage,” which makes him special among rock ‘n’ roll vocalists and brings with it an important trademark of the band’s elemental character. In Rise And Fall, for instance, Keith’s metric “bending” at the ends of the verse lines jars, because, believe it or not, it recalls Axl W. Rose’s habits. The song is lifted from the bottom of the interest pile once again by the outstanding guitar work in its middle section.
Let’s hope that Tesla turn forward again as their career goes on, leave behind the romanticism of nostalgia for bygone days, which were undoubtedly lovely, and instead charge back at full gallop toward the contemporary traits of wrecking-ball rock ‘n’ roll charm that “Into the Now” and “Forever More” were so full of!
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 7.5 / 10
Tracklist:
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
Lineup:
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
