Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: TNT
Label: Bonnier Amigo Records
Release: 2007
Duration: 46:48
What happened to TNT, and what’s going on with them? Have they lost it? All of them, right down to the last man? Let’s rewind about six months to see what the band has been up to. TNT have a new singer in the ranks. That’s Tony Mills, who came over from the ranks of the great British melodic AOR rockers Shy. He joined the band last year as a replacement for the standard TNT vocalist Tony Harnell. Tony for Tony. Clearly everybody’s mixing them up. Harnell either got fed up with TNT, or he smelled which way the wind was blowing just in time and wisely slipped out of the band. The rest of the crew wanted something different. At first, though, nothing smelled even remotely of a different direction, because bringing in a top-class singer to replace a top-class singer is a totally logical move, one that let TNT first and foremost safeguard every trademark of their hard rock craft. Second, Mills joining was just as logical, since the man is flawlessly capable of “warbling” the whole repertoire of his predecessor, which not just anyone can pull off. So the horizon pointed, quite logically, to a brand new classic TNT album.
Damn! With this new album, TNT set out to make the most “non-TNT” album possible. A horror show. This is total devastation, total negation of themselves. You struggle through a whole album driven by the urge for something “different”, at the cost of throwing away your classic identity in the world of hard rock. So you ditch what makes you different in order to go looking for something different.
TNT are delivering an album that isn’t TNT. Mills is unrecognizable if you compare his Shy approach on, say, “Unfinished Bussines” (2003) or “Sunset And Wine” (2005) with what he serves up on The New Territory. As if it weren’t actually Mills at all. The album opener Constitution confirms it right away. The guy comes in low-pitched, muffled, gloomy… Hello? It’s not just Mills, the whole band is coming in with a completely new direction.
The abbreviation for trinitrotoluene fits the new album title perfectly: The (T) New (N) Territory (T). And the guys gave the album a fitting name, because they’ve really wandered into new territory. The last “TNT Harnell era” album, “All The Way To The Sun”, already hinted at the outlines of these shifts, but compared to “The New Territory” it’s pure innocence. Take Golden Opportunity: it’s a song with clear potential to be a classic TNT piece (that guitar riff), but Mills wipes out every last speck of hope with his vocals the moment the song turns into the chorus. Unbelievable! The comparisons with the blandness of The Darkness are fair here. And not just here. Another example is the chorus of Fountain Of Love, and you’ll easily find a few more Darkness comparisons on the album.
What we have here is an experimental album that has uncompromisingly dismantled the perfectly classic TNT sound. It’s a sort of pop rock record that even wants to be commercial. It’s loaded with effects that totally mangle Mills’s vocals, the rhythm section is pushed to the back of the production, the guitars try to be fashionably twisted, and there are practically no riffs to be found in this sonic mush, which has no clear direction whatsoever. Any band with their feet even slightly on the ground approaches “experimenting” by building on and upgrading their own identity and musical voice. There are plenty of albums by bands that were extremely successful at weaving in something “new” with imagination, which marked a step up in the band’s development. In TNT’s case, though, the “experimenting” doesn’t work in that direction, but in the negative one: downward. Toward total degradation. The band hits rock bottom of self-negation on Now We’re Talkin’, which is steeped in the weirdest combinations, and which will make anyone seriously wonder whether anyone in TNT still has a shred of good taste. A tasteless parody of The Beatles.
Amid all the mess, what stands out in this “poppy novelty” are motifs that clearly underline the influence of legendary names like the gods Queen and The Beatles (the chorus of Something Special), while the album “The New Territory” itself is closer to Ronnie’s band Vagabound, with which it shares far more in sound than with the TNT tradition. When it comes to clowning around, The Darkness still can’t match TNT this time. An example? If the choice of the cover What A Wonderful World stupidly cut through the atmosphere on “All The Way To The Sun”, then the song playing its role on “The New Territory” is surely June. A comedy in the style of Paul Anka. Who are you trying to fool, guys? Yourselves, no doubt.
The tasteless, indecent buffoonery doesn’t run out later in the album either, and the cherry on top is the closing address by Tony Mills in authentic “cockney” English. Who could laugh at that genuine “cockney” accent after you’ve just poured litres of crocodile tears through three quarters of an hour of torture, in delirious mourning for 2004, when TNT put out the excellent melodic hard rock album “My Religion”? When they changed singers, TNT should have come out swinging with a new classic hard rock album, in the way they master and carry in their blood. That would have proven they can survive without the charismatic Harnell with no trouble at all. With Mills in the lineup, the band has every chance to top the TNT albums with Harnell. But not like this.
The album “The New Territory” has a truly sad effect. The more you listen to it, the more you hate it. One serious listen is enough to never listen to it again! Steer clear of this new “different” TNT album by a wide radius, at all costs! And may the TNT boys find some common sense as soon as possible.
Lineup
Tony Mills – vocals
Ronnie LeTekro – guitar
Victor Borge – bass
Diesel Dahl – drums
Production
TNT
Track list
1. A Constitution
2. Substitute
3. Are You Blind?
4. Golden Opportunity
5. Something Special
6. Now We’re Talkin’
7. Wild Life
8. Fountain of Love
9. June
10. Can’t Go On Without
11. 2 Seconds Away
12. Milestone River
13. Let’s Party Mills
