Beg for It

Audio Mixers: Roberto Laghi; Hardcore Superstar.
Arranger: Hardcore Superstar.
These Swedes have a sense of humor, and better taste than their sleazy glam metal might indicate -- they took one of their album titles, Bad Sneakers and a Piña Colada, from a Steely Dan lyric, after all. On their latest effort, they're continuing to deliver what big-haired ladies and aging bandanna-over-the-bald-spot dudes want from a rock band. Big riffs, catchy choruses, and solos directly indebted to Slash's work on Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction are all over this album. Vocalist Jocke Berg shrieks like a cross between Axl Rose and Vince Neil, the rhythms are bare-bones but hard-driving, and the lyrics are all about sex and debauchery, in the most vague and amorphous way possible. There's even a power ballad -- "Hope for a Normal Life" -- that splits the difference between G N' R's "Patience" and Iggy & the Stooges' "Gimme Danger." This is an utterly anachronistic album, which, when one considers the aesthetic wasteland that is American hard rock in the post-grunge era, isn't really a bad thing. They do need to tighten things up a little; no glam metal song should make it past the four-minute mark, let alone five-plus. But there's enough fast, punchy, cowbell-driven tracks like "Remove My Brain" and the almost thrashy "Into Debauchery" to make Beg for It a fun, dumb good time for fans of the band or the genre. ~ Phil Freeman