In the Raw

Although they'd lost their deal with Arista Records and then exchanged the brief elation of their British sojourn for the sobering reality of their upstate New York breeding grounds, the Rods wasted little time sulking before getting back to work on new songs at Rochester's Barrett Alley Studios. The trio's sophomore opus, WILD DOGS, may not have performed well enough to satisfy the chart-topping expectations of their former label, but it was relatively successful by heavy metal standards. So it was no surprise when independent Shrapnel Records was calling with a new contract. Of course, instead of heaping money on the Rods to polish off the material they'd been recording, their more frugal new backers were perfectly happy to take the songs that became 1983's IN THE RAW just as they were. One could argue that the Rods' proletarian metal is best served with minimal production gloss anyways, and so, resulting barnstormers like "Hurricane," "Go for Broke," and the proto-thrashing "Hot Love" hardly seemed to suffer while hammering their head-banging directive home. And even though most of these new songs still sounded partly like crossbreeds of Twisted Sister and Y&T, they finally helped the Rods sever their once overwhelming dependency on '70s hard rock influences in order to sound like a true '80s heavy metal band for the first time.