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What’s the 4-1-1?
The San Francisco rockers second full-length album finds the band’s
sounding like something good from the 80’s rock heyday.
Genre
Hard Rock / rock / metal
The Good
I know the band is from San Francisco, but they do manage to come across with
that Southern rock down home rock and roll vibe on this disc. I don’t
know if that’s just how I heard things or if it’s an intentional
design by the band, but it works like a charm.
For the most part, the vocals from Lance Boone are excellent. He’s got
a bit of that rough whiskey tinged style I like on a lot of my rock music, so
that helps.
The band’s straight ahead rockers are dominant on the disc, though I did
really enjoy the slower paced “The Girl Who Knows Nothing At All” a
lot. The band has straightforward simple lyrics.
Now that doesn’t mean
they are simplistic, it’s just that they don’t try to use a ten-dollar
word when an everyday word works just fine. There are turns of phrase and phrasing
that I found quite enjoyable.
The guitar work is excellent and the band has a nicely honed sense of what works
in terms of melody. The opening track “Somebody” sets the pace for
the band’s melodic tones.
The album features 13 tracks, and I thought 8 of them were simply awesome. The
standouts among those tracks are the ode to the 1970’s rockers “The
Last Of The Superheroes (Of The 1970’s)”, “Fallen Angels”,
and my personal favorite, the screw you break up song “Crawling.
The Bad
The song “Isolation” is rather boring. The delivery of the chorus
for “Love Your Abuse” is kind of lame.
The Verdict
I am not sure what I was expecting when I popped American Heartbreak into
my CD player, but whatever those expectations were, they were exceeded.
This album really surprised me and I think anyone who longs for the days
of a fresh sounding arena rock album would do well to check out this album.
Did You Know?
American Heartbreak guitarist Billy Rowe played with the 80’s rockers
Jetboy. The band’s bassist Michael Butler used to be in the thrash band
Exodus. He also hosts a weekly podcast called The Rock and Roll Geek Show. You
can check that out here.
There is a face shot of the front cover model underneath the CD holder for the
album.
Rating:  out
of 5
--Jay Roberts
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AMERICAN
HEARTBREAK
