format: 10" EP
year: 1980
country: USA
label: Poison Records
#: PR1001-01
info: -
style: Hard Rock Heavy Metal
Side A:
Side B:
There's 2 excellent reasons to add this olde American 10" oddity to this our Greatest List Of Rare Heavy Metal Releases Ever, but none of them would be that this is a release you simply must hunt down for your collection - quite the opposite! Remember, it's "The Greatest List..", not "The List Of The Greatest..". So, yeah, that's basically reason #1 right there: Don't buy this record. It's not very good.
Want me to elaborate? Sure: "Rock'n'Roll Band" will not surprise you. It is indeed the very same ol' basic, upbeat classic rock you'll expect it to be, with only some fairly distorted HR guitars as a redeeming factor. "Angelique" is plain awful with its slow reggae beat and corny keyboard breaks. Opening side B is "Tell Me" and here we're actually presented with a pretty decent, pounding Hardrocker that I'm sure would get the feet tapping on plenty of 70's Hard Rock/proto-HM fans and collectors, but probably not hard enough for anyone to start any serious Hunting-missions. Ending it all is another awful one in the form of a piano-schmallad. Of course.
Caught me skippin' that beat? Good, coz here comes reason #2: I double-dare you to find me a faster Heavy Metal tune from the USA 1980 than PRETTY POISON's "Exhausted"! After the painful dirge of "Angelique" the chock-factor of this tune will hit your nervous system like pure adrenochrome. WHAT - THE - FUCK - HAPPENED ? ?
Ok, it's not Slayer and certainly not the heaviest shit around on the American continent at the time, but for sheer quickness the closest comparison that my Band-Comparison superpowers can come up with would the more aggressive Raven-numbers - the kind that Raven didn't start churning out until 1-2 years later(!) Hell, it would even have been a great song if it weren't for that awkward wimp-rock break in the middle.
Meanwhile, in a different space-time continuum the 1980 "Exhausted / Tell Me" 7" of PRETTY POISON spurred a somewhat longish and medium-successful career for the band, leaving almost a handful of fairly decent Heavy Metal albums in their wake...