Monthly Archives: September 2026

Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Derivative Works, Influenced, Music, Unsung Heroes

Airbourne – Airbourne: What Kind of Music Do You Play?

Rock?

Hard rock?

Heavy metal?

Classic rock?

No.

AC/DC music.

Maybe we should finally admit it’s a genre.

Because here we are again with Airbourne, six albums into a career built on guitars, drums, sweat, beer, volume, riffs, choruses and a complete refusal to overcomplicate anything.

Except this time they’ve done something interesting. They’ve called the album Airbourne.

Their seventh album is self-titled.

After six records.

You know what you’re getting. And you do. You absolutely do.

Airbourne isn’t a reinvention.

There’s the riff. The stomp. The groove. The Malcolm Young foot tapping. The Angus Young leg shakes. The shout-along chorus. The guitar solo.

Let’s not pretend this isn’t built from the same DNA as AC/DC.

AC/DC invented the language.

Airbourne speak it. And they’re really fucking good at it.

There’s something else interesting about this record. Twelve songs. Forty-seven minutes. Almost every track between three and four minutes.

Whether intentional or not, it’s almost perfectly designed for the streaming era.

No seven-minute monsters. No songs that take three minutes to get going. No conceptual interludes. No ballads. No soft rockers.

You press play.

Riff. Verse. Chorus. Solo. Riff. Done.

Next.

We’ve spent years being told rock needs to adapt to streaming. Songs need to grab you immediately. Attention spans are collapsing. The first thirty seconds matter.

Airbourne’s response seems to be, “we’ve already been making songs like that for twenty years.”

If we’re going to keep having the conversation about Airbourne sounding like AC/DC, maybe we’re asking the wrong question.

What if AC/DC isn’t simply a band?

What if it’s a musical form?

Strip away the names and the ingredients are obvious.

A huge guitar riff. Straight-ahead rhythm. Four-to-the-floor momentum. Blues-based guitar vocabulary. Minimal harmonic movement. Groove. A singer who sounds like he’s been gargling broken glass.

Lyrics about drinking, fighting, sex, cars, rock’n’roll, trouble and having a fucking good time.

And above everything else: attitude.

You could almost build a taxonomy.

AC/DC music.

The Angels music.

Rose Tattoo music.

Airbourne music.

Maybe that’s the point.

Airbourne have spent enough time inside this particular musical language that they’re no longer simply copying the vocabulary. They’ve built their own accent.

Does it matter that it’s not original?

No.

At least, not in the way people usually mean it.

If originality means inventing a sound nobody has ever heard before, then Airbourne aren’t winning any prizes.

But originality and invention aren’t the same thing.

Nobody listens to a blues guitarist playing a twelve-bar blues and complains about a lack of innovation.

Nobody hears punk and thinks, Three chords? Come on, give me some harmonic complexity.

The creative challenge inside a restricted musical language is execution.

Is the riff good?

Does the drummer hit hard enough?

Does the chorus land?

Does the singer sell it?

Does the solo make you want to play air guitar?

Does it make you turn the volume up?

That’s the test. Airbourne have been taking it for their entire career.

Which brings us back to the title.

It’s simply: Airbourne.

The band. The sound. The promise.

You know what you’re getting. And sometimes that’s exactly what a rock band should be.

AC/DC didn’t need to become something else to remain AC/DC.

Motörhead didn’t need a string section.

Ramones didn’t need a concept album about climate change.

Sometimes the artistic decision is deciding what you’re not going to do.

Airbourne have made that decision a long time ago.

And underneath all the riffs and beer-soaked stupidity, there are moments where the songs accidentally stumble into something more interesting.

“Gutsy” is basically an Airbourne mission statement.

“It’s not just a word / It’s a way of life.”

That’s the whole philosophy. Identity isn’t something you claim. It’s something you demonstrate. And:

“Gutsy’s all I got / So take your best shot.”

Strip everything else away and you’re left with resilience. No grand strategy. No guarantee. Just the willingness to absorb another hit.

That’s a pretty good definition of rock’n’roll.

“Alive After Death (Last Plane Out)” takes the same idea somewhere else.

“When you drop the needle I’m back in the band.”

That’s the beautiful thing about records. The record doesn’t remember the musician.

We do.

Put the needle down and suddenly the dead aren’t dead. The past isn’t past. The distance between audience and artist disappears.

The song becomes a time machine.

And when Airbourne sing:

“They never die / When we rock together in denim and leather they live forever.”

They’re talking about something bigger than nostalgia.

Music survives because people participate in it.

The audience becomes the archive.

That’s why the closer, Send Me To Rock ‘N’ Roll Heaven, works.

It’s ridiculous. It’s sentimental. It’s loud as fuck.

And it’s a roll call of heroes: Lemmy, Doc Neeson, Bon Scott, John Bonham, Little Richard, Eddie Van Halen, Malcolm Young and Ozzy Osbourne.

Then comes:

“Stack the amps twelve miles high / Crank it louder than the sky.”

Of course they aren’t going to mourn quietly. Rock remembers its heroes by turning the fucking volume back up.

That’s the point.

Elsewhere, Airbourne remain Airbourne.

“Here She Comes” turns desire into weather:

“Now here she comes / Raisin’ a hurricane.”

She’s not really a character. She’s a force of nature.

“Kid In A Candy Store” understands addiction better than it probably intended to:

“But I always come / Back for more.”

He knows what it costs. He knows he’ll do it again.

Appetite. Consequence. Repeat.

“Sky High” is more familiar territory, but one line cuts through the cliché:

“Shadow of the glass and smash the past.”

You can keep staring at the person you’ve become because of everything that happened to you, or you can smash the fucking mirror.

Your past can explain you. It doesn’t get to own you.

“Who Put The Rhythm In You?” is pure rock’n’roll swagger. There’s barely a character here, just presence. Someone walks into the room and changes the temperature.

“Christmas Bonus” takes the same philosophy and applies it to Christmas: beer, sex, mates, noise and another excuse to turn the amps up. Sometimes the entire philosophy is:

We survived another year. Fuck it. Let’s celebrate.

“Last Man Standing” goes darker.

“You can do the right thing and still break the law.”

That’s an interesting contradiction because it refuses to equate legality with morality.

And then:

“Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

The character doesn’t want revenge. He simply refuses to become what happened to him.

“Rock ‘N’ Roll Ya” is considerably less philosophical. Thankfully.

“But if you’re looking for love, then you’re shit outta luck.”

It’s actually the most honest line in the song.

No promises. No pretending the hit-and-run is something it isn’t.

And “I live my life like a rolling stone” captures the contradiction perfectly, freedom pushed right up against irresponsibility.

“Bogota” turns a breakup into an escape plan.

“You swung a wrecking ball through every memory.”

There’s no romanticising the breakup. It’s been demolished.

And once you’re standing in the rubble, you can either stare at it or walk away.

Then comes:

“I am an animal, and I’m outta the cage.”

Whether that’s genuine liberation or simply a great excuse to run from responsibility is almost beside the point.

The plane leaves. The champagne starts. Tomorrow can deal with itself.

And then there’s “Hells Got No Vacancy”, which sounds like it wandered out of “Big Gun‘s” back door after drinking somebody else’s beer.

“When you’re raised with nothing, you got nothing to lose.”

That’s the character’s operating system. And eventually he delivers the best line in the song:

“Because I’m the fucking problem, that’s why.”

At least he’s honest. No victim narrative. No excuses. I’m part of the mess. I’m the problem. And I’m not particularly interested in fixing myself.

That’s a surprisingly strong piece of self-awareness buried inside a song about a criminal who apparently wants to fight Satan.

There is a danger here. The line between heritage and repetition is incredibly thin.

Airbourne have built an entire career on it. Eventually the songs have to justify the familiarity.

That’s where Airbourne succeeds.

Not because it’s new. Because it’s good.

Airbourne know the recipe. They know the temperature. They know how long to leave it in the oven.

There’s a strange expectation placed on rock music.

It needs to evolve. It needs to be relevant. It needs to cross genres. It needs to say something profound. It needs to appeal to younger listeners. It needs to survive streaming. It needs to compete with pop. It needs to reinvent itself.

Maybe.

Or maybe sometimes a rock band just needs to plug in.

Turn it up.

Count to four.

And hit the fucking riff.

That’s what Airbourne does.

It’s a new album built from an old sound.

A record made in the streaming era that understands the three-minute song better than most bands ever did.

And, more importantly, it understands what the songs are for.

They’re not asking you to analyse them. They’re asking you to participate.

You don’t study the chorus. You fucking yell it.

You don’t need to reinvent rock’n’roll. You need to make somebody want to turn it up.

What kind of music do you play?

AC/DC music.

Airbourne music.

And maybe that’s finally a genre of its own.

GUTSY.

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Angry Anderson: We Can’t Be Beaten – Rose Tattoo, Rock ’n’ Roll & an Australian Icon

We used to sing “We Can’t Be Beaten” after every football game we played.

Every game.

It could have been our first win of the season and we sang it. It could have been another week of an unbeaten run and we sang it.

Win, lose, draw, the song belonged to the ritual. And maybe that is how I will always remember Angry Anderson.

He can’t be beaten. Not really.

He played a bikie in “Housos” who was basically impossible to beat in a fight. He sang “Suddenly,” one of the biggest power ballads to come out of Australian television, and somehow even a song from a completely different universe still sounded like Angry Anderson.

That is the trick with Angry.

You could put him anywhere and he remained Angry Anderson.

Hard rock band. Bikie comedy. Soap-opera power ballad. Mad Max. Rose Tattoo.

It didn’t matter. The voice came with him.

Gary “Angry” Anderson died on 21 September 2026, aged 79, after suffering a cardiac arrest.

And I keep coming back to the music. Because that is where I first knew him.

Before Rose Tattoo, there was Buster Brown.

Buster Brown formed in 1973 and released “Something to Say” the following year.

The drummer was Phil Rudd.

Yes. The same Phil Rudd who would leave and join an early version of AC/DC.

Anderson kept going however Buster Brown ended in 1975, and Anderson would soon become the voice of a band that would define Australian hard rock in a completely different way.

Rose Tattoo.

Peter Wells formed the band in Sydney in 1976 because he wanted something tough. Something built around slide guitar.

The first great statement arrived with “Bad Boy for Love.”

It was written by Ian Rilen, who left to form punk group X before the single was released. Geordie Leach, Anderson’s former Buster Brown bandmate, eventually joined the lineup that recorded most of the debut.

And then there was the production team.

Harry Vanda and George Young.

So when Rose Tattoo arrived in 1978, there was a lineage.

The blues had crossed the Atlantic. British bands absorbed American blues. British rock came to Australia. Australian musicians absorbed all of it.

And then they made it sound like home.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Outlaw

“Rock N Roll Outlaw” sounds like a mission statement.

The blues-rock vocabulary of Britain and America is all over Rose Tattoo, but the important thing is what they do with it.

We talk about the Rolling Stones, Cream, Free, Led Zeppelin. We talk about AC/DC.

But underneath all of that is the original source material: Black American blues musicians like Chuck Berry, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Albert King whose music was absorbed, reinterpreted and fed back into the world through British and Australian rock.

Rose Tattoo didn’t invent the language. They spoke it with an Australian accent.

“Nice Boys” is probably the easiest entry point. If you don’t know the Rose Tattoo version, you may know the Guns N’ Roses version.

“The Butcher and Fast Eddy” is Angry in storyteller mode.

Someone got stabbed. Here is what happened. Next song.

“One of the Boys” has that Status Quo pulse. “Remedy” is AC/DC with the volume turned up. “Bad Boy for Love” is the obvious classic. “T.V.” is twelve-bar blues.

No dissertation required.

“Stuck on You” is the curveball, almost a love song, with a melodic acoustic guitar figure underneath the chorus.

Then “Tramp,” with “Let There Be Rock” energy, and “Astra Wally,” which feels like the offspring of “Tramp” and “T.V.”

Ten songs. No wasted motion. Just get on with it.

The band toured America and Europe, recorded an unreleased album in Los Angeles, and came home. Then, in 1981, “Rock N Roll Outlaw” started charting in Europe.

So they went back. That’s the music business.

Assault & Battery

Three years after the debut came “Assault & Battery”.

This is where my relationship with Rose Tattoo gets interesting.

I don’t think it has the same collection of songs that immediately grab you by the throat. But I think the band is getting better.

Better musicianship. Better lyrics. More ambition.

Start with “Magnum Maid.”

“We’re never gonna catch the criminals / As long as they’re runnin’ the show.”

That is the eternal rock and roll conspiracy theory. The criminals aren’t hiding. They’re running the place.

Then Angry turns the gun into a character. The “Magnum Maid” isn’t just a weapon. She’s salvation. Revenge. The last thing a desperate man has left when every institutional answer has failed.

By the end of the song it feels like you’re lying in the gutter with two bullets left.

No cavalry. No government. No committee. Just the gun and one last decision.

That’s Angry’s world.

When the system doesn’t work, you don’t write a submission.

You reach for the Magnum.

“Sidewalk Sally” takes the opposite approach.

“She knows what she is selling.”

“French or Greek don’t cost much.”

No university degree required. You know exactly what is happening.

Scarred For Life

The third album arrived within a year in 1982

No three-year gap this time.

The opening is a knockout.

“I grew up fast on a working class streets.”

“First thing I learned was life don’t come cheap.”

That’s Angry Anderson in two lines.

Not a victim. Not a hero. A battler.

Somebody who has been punched around by life and decided to punch back.

Then comes “We Can’t Be Beaten.”

And there it is.

The song we used to sing after football. The song that makes the whole thing personal for me.

“If you want to be in my gang…”

That is the invitation. To belonging. Stand with me. We’ll start something. We’ll fight for something. We’ll make some noise.

The song is simple. That’s why it works. And it isn’t really about winning. It’s about refusing to accept defeat as an identity.

“Juice On The Loose” is basically “Bad Boy For Love” with another coat of paint. And again, I like it.

“Branded” is where Rob Riley becomes impossible to ignore. He co-wrote “We Can’t Be Beaten,” “Scarred For Life,” “Branded” and “It’s Gonna Work Itself Out.”

“I’ve had enough and now I’m gonna fight back.”

Again, Angry doesn’t write a self-help book. He writes a chorus.

Then there’s “Revenge.”

The song contains lines about immigrants, religion, unions and government that reflect a particular strain of working-class Australian grievance. Some of the language is explicitly hostile and exclusionary.

You don’t have to pretend otherwise.

But you also don’t need to pretend the song doesn’t exist.

The underlying emotion is easier to recognise than the politics, someone has taken something that belonged to me.

My city. My work. My country. My life. My dignity.

That is the engine underneath the song.

Angry is giving voice to a worldview that is angry about a world changing underneath him.

The problem is that the song doesn’t stop at describing that anger.

It assigns blame. Sometimes the artist is documenting the ugliness. Sometimes the artist is participating in it. Sometimes it’s both.

Southern Stars

Then came another lineup change.

By 1983, Rob Riley, Dallas Royall and Peter Wells had all left.

Anderson and Geordie Leach rebuilt the band again, and “Southern Stars” arrived in 1984.

And this is where I disagree with the people who want every great band to make the same record forever.

I love this change. The blues rock is still there. The boogie is still there. But the choruses are getting bigger. The songwriting is evolving.

It’s not Rose Tattoo abandoning Rose Tattoo.

It’s Rose Tattoo trying to work out what Rose Tattoo sounds like four records into a career.

If you make the first record four times, you haven’t preserved your identity. You’ve preserved your business model.

“Southern Stars” is more AOR without becoming AOR. The guitars still have dirt under their fingernails. But there is more melody. More space. More ambition.

And lyrically, Angry is at his most openly political and philosophical.

“The ghosts of Eureka are calling to me now.”

“I wanna live my life under Southern Stars.”

Anderson described the album as being about the spirit of Eureka and said its patriotism was intended to extend beyond Australia to humanity as a whole.

That’s important because “Southern Stars” is really an album about freedom.

“Let Us Live” strips it back. Let us be what we want to be. Let us go where we want to go. Let us say what we want to say. Let us live our own lives.

Not necessarily left. Not necessarily right. Just leave me alone and let me live.

“Freedom’s Flame” and “Death Or Glory” turn that idea into mythology: tribes rise, soldiers arrive, fires burn, people refuse to surrender.

Again, Angry isn’t writing a policy paper. He’s writing mythology.

And then there’s “You’ve Been Told.”

The riff takes me straight back to that Richie Blackmore school of blues-based hard rock.

But lyrically?

This is Angry enjoying himself.

Women. Bourbon. Drugs. Cigars. Rock and roll.

Just a bloke telling you exactly what he likes.

And finally:

“The Radio Said Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Dead.”

Of course it did. Somebody always says it’s over. And then some idiot plugs in a guitar.

That is the joke.

Rock and roll doesn’t survive because the radio says it should.

It survives because somebody somewhere still needs it.

Suddenly

Anderson went on to play Ironbar Bassey in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and Rose Tattoo eventually gave way to his solo career.

Then came “Suddenly.”

A song that could have destroyed the whole image. Instead it became another Angry Anderson song.

It found a much larger audience when it was used for Scott and Charlene’s wedding on Neighbours, reaching No. 2 in Australia.

The same voice that had spent the previous decade singing about street fights, criminals, revolution and rock and roll was suddenly singing a giant romantic ballad on television.

And it worked. That is Angry.

His 1990 solo album “Blood from Stone” produced “Bound for Glory,” a No. 11 hit.

“Life’s tough / So what? / I’m alive.”

“I’ve been down / Seen hard times / But I survived.”

He could have made an entire career out of that sentence.

Rose Tattoo eventually reunited, and I saw them on the Guns N’ Roses “Use Your Illusion” tour.

They rocked. And I was more than happy to cross Rose Tattoo off my list. The Gunners are a different story. I’ve already written about that.

And that is where my musical journey with Angry ends.

I haven’t listened to the “Pain” and “Blood Brothers” albums from the 2000s.

I will.

And maybe that is the best way to remember Angry Anderson.

As the voice that refused to soften. The little bloke with the enormous presence.

The voice that could sing about a street fight, a revolution, a woman, a working-class battler, a Magnum revolver, Australian freedom or a wedding on Neighbours and somehow still make it sound like Angry Anderson.

He wasn’t supposed to fit neatly. Neither did Rose Tattoo. And that’s probably why they lasted.

We used to sing “We Can’t Be Beaten” after every football game.

I think I understand it differently now. It wasn’t really a song about being unbeatable.

Nobody is.

It’s a song about standing up with your people and deciding that losing isn’t going to define you.

Angry Anderson spent fifty years doing exactly that.

The band changed. The members changed. The sound changed. The country changed. He changed. But he kept getting back on stage.

One more tour. One more record. One more song. One more fight. Until there wasn’t another one.

And now we sing it without him.

We can’t be beaten.

Maybe that’s the point.

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Audrey Horne – Achilles: The War Inside Us

Audrey Horne have always been something of a contradiction.

Formed in Bergen, Norway, in 2002 by musicians better known for extreme and progressive metal, they deliberately chose another path: classic hard rock built on riffs, melody, swagger and songs that demand to be played loud.

The pedigree was serious from the beginning. Thomas Tofthagen, Tom Cato Visnes, Kjetil Greve, Torkjell “Toschie” Rød, Arve Isdal and Herbrand Larsen brought connections to bands including Sahg, Gorgoroth and Enslaved, but Audrey Horne became their escape route from extremity.

Their 2005 debut, “No Hay Banda”, earned strong reviews and a Norwegian Spellemann Award, while “Le Fol” (2007) pushed them further into the European rock circuit.

Then came the breakthrough. Their self-titled 2010 album was my introduction to the band. I spent three months in Europe back then and overdosed on it.

“Youngblood” (2013), “Pure Heavy” (2014), “Blackout” (2018) and “Devil’s Bells” (2022) progressively sharpened the formula: big guitars, bigger melodies and an increasingly confident identity. They survived lineup changes, relentless touring and a pandemic interruption, emerging as one of Norway’s most dependable modern hard-rock bands.

Now comes “Achilles”, released on September 4, 2026, via Napalm Records. My vinyl and CD just arrived, however streaming filled the gap. I also took liberty to fill a few gaps in my collection, so when ordered “Achilles”, I also purchased “Pure Heavy” and “Youngblood” on vinyl.

Clocking in at 44:15, “Achilles” lands in the sweet spot anyone raised on physical media will remember. Back when the TDK 90-minute cassette was essential equipment, this was the kind of album you could record in full on one side, no flipping the tape halfway through, no songs left behind. Just 44 minutes of Audrey Horne: load it up, press play and let it run.

Audrey Horne’s DNA is unmistakable: Iron Maiden’s twin-guitar attack and grandeur; the swagger of Kiss and Mötley Crüe; the melodic instincts of Thin Lizzy and Europe; and the riff power of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Led Zeppelin. Ozzy Osbourne and Dio appear in the darker edges, Van Halen in the flash, Scorpions in the melodic weight and Deep Purple in the classic-rock muscle. Every so often, the sharper guitar work of the NWOBHM, particularly Diamond Head, creeps through.

Achilles

As soon as the intro riff kicks in, which is the same riff that becomes the chorus, “Can I Play With Madness” comes to mind. The DNA.

“Achilles” is the ultimate symbol of the warrior: almost invincible, terrifyingly capable, driven by honour, rage, pride and revenge.

But his story is also about the price of becoming the weapon everyone needs you to be. He wins glory and loses everything that makes glory worthwhile.

The song turns that mythology inside out. The warrior doesn’t want another battle. He wants a ceasefire. The repeated word starts to sound like someone trying to convince himself there must be another way.

“The blood that we spill to feed the mouth of greed.”

We dress war up as honour, freedom, territory, security, history, the flag, the cause and the enemy.

We build elaborate stories around violence because “somebody benefits from this” doesn’t make for an inspiring recruitment poster.

But blood is still blood, and greed is still greed. The people doing the bleeding are rarely the people deciding how much bleeding is necessary.

Maybe “Achilles” is every person who has spent a lifetime fighting somebody else’s war and finally gets tired. That isn’t weakness. That’s the beginning of the ceasefire.

In the Eye of the Hurricane

The intro and verses bring “Creatures of the Night” by Kiss to mind. The chorus, meanwhile, is pure Scorpions, and a certain song with “Hurricane” in its title.

“Carry on, into the eye of the hurricane.”

Sound familiar? That’s adulthood.

We’re sold the bullshit idea that eventually we arrive at permanent stability. Get the job. Pay off the mortgage. Find the person. Get your shit together. Then you can relax.
Except the hurricane doesn’t give a shit about your five-year plan.

The strange thing about a hurricane is that the most violent thing imaginable has a calm centre: the eye. You don’t defeat the storm by pretending it isn’t happening. You move through it until your feet hit the ground again.

The world throws enough shit at you and eventually you choose: let the storm destroy you, or become something it can’t blow away.
Carry on, not because everything is going to be okay, but because it isn’t.

Vampires

The intro and verse riffs recall “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Iron Maiden, merged with the pulse of “Heaven and Hell” by Black Sabbath and “Holy Diver” by Dio. There’s nothing else to do except bang your head.

“Achilles” was about conflict and “In the Eye of the Hurricane” about surviving chaos. “Vampires” is about the people who feed on you while pretending they aren’t the problem.

“You drank it all.”

Four words. The whole crime.

Some people don’t enter your life to share it. They enter to consume your time, attention, money, ideas, optimism, patience and belief in yourself.

They rarely announce themselves as vampires. They arrive looking like everybody else: friend, lover, boss, colleague, business partner, sometimes even family. They tell you they’re taking care of you while quietly taking everything from you.

That’s why the repeated “liar, liar” matters. The spell has broken. Once you see the vampire, you can’t unsee the teeth.

Make sure you stick around for the solo section with the “woah-oh” vocals. Brilliant.

God Damn Beautiful

This is high-energy AOR melodic rock with a steroid-strength foundation recalling “Just Another Night” by Mick Jagger, plus twin harmonies that bring Thin Lizzy to mind. Bassist Espen Lien also takes the lead vocal.

“Every turn you take is gonna lead you back to where you’ve been.”

That’s the trap. We convince ourselves we’re moving forward because we’re moving: new relationship, new job, new city, new haircut, new version of ourselves.

Look at me! I’m different!

No. You’re just taking the same baggage to a different postcode.
The road isn’t necessarily the problem. The driver is. You can change direction a hundred times and still arrive at the same destination if you haven’t changed what’s steering you.

Relationships expose this particularly well. We leave someone because they’re “the problem,” find somebody else and, six months later, have the same argument with a different face across the table.

Maybe the hardest part of heartbreak isn’t losing the person. It’s recognising the pattern.

Sometimes the person you’re trying to escape isn’t standing beside you. It’s the person in the mirror.

That’s why the chorus feels bittersweet rather than triumphant. She’s still beautiful. He still misses her. He still loves her. But love doesn’t automatically mean you belong together.

Goddamn beautiful. Goddamn painful.

Pretty Little Lies

It starts as a slow rock song, recalling “Sail Away” from Audrey Horne’s 2010 self-titled album.

“God Damn Beautiful” was about losing someone you still love. “Pretty Little Lies” is about knowing you’re causing the damage and continuing anyway.

“Don’t believe a word I say to you, ’cause telling little lies is what I do.”

Now there’s some fucking honesty.

The destructive lies aren’t always enormous. They’re the little ones: “I’m fine.” “It’s nothing.” “Of course I love you.” “Things will change.” “Just give me some time.”

Stack enough of them together and you build an alternate reality.

Sometimes we lie to ourselves. We say we’re staying because we love someone, when perhaps we’re afraid of being alone. We promise things will change when we already know what tomorrow will bring: nothing.

The pièce de résistance is the lead break, a song within a song. If it doesn’t make you play air guitar, check for a pulse.

When the “on and on” chants arrive, the energy rises, followed by violins in the final thirty seconds that push the riffs into “Kashmir” territory.

The only thing I can do is press play again.

Prodrome

A brief instrumental built around a warlike drum pattern and harmony guitars drawn from Audrey Horne’s Thin Lizzy and Maiden influences.

I had to look up what “Prodrome” meant, An early sign or symptom that signals the impending onset of a disease before major or specific symptoms appear.

Like fever, body aches, and tiredness often act as early warnings before a specific infectious illness takes full hold.

Insanity

Now we’re cranking. It feels as though they’ve taken their best track, “This Is War,” and reimagined it for the verses.

“Did I kill a man?”

That isn’t a confession. It’s worse. A confession means you know what you did. This character doesn’t.

Suddenly we’re inside the head of somebody who can’t trust the most basic fact about himself.

Did I do it? Was I there? Was it a dream? Am I the same person I was yesterday?

We construct stories about ourselves and spend our lives defending them: I’m a good person. I’m the victim. I always do the right thing. Then something happens that doesn’t fit the story.

“If there’s a God, tell him to leave me be.”

There’s no grand revelation or comforting answer. Just a man alone in the dark, surrounded by rain, rats and his own thoughts.

That’s where the Iron Maiden influence matters. The song is a prequel to “Hallowed Be Thy Name”.

Maiden’s condemned man is in prison, waiting to be executed. He faces death, questions God and considers what comes next.

“Insanity” belongs earlier in that story, before the cell, before the execution and before certainty.

And then comes the “Back in the Village”, inspired outro. Excellent.

Hell Is Eternity

Bass and drums start the song before an open-string melodic riff kicks in. It’s fast, high-energy and immediately engaging.

“It leaves a mark on me. The kind that you can’t see.”

The invisible stuff is harder to explain. You can walk into a room carrying ten years of pain and nobody knows. You smile, work, make dinner, crack a joke, and something is still eating you alive.

The monster doesn’t need claws or horns. It doesn’t even need to exist outside your head. It just needs access.

“Hell is eternity.”

That’s the real hell. Permanence. Pain is survivable when you believe it ends. Tell someone their suffering has no end and watch what happens to their world.

Six Feet in the Ground

The foundational DNA here comes from “Unmasked” and “Dynasty” era Kiss. “Naked City,” “Sure Know Something” and “Easy as It Seems” all come to mind.

“Monday early morning, I wake up and open up my eyes.”

The alarm goes off and, before your feet hit the floor, you already know how the day will feel. Same shit. Same routine. Same problems. Same person in the mirror.

“Days drag but nothing changes.”

Repetition is the real prison. Pain gives you something to fight. Repetition wears you down. One day becomes a week, a month, a year, and eventually you realise you’ve spent years waiting for change.

“Happiness is a long gone friend by now.”

Happiness used to live here. Now it’s gone. You can function and still feel fucking dead inside. You can show up while feeling six feet underground and everybody else is living on the surface.

“All I need is some time to think it over.”

Except time doesn’t solve everything. Sometimes it simply gives you more time to avoid what you need to confront.

“All I need is a drink to wait it out.”

It doesn’t solve the problem, just makes it quieter for a few hours.

“Most people learn faster when on fire.”

Pain is an excellent teacher. Unfortunately, most of us are terrible students until the exam is already burning.

Running Through the Night

This is fast and furious Iron Maiden. The verses recall “Aces High,” while the introduction feels influenced by the vibe from the “Powerslave” album.

Tony Soprano. That’s where we start. Tony fucking Soprano.
He’s a captain of industry, family man, criminal, violent, terrified, powerful and miserable.

Underneath it all, he’s “just a kid from New Jersey.”

“I’m going crazy and I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

There’s a guy losing his shit and moving forward.

“Right is wrong.”

There’s the problem. Once the rules become negotiable, everybody writes their own version of reality. The criminal is protecting his family. The businessman is playing the game. The politician is doing what has to be done. Everyone has a reason, a story and a version in which they’re the hero.

Nobody wakes up intending to become the villain. They wake up feeling justified.

Running toward something requires a destination. Running away only requires fear.

The repeated “Running through the night” gives us no arrival. Just movement. Again. Again. Again.
Then come the fragments: “Gloria,” “Suicide,” “Chinatown,” “Bring me down.”

Images, places, death, crime, despair, fame and violence mashed together.

And that section from the 2:30 mark?

I was ready to break my desk in half. The tempo change, groove and classic-rock blues are brilliant.

New Star Falling

After the chaos and self-destruction of “Running Through the Night,” this becomes intimate. The character isn’t running anymore. He’s hiding.

“From this place where I hide, stripped from pleasure and pride.”

Whatever version existed before has been reduced to whatever remains when the bullshit disappears.

There’s loneliness throughout the song, the ugly kind, the kind where you can be surrounded by people and still feel completely disconnected.

“As I’m sitting here beside you, I can’t feel you here.”

You can know somebody’s voice, face, habits and coffee order, yet still lose access to them, or they to you.

“If you’re looking for me, look closer and you will see a new star falling.”

A supernova isn’t just beautiful light. It’s destruction. A star reaches the end of itself and explodes; its death becomes its final spectacle.

It sounds like a warning: watch me disappear.

“Tell me how to undo what can’t be undone.”

The heart of the song: regret. You can’t rewind a conversation, unsay a sentence or return to who you were before you knew what you know now.

“Falling from grace, my supernova, lights out I’m falling down.”

The brightest person in the room can still be falling.

The sequencing gives “Achilles” a cinematic psychological arc.

“Achilles” asks why we’re fighting. “In the Eye of the Hurricane” asks how we survive chaos. “Vampires” asks who’s draining us. “God Damn Beautiful” asks what happens when we lose someone. “Pretty Little Lies” asks what damage we cause each other.

“Insanity” asks whether we can trust our own minds. “Hell Is Eternity” asks what happens when we can’t escape them. “Six Feet in the Ground” asks what happens when we have to get out of bed and live with it. “Running Through the Night” asks whether escape is possible, or merely another form of self-destruction. “New Star Falling” asks what remains when the running finally stops.

The album keeps moving inward: from the world outside, to the people around us, to relationships, lies, the mind, despair and identity.

By “New Star Falling,” that identity is burning out like a dying star.

Which brings us back to “Achilles”. He wasn’t invulnerable. His famous weakness was the one place where he could be wounded. Maybe “Achilles” isn’t about finding the strongest part of ourselves. Maybe it’s about discovering where we’re vulnerable, and what happens when that vulnerability becomes the battlefield.

“Achilles” is a great album, and I’m glad I’m a fan of Audrey Horne. I didn’t actually drop dollars on the band until “Blackout” came out. The self-titled album, my introduction to them, was downloaded free through cyber lockers.

Who said piracy doesn’t pay?

That free download turned into a fan, then a buyer, then somebody waiting for the vinyl to arrive. That’s how music gets you. One album slips through the cracks, and years later you’re still pressing play, still hearing the influences, still finding new things to say.

Audrey Horne take Iron Maiden, Kiss, Scorpions, Thin Lizzy, Black Sabbath, Dio, Europe, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Van Halen, Judas Priest, Diamond Head and all the rest, then turn those ingredients into something that belongs to them. “Achilles” sounds familiar without being second-hand, classic without being trapped in the past and modern without sanding off the danger.

That’s the real achievement. The album doesn’t simply remind me why I love hard rock. It reminds me why I became a fan of Audrey Horne in the first place.

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A to Z of Making It, Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Derivative Works, Influenced, Music, Unsung Heroes

Bangalore Choir — On Target: They Had Everything Except Time

There are records that arrive at exactly the wrong fucking moment. Bangalore Choir’s “On Target” is another record to add to those lists.

Released by Giant Records in 1992, “On Target” had the voice of a former Accept frontman, two guitarists carrying the DNA of an obscure but excellent 1980s hard-rock band, a rhythm section that had already come through another major-label act, production from Max Norman, and songs connected to people such as Jon Bon Jovi, Aldo Nova and Steve Plunkett.

This was a band assembled from musicians who had already spent years trying to make it.

Because the story of “On Target” isn’t really “here’s another forgotten hair-metal album.”

It’s the story of what happens when talented, experienced musicians get another shot and the world changes just as they’re taking it.

The lineage is the story. Start with David Reece.

Before Bangalore Choir, Reece had already won the musical lottery and discovered that winning the lottery doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve won.

He became the American singer chosen to replace Udo Dirkschneider in Accept and recorded “Eat the Heat” in 1989.

But “Eat the Heat” became controversial, the Accept experiment ended, and Reece returned to Los Angeles.

Instead of giving up, he started again. And Reece didn’t simply recruit random musicians.

He found John Kirk through the Guitar Institute of Technology in Hollywood. Kirk had previously played with Curt Mitchell in Reno band Razormaid. Mitchell joined.

That’s already a hell of a musical family tree. Then came Ian Mayo and Jackie Ramos.

Both had been members of Hericane Alice, the Atlantic Records band that released “Tear the House Down” in 1990.

Bangalore Choir’s management had also managed Hericane Alice, and the opportunity came almost immediately after Hericane Alice had been dropped.

So look at what you’re actually hearing:

David Reece — Accept
Curt Mitchell — Razormaid
John Kirk — Razormaid
Ian Mayo — Hericane Alice
Jackie Ramos — Hericane Alice

It’s absolutely a supergroup of experience.

And, more importantly, these weren’t musicians getting their first taste of the business.

They had already been through it.

The really strange thing about “On Target” is how much machinery was behind it.

Bangalore Choir played only a handful of Los Angeles shows before major-label interest arrived. Reece later recalled via the metalforcesmagazine.com that after around nine shows, the band had offers from labels around the city. Giant Records, distributed through Warner Bros., won the race.

Then Giant brought in Max Norman to produce. His résumé already included Ozzy Osbourne, Megadeth, Lynch Mob, Savatage and others.

The album also had Jon Bon Jovi and Aldo Nova connections on “Doin’ the Dance,” while “Loaded Gun” had Ricky Phillips among its co-writers.

And yet the album didn’t explode.

That’s the great paradox. The band had the musicians. The singer. The songs. The producer. The label. The industry connections. The look.

The timing should have worked. Except the timing didn’t.

And we are back to the seismic moment of 1991–92, when the musical ground underneath hard rock was moving.

Nirvana had detonated. Pearl Jam were exploding. Soundgarden were breaking through.

And then the record industry did what the record industry always does when it discovers something that sells.

It copied it.

The same machine that had saturated the Sunset Strip with interchangeable hair-metal bands now turned toward Seattle. Suddenly everyone wanted flannel, distortion, alienation and authenticity.

MTV changed.

Radio changed.

Labels changed.

The irony is that the industry eventually did to Seattle what it had done to the Sunset Strip: saturate the market with bands trying to reproduce the sound of the bands that broke through, until the movement itself became exhausted.

Bangalore Choir weren’t suddenly bad.

The market had stopped asking for what they were selling.

And that’s the brutal part of making it in music.

Music is a supply and demand economy. Talent isn’t enough. Hard work isn’t enough. Experience isn’t enough. You can spend ten years building something only to discover that the market has moved somewhere else.

Bangalore Choir got their opportunity. They just got it at the end of an era.

“Angel in Black”

And what a way to open the record.

“Angel in Black” immediately tells you what Bangalore Choir are.

Big guitars. Big vocal. Big chorus. Big fucking attitude. It’s melodic hard rock without apologising for the “rock” part.

Reece sounds enormous. There’s swagger and melodic freedom here.

There’s something familiar buried in the main riff too. It reminds me of the riff that comes after the chorus in Alice Cooper’s “Snakebite.”

The song had an interesting history too: it was originally associated with Autograph, with Steve Plunkett credited as its writer along with Jack Conrad. Their demo version was released on an Autograph anthology release.

“Loaded Gun”

An overused song title in the 70s and 80s. However this is the commercial punch.

It’s got some serious songwriting lineage around it. Written by Curtis Cuomo, Harry Paress and Rick Phillips.

Phillips is coming from a pedigree that involves “The Baby’s” and “Bad English”. He’s hardened and been around. Paress already had success writing for Vixen, including “Love Is a Killer.” He would go on to write songs for Fiona, Quiet Riot, Bobby Kimball and Steelhouse Lane. And then there is Curtis Cuomo. His name would later become much more recognisable when he appeared as a co-writer on “Psycho Circus” with Paul Stanley, plus on all the Paul Stanley sung tracks on the “Carnival of Souls” album.

So if “Angel in Black” introduces the band, “Loaded Gun” is the song designed to make the radio understand them.

It’s hooky, muscular and built around the kind of chorus that could have lived comfortably alongside late-80s Bon Jovi, Whitesnake or Def Leppard.

The song was pushed as a single and received trade promotion from Giant Records. The music video has since become a piece of pop-culture trivia because a very young Jared Leto appeared in it.

“If the Good Die Young (We’ll Live Forever)”

It’s one of those songs where the title sounds like something you’ve heard a hundred times, but the band sells it because the melody is stronger than the cliché.

“Doin’ the Dance”

This is one of the album’s most interesting tracks because of the songwriting pedigree.

Jon Bon Jovi and Aldo Nova are involved in the writing.

There’s groove. There’s melody. There’s attitude.

But it’s not their best track. It’s competent, commercial and perfectly engineered for the moment, but compared with “Angel in Black” and “Loaded Gun,” it doesn’t hit with the same force.

“Hold On to You”

The inevitable ballad. Co written by the band with Russell Miller.

The guitars become atmosphere rather than artillery, and the song provides the album with some breathing room.

“All or Nothin’”

This is one of the songs that reveals the band’s confidence.

It was one of the earliest songs written by the developing Bangalore Choir lineup, along with “Slippin’ Away.”

And you can hear that it isn’t trying to impress anybody.

It’s simply a band discovering its identity.

The riff is direct. The chorus is huge. The rhythm section drives rather than decorates.

And Reece attacks the vocal like a man who knows he has something to prove.

Which, frankly, he did.

“Slippin’ Away”

It’s a great piece of melodic rock. And the title is prophetic. Because things just slip away.

Eras. Youth. Relationships. Opportunities. And the musical culture that had created the conditions for Bangalore Choir to exist.

Reece has said via SleazeRoxx that decades later, “Slippin’ Away” remains one of the Bangalore Choir songs audiences know and sing along to.

That’s the ultimate vindication.

The industry may have forgotten the album. The audience didn’t.

It just took them longer to find it.

“She Can’t Stop”

An AOR gem about a lonely girl dancing under neon lights who can’t stop running away.

“Freight Train Rollin’”

This is one of the album’s hardest hitters. A great riff to kick it off.

The title tells you everything.

It’s movement. Momentum. Power. And the song doesn’t mess around.

I love the groove around the verse riffs. The simplicity is deceptive. Getting stuff to sound effortless is difficult.

“Just One Night”

And then the album closes.

“Just One Night” isn’t the biggest song here, and that’s probably why it works as the closer.

After all the swagger, sex, guitars and huge choruses, the record finishes without trying to manufacture some grand finale.

It’s simply another strong melodic hard-rock song.

And then it’s over.

Thirty-eight minutes.

Ten songs.

No filler marathon.

No desperate attempt to prove they’re the next Metallica.

Just a fucking good hard-rock album.

And then reality arrived.

Bangalore Choir had done everything right.

They had paid their dues. They had experienced musicians. They had a respected producer. They had a major-label deal. They had songs. They had management.

And still…

Nothing.

There’s a tendency to look back at bands like Bangalore Choir and think: “These guys just appeared, made an album and disappeared.”

No. That’s completely wrong. The musicians had been grinding for years.

Razormaid had been around since the early 1980s before “First Cutt” arrived in 1987.

Hericane Alice had spent years developing before Atlantic released “Tear the House Down.”

Reece had already gone through the extraordinary experience of joining Accept and recording a major-label album.

Mayo and Ramos had already experienced the major-label dream, and the pain of being dropped.

By the time these musicians stood together as Bangalore Choir, they weren’t beginners.

They were survivors.

You’re listening to musicians who had already learned how fucking hard it was.

And looking at where these five musicians went afterwards only strengthens the argument.

Mayo and Ramos moved into Bad Moon Rising, connecting them to Kal Swan and Doug Aldrich of Lion.

Jerry Best’s parallel Lion/Freak of Nature/Dio story eventually connects the same ecosystem to Mike Tramp, Dio and even Courtney Love.

Reece would go on to Sircle of Silence, Bonfire, Gypsy Rose and his solo work, eventually returning to Bangalore Choir decades later.

Mitchell and Reece would eventually revive Bangalore Choir.

The family tree keeps growing.

Here’s the beautiful part. The album didn’t disappear. It went underground. Collectors found it.

Hard-rock fans rediscovered it. CDs changed hands. People bought it on eBay years after its release.

And eventually a younger generation started hearing it without any of the baggage attached to 1992.

That’s the funny thing about music.

Sometimes the audience you were chasing isn’t the audience that eventually saves you.

“On Target” isn’t a lost masterpiece because it reinvented hard rock.

It’s a lost classic because it executed the genre extraordinarily well at exactly the wrong moment.

The guitars sound enormous. The vocals are killer. The songs are melodic without becoming soft. The production has the pedigree. The musicians had the experience.

And the album has something a lot of technically impressive records don’t: personality.

Could On Target have been a major commercial hard-rock record in 1987, 1988 or even 1989?

Absolutely.

But in 1992?

That’s the tragedy. The machine changed what it wanted.

That’s timing. And sometimes timing is the difference between a band everybody knows and a band people spend 30 years telling other people they should know.

Because Bangalore Choir didn’t miss because they weren’t good enough.

They missed because the target moved.

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