Turn It Up

Album review

Just a few years removed from their wholesale conversion from folk music to rock & roll, Northern Ireland's Mama's Boys had a very impressive debut album -- 1982's Plug it In -- under their belts, and were hungering for more with their second independently recorded opus, 1983's Turn It Up. Perhaps they were a little too hungry, though, given the new album's accelerated evolution toward a more polished commercial rock sound that was sure to gain the band more airplay, but wound up sacrificing some of their working-class purity along the way. This certainly explains the fundamentally good but mildly contrived and derivative qualities of predictable numbers like "Couldn't Take Anymore" (which grooves a little too close to UFO for comfort), "Midnight Rendezvous" and "Face to Face" -- as well as the lush ballad "Too Little of You to Love" (very reminiscent of Gary Moore's singles from the same time period) -- and even the tough-nut rocker "Gentleman Rogues" (a mixture of Montrose's "Space Station No. 5" and Van Halen, with splashes of Hammond organ). Ironically, Mama's Boys managed to copy no one but themselves on the bluesy "Lonely Soul" (which is the spitting image of their debut album's "Belfast City Blues"), while irresistible highlights like "Loose Living" (slightly redolent of Journey, but excellent just the same) and "Freedom Fighters" (featuring a few folk-fiddle throwbacks and twin guitar harmony tributes to Thin Lizzy) offered only temporary respites from the oftentimes bland surroundings. But of course this sort of sound-sanitizing progression was anything but surprising during the '80s, and therein lies the greatest distinction between the McManus brothers' first two records: while Plug It In was undoubtedly a product of the ‘70s, Turn It Up was an ‘80s album through and through. That's the way it goes, and of much greater concern was how quickly the former child folk prodigies bought into rock & roll, then cashed into quasi-AOR here, and finally caved into hair metal concessions on future releases that would ultimately be the death of them.

© Eduardo Rivadavia /TiVo