Album review: Steve Stevens – Atomic Playboys

By STEVE MASCORD

WITH Guns N’ Roses opening a whole new chapter in music industry clonedom, the HR/HM catalogue has been cluttered with sleazy riffs, leather and denim of late. What the release of this album and the Mr Big opus does is squeeze rock ‘n’ roll back into the spandex and opens up the sunroof.
While, the US scene is now obsessed with a slummy Sunset Strip view of things, former Billy Idol guitarist Steve Stevens takes us back to the beaches with this piece of Van Halenesque extravagance.
Stevens says he is sick of doing “the raygun” on his guitar and he wants to play serious, off-the-wall rock. Well, if that sound about 30 seconds into the title track isn’t a ray gun, then it’s a laser blaster. Such acrobatics are what gives Stevens an advantage over his rivals and he’d be a goose not to use them. The songwriting, mind you, is a little inconsistent. “Atomic Playboys” is pure open-top car anthem stuff — the riff has already been ripped off by one FM station for a station promo. “Crackdown” is tremendously disposable good time rock ‘n’ roll, in the same league as Diamond Dave’s solo efforts. But each time the album appears to be taking on a distinctly commercial complexion, Stevens skids somewhere left of field.
It’s this quality that makes Steve Stevens Atomic Playboys interesting, and frustrating.
For Idol fans, the material is somewhat less commercial and more techno-metal in outlook. Vocalist Perry McCarty, it must be said, has an indistinctive and deceptively capable vocal range and handles the often unpredictable nature of his material well.
Not a milestone release, but a bloody entertaining one that has come at the wrong end of the American summer.
Hey, but it’s definitely at the right end of my summer.

Get Steve Stevens Atomic Playboys on CD