SON OF A BITCH – Victim You

Angel Air

What you would expect from 3/5ths of Saxon is exactly what you get. No nonsense riffmongerous chunks of mainstream metal. That description could probably fit neatly into a copy of Kerrang! circa 1984 and so could this album. Although it is a re-issue of a 1996 collection, the sound has much earlier roots. The band was a resurrection of the pre-Saxon outfit put together by Graham Oliver and Steve Dawson. For this incarnation, former Saxon drummer, Pete Gill joined them and the line up was completed by Thunderhead singer Ted Bullet and session guitarist Haydn Conway.

With that pedigree, allied to a solid production, Son Of A Bitch delivered a decent album, albeit very much of its time: “Bitch Of A Place To be” has a killer riff and a piledriving rythmn; “More For Me” chugs along merrily; and “Driving Sideways” has enough unrepentant, unreconstructed sexual fantasy to make Airborne blush. (OK, maybe not quite!) “No-ones Getting Over” is the best thing on here. A track that builds from a spare acoustic introduction to the full-English-with-fried-bread of the chorus, underpinned by thunderous drums and apocalyptic cymbal crashes from Mr Gill.

It’s not such quality right through though. “I Still Care” is a ballad by numbers and a few of the others feature powerchords from the home-for-old-metalheads, dusted down for a nice run out.

The timing of the original release was interesting, coming not long after Oliver had been booted out of Saxon (the album’s “Treacherous Times” could well be an allusion to this). The band soon folded and not long after, Oliver and Dawson were involved in legal action over rights to the Saxon name. This re-release 12 years later doesn’t feel particularly relevant in a post nu-metal world, but taken at face value, it is just pretty darned good fun.

***1/2

Dave Atkinson

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