Cherry Red [Release date 28.06.24]

CD1: Let It Roll (1979)
CD2: Lost Demos (1980)
CD3: In Your Face (1981)
CD4: Below The Belt (1984)
CD5: Early Mixes

1979, 14 years before Brad Sinsel’s War Babies became the only band not to make it out of Seattle – despite sharing the local tour circuit with Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains and Sound Garden – the Sinsel led TKO released their debut album, Let It Roll (CD1). It got them tours with Van Halen, Cheap Trick and other marquee names, but fame and fortune eluded them.

A reconfigured band would later evolve into much more of a hard rock machine, but the debut has an undeniably anglicised pop sound. There’s no mistaking the Who/Mott influences on the inventive ‘Ain’t No Way To Be’ and ‘Only Love’, with Sinsel’s vocals proving to be just as animated and theatrical as Daltrey’s or Hunter’s. Deliberate artifice or just the sum of their influences? Either way, the music had considerable dramatic heft – ‘Kill The Pain’ and ‘Gutter Boy’ sound like carefully constructed routes into the rock’n’roll limelight. And while these songs got them noticed, they didn’t really make the wider emotional connection needed to sell in volume.

This reissue has the usual clarity and oomph we have come to expect from Cherry Red’s remastering tech wizards. Plus seven explosive bonus live tracks – each one revealing a band straining to break free of the studio straitjacket, striving to become the band they really wanted to be.
On the follow up, they did.

The Lost Demos (CD2): Sinsel: “You can hear the sonic shift between Let It Roll and these demos. The band had returned to our much heavier roots, and our next album shows it”.

The demos blossomed into In Your Face, (CD3) which was recorded in 1981, produced by Rick Keefer, and released in 1984. Unfortunate timing perhaps, as it was competing with the new wave of glam and hard rock . . . in the form of Ratt, Wasp, Keel and other four letter words, but why it was swamped by these remains a mystery to this day.

The songwriting is razor sharp, the choruses are bigtime stadium fillers, the riffs are broad strokes – bolder now, mainlining on pumping major chords. For several wonderful minutes, ‘Run Out Of Town’ and ‘Give Into The Night’ show off a raggedness, a controlled rough and tumble, an identity defining sound that may slip out of their grasp from time to time elsewhere, but not here, and even ordinary songs like ‘I Can Do Without You’ and ‘I Wanna Fight’ are elevated way beyond their pay grade thanks to gritty performance and upscaled arrangements.

The album has an ill found reputation for not being particularly well recorded. When you consider the sonics coaxed out of the source tapes on this remaster, it’s clear that the problem lay with the original mastering.
This reissue comes with a freshfaced remix of the complete album, plus hugely informative liner notes.

The band’s third and last album, Below The Belt, (CD4/1986) was again produced by Rick Keefer, and released on burgeoning Indie label, Roadrunner Records. TKO had grown in stature and reputation to this point, enjoying considerable critical acclaim. Sinsel was considered to be one of the outstanding rock vocalists of his generation, and truly talented guitarists – like Adam (Bomb) Brenner and Kjartan Kristoffersen – came and went, (to the band’s inevitable loss, it has to be said).

Keefer and the band didn’t stray too far from the In Your Face template, adding a light touch layer of polish here and there, balancing the band’s previous gravitation toward unbridled, melodic rock abandon. The effect is not totally successful, taking the edge off the stuttering, one-two punch of ‘Below The Belt’ and ‘Can’t Let Go’. Yet it works a treat on the more restrained, finely wrought hard rock of ‘With My Back To The Wall’ and the effortlessly cool ‘Chains Don’t Change’. But it’s hard to shoehorn artistic gestures like these into the claustrophobically close limits of hard rock. And even with the rock press on its side, Below The Belt failed to sell in sufficient numbers to call it a success.

(Between Let It Roll and In Your Face, Sinsel briefly formed the Suicide Squad with guitarist Rick Pierce. They recorded a 4 track EP, which now makes its CD debut, tacked onto the end of Below The Belt.)

And finally…CD5 circles back to the beginning, with 11 Early Mixes of the In Your Face tracks, so we can hear where they began, neatly completing the TKO picture.
In fact, for TKO fans, this anthology could not be any more complete. For fans of the genre, who know little of TKO, it will be a goldmine. *****

Review by Brian McGowan

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