A 13 track 'Very Best Of.', plus 3 new songs from a band who always had their eyes on the prize, but whose fifteen minutes eluded them.
Considering they've had more vocalists than the Vienna Boys' Choir, this is a surprisingly cohesive collection of hard rock highlights from a band who, in 1992, dropped out of radar range, mid flight.
By a career crushing coincidence, they'd released their third album 'Go All The Way' in the same year that Nirvana captured the zeitgeist.
For
China and a million other bands, the rest was simply history.
For the bands who didn't crash and burn, low altitude cruising was then the order of the day, stopping only to refuel and occasionally to record and release new material.
China's subsequent album releases have been uneven affairs, so the vast bulk of this 'Best of.' is taken from the band's 1988 self titled debut and 'Sign In The Sky' from 1989.
They've often been compared to fellow Swiss bands
Gotthard and Krokus, but there are strong echoes of Oz hard rock and eighties Glamrock in these grooves.
A strange combination, but it works.
You can hear all of the above in the raw, primal riffing that underpins songs like 'Shout It Out', 'All I Do Is Wait' and 'Rock City'.
In addition, there's plenty of stadium filling melodic hard rock, punctuated by banner headline choruses, driven along by gang vocal fervour.
'Sign In The Sky' and 'The Fight Is On' are huge, arena rock monsters, but the true heavyweights are the mighty, yet finely drawn 'In The Middle Of The Night', and the exuberant, exhilarating 'Don't Ever Say Goodbye'.
The perceptive will quickly recognise that guitarist Claudio Matteo is clearly the band's driving force. His axework frames each and every track.
That goes for the new material too. 'Girl On My Screen' flatters to deceive (and owes a debt of gratitude to the Temptations' 'Get Ready'), 'Trapped In The City' sounds like it's trapped in a cliché. Thankfully, 'Stay' saves the day. It's hardly original, but it shows imagination and songwriting craft.
The new stuff will struggle to satisfy old fans, never mind attract new ones, but the old stuff will be well worth anyone's investment.
Written by
Brian Friday, July 18, 2008
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