If you’ve ever hung out in rehearsal rooms you’ll immediately recognise the point reached by Rawk Dawg in 2004 when they recorded this mini-album. This band prides itself on its raw, unpolished approach to making hard rock music, yet this approach can have drawbacks as well as benefits.
On the plus side, ‘She Runs Away’ gives me the impression that I’ve seen Rawk Dawg support a major act on a theatre tour. It is certainly their most complete track. Much of their other material starts promisingly but doesn’t develop. In the debit column, a lack of variation (how about a few middle-eights, guys?) and a conformity of guitar sound across the half-hour length of the piece form the biggest obstacles to that development.
The band is tight and makes no apology for revering the likes of Free and UFO, vocal lines frequently being answered by distorted guitar licks. To be fair, ‘We Only Came To Rock’ does exactly what it says on the tin, in that it meets our established rock fan expectations.
‘You & Me & You’ has by far the best lyrical story line and throughout the CD there are occasional flashes of genuine originality in the lyrics, which is some achievement in this genre. Sometimes, unfortunately, these merely serve to highlight a cliché that appears shortly afterwards. Closing track ‘Beware Of Angels’ is strong but sums up the promise and frustration of this body of work in progress.
On ‘In My Mind’, Rawk Dawg’s Jo Island sings that he has “seven kisses…three left to go”. Trade them in for more pre-production time, Jo, or better still offer them up to a record company executive in return for an advance. I’d love to hear Rawk Dawg again when they make an album that encapsulates and crystalises their best ideas.
