close

Philadelphia Road - The Bacon Brothers Album Review

Posted: 8th December 2011
Review Info
Rating:
2 out of 5
Release Date:
31st Oct 2011
Label:
Hypertension Music
Reviewer:
Matt Fancy

Album Review

Kevin and Michael Bacon are the Bacon Brothers. Leaving younger brother Biffa at home in Viz, these two guitar slingin hot shots are REAL MEN of AMERICA who like beers in bars, great big cars, shooting big guns and frilly white bras. Well, maybe not the bras. Kevin Bacon will be familiar to many from being in every film ever made, while older brother Michael is apparently a go-to composer for film and television. Philadelphia Road is a career spanning retrospective featuring 19 songs from 15 years - all of which sound the same and are nothing whatsoever to do with soft, spreadable cheese. So, is this collection going to leave listeners with the Tremors? Or are the Bacons unsubtle tunes just Sleepers? (no more crap Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon film based puns promise).

Well, to be honest its all very bland. Nice comfortable safe rock which preaches a crap rebellion of beers and girls and bars and blah. Tune into any middle of the road station in the US and tripe like this pumps out of the speakers reaffirming fat truckers that the good old USofStateside is still a simple but proud nation thatll be your good buddy unless you break its heart then itll waste no time at all in kicking ass etc etc.

Unhappy Birthday is some sort of 9/11 tribute with lyrics by a teenager while in Old Guitars the Bacons dribble on about Sam and Dave, The Boss and Buddy Holly all of whom would have thrown the chord sequence of this hash into the bin before writing a far better song. Guess Again is perplexing as its surely a tongue in cheek self-referential mockery but the humour is lost somewhere in the 25th verse. Far better is Angelina, a genuinely lovely ballad with some subtle cello low in the mix. Sooner or Later is also a great improvement on earlier tunes a melancholic ode to the passing of time with a haunting flute and more of that excellent cello which thankfully resists the urge to turn into a massive rawk beast and is all the better for it. When You Decide Youve Stayed Too Long is another low temperature croon from Kevin Bacon, a great song which is evocative of Daniel Lanois production.

A hit and miss bunch really. Far better than many actors vanity projects but theres still too much middle of the road padding and squawking about manliness and bars. But then, if you spend your life eating swan with cigar chewing movie moguls, maybe bars and cars are what you dream of. The Bacon Brothers then: far from a Flatliner but not exactly Footloose either.(*Sound of clich machine exploding*)

Matt Fancy