This was a fairly forgettable debut album and that is quite surprising when you have John Waite on vocals and a world-leading producer like Bob Ezrin at the helm. Something must have gone terribly wrong when they made this one. They would come back much stronger at a later point in time, though.
Read on!
Nappy dread
The Babys (Chrysalis CHR1129) **
Album review by Geoff Barton
THE BABYS are the Chrysalis label’s great hopes for ’77. Already the band have had a maxi single made available and have been treated to extensive poster promotion all over London’s Underground. Indeed, it’s alleged that they were signed up after only the briefest of demonstrations of their talents (ie: after the screening of a single promo film).
All of which would seem to suggest that the Babys are something extra special.
Which they aren’t. At least, if this debut album is anything like an accurate representation of their talents.
A four man outift (the backgrounds of the members being less than illustrious, even though drummer Tony Brock did once play with Strider and Spontaneous Combustion), the Babys have come up with a curiously fragmented platter. Bob Ezrin produced, its sound is surprisingly muggy and ill-defined, far removed indeed from the dynamic Alice Cooper and Kiss albums that the man has worked on in the past. Mind you, it’s not as if the material would inspire any producer to do particularly great things at the boards.
Strictly routine stuff, overall. Although the LP starts off fairly promisingly with the endearingly mindless `Lookin’ For A Love’ — lots of brash guitar solos, thudding bass work, echoed vocals and simplistic lyrics like ‘Up in the sky, deep in the sea, I’m looking for love, where can it be?’ — and ‘If You’ve Got The Time’ — riotous enough, together with a sub-`Jean Genie’ guitar riff — matters soon go rapidly downhill.
The remaining three tracks out of the five on side one — ‘I Believe In Love’, ‘Wild Man’ and ‘Laura’ — are ballads, dull and plodding to an extreme, totally running against the band’s ‘uncompromising and raunchy’ image.
Side two falls flat on its face almost immediately with a dumb, Fifties’ tongue-in-cheek crooner called ‘I Love How Much You Love Me’, and through ‘Rodeo’, ‘Over And Over’ (another tedious slow number), ‘Read My Stars’ and ‘Dying Man’ (jauntily funky, quite dramatic and arguably the best track on the album, but coming much too late in the day to save face) never manages to pick itself more than a few inches up off the ground.
Of course, live performance may lend a whole new perspective to the band’s music, but somehow I doubt it. As far as I’m concerned, the Babys are still in their infancy. They need time to develop, to successfully combine their melodic/heavy rock leanings and write some truly memorable songs. A lot of time.
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