Year Of Metal #072: Scorpions - In Trance
Scorpions are one of those strange bands that are undeniably huge, still doing the business long after many of their contemporaries, and yet have never really had any impact on me. I know “Rock You Like A Hurricane,” of course (though I could really bring no more than the first two lines of the chorus to mind), and I listened to that podcast about “Wind Of Change” on which Klaus Meine came across well, so I’m to some extent warmly disposed towards them. Their third record, 1975’s In Trance, seems to be a turning point for the band, leaving behind their proggy roots and embracing hard rock, but hopefully for me prior to their descent into properly daft hair metal stuff.
Yeah, this is pretty daft stuff. It opens on a reasonably promising note with “Dark Lady”, which moves at a good swinging, galloping pace. Meine’s caterwauling vocals are pretty fun - he shrieks away in the background without much in the way of rhyme or reason but it feels like he’s expressing himself the best way he knows how, rather than trying to be cool (there’s nothing cool on this LP). In a theme that will continue across the album, the guitars sound great. They’re often the saving grace, and the solo that kicks in at the halfway point is fantastic. Uli Jon Roth sweeps across the fretboard and dive bombs at will; Meine smartly cedes the track to these histrionics.
It gets worrisome when the next two rather boring tracks maintain the exact same plodding rhythm from one to the next. “In Trance” is particularly poor, taking an age to get going and feeling a bit gutless when it finally does. The band keep taking dramatic pauses that don’t feel at all earned and make a four minute song seem more like fourteen. “Life’s Like A River” is better but not by a massive amount. It’s aided massively by more immense guitar work from Roth, who treats himself to multiple solos, some of which truly sing. When the track starts to punch, it does so with real heft; a shame it takes so long to get there.
You can’t say In Trance is without its charm, as exemplified by “Robot Man”, a song about a robot. The vocals are processed to sound a bit roboty (but not very roboty). It’s never right to take a pop at lyricism in the artist’s second language, but there are some doozies in here (“I say babe, it's not a vision / It's reality, this is a robot scene what we live in”). The 1970s were a great decade for science fiction, and you can’t say Scorpions weren’t playing their part.
The best track on the record is probably “Evening Wind”, a dark, bluesy number that uses a chord sequence not unlike “Ike’s Rap II” or Portishead’s “Glory Box”. It’s surprising how well Meine’s rough and tumble vocals are suited to this more subdued form. He creeps on the track, smartly buried quite deep in the mix, while the guitars sound like they could be played with an e-bow. With its sense of build and evolution, it’s the closest the record comes to being proggy - maybe that style suited them better after all.
Scorpions come across on In Trance like, to put it bluntly, goofballs. They’re charming throughout but almost none of the songs have much going for them beyond the guitar work of Roth, which is often genuinely excellent. I don’t know when they hit it big - the next album chronologically has such a gross cover that I ended my investigation - but from the stuff I’ve heard here, it’s not surprising I never got on board with them.
