Year Of Metal #065: Lizzy Borden - Love You To Pieces
To a large extent I could copy and paste the entry for the Alice Cooper record here. Like Al’s efforts, this is a schlocky LP with an emphasis on theatrics and a singer with an eponymous, gender switching name. Also like Cooper’s work, this 1985 record is quite a lot better than you’d imagine it would be.
Love You To Pieces bristles with debut LP energy, and a great sense of right place, right time. Lizzy Borden crash landed in LA in 1985; as decent as the songs are on here, in no other time could they have made a career off of this kind of music. That’s not to say they don’t have the chops: open “Council For The Cauldron” is powered by some excellent, Maiden-esque twin guitar heroics and a chance to show out on a brief but flash solo. “Red Rum” has a nicer riff still, galloping chords complimented by a lovely sweeping pattern. They’ve got the chops, and they’re not beholden to the hair metal side of things, with plenty of influence from thrash and old school UK gear.
When they want to be silly, though, they're pretty darn silly. “Love You To Pieces” brings a demented vocal performance out of Borden (as in the person). The mellow parts are multi tracked and reverbed beyond recognition to disguise the fact that it’s really not the singer’s strong suit. There are other tics too, weird purrs and growls that serve the purpose of keeping the band engaged through a downtempo number. It eventually drags its way to a tremendous (albeit brief) sweeping solo that just about makes the whole thing worthwhile.
The more cocksure “American Metal” picks up significantly when the guitars launch into a twisted rendition of “America The Beautiful”, Lizzy Borden perhaps searching for their Jimi Hendrix moment. Elsewhere we get “Warfare”, which is notable mainly for the fact that its riff is basically exactly the same as the one The Offspring would use on “The Kids Aren’t Alright” more than a decade later, only with a bit of a swing to it.
It certainly doesn’t hit the heights of Alice Cooper’s album, and it does feel as though Lizzy Borden don’t quite want to give themselves up to the camp and performance art that would make Cooper (the man more than the band) a more or less relevant figure half a century later. They have their hearts set on a harder sound, and more often than not, that works in their favour. They end on a strong note with the clobbering finale “Rod Of Iron”, which serves as a final push to get some real heft behind an often silly subgenre of heavy music. They’re also quite rightly eager to flex their musicianship - there’s some superior playing on here.
This does lead to the filler being quite noticeably filler, is the flipside. Not even one album in and the content gets a little formulaic: pick a topic - murder, cannibalism - find a pretty simple riff, have Borden holler over it, repeat. It’s a rare instance of fairly mediocre songwriting being saved by production and playing just about slick enough to get it over the line. It definitely exceeded my expectations, but I can see why they’re not so well remembered among the hair metal fraternity.
