Hailing from Swedish, Mama Kin present their debut album ‘In the City’, and it is clear from their image and music, they are very much in love with the retro hard rock scene. Whilst not falling into the bluesy end of the spectrum, Mama Kin stay out of the punk attitude arena to simply produce hard rock period.
This one has ‘Hot in the Shade’ to ‘Psycho Circus’ Kiss written all over it (missing out ‘Carnival of Souls’ if you ever considered that a real Kiss album!). I especially refer to the vocal delivery from Ward. ‘You Belong to Me’ bobs along with a similar melody and guitar tone in the chorus to the verse of Kiss’ ‘Hide Your Heart’, whilst the vocal delivery on ‘Mrs Operator’ reminds me of the ‘Moral Judgement’ EP from Smalltown Heroes I remember from the mid 1990’s. This is not a bad thing, a lot of bands are trying to adopt the classic rock sound these days, and some do it well, some not. There is certain homage to Paul Stanley’s voice throughout the release. When some solos do surface, that kind of is the only thing that’s makes this different to it being labelled “heard it all before”. ‘Champagne, Chicks & Rock n’ Roll’ is by far the stand out tune; this is the only one with pent up energy and a breath of fresh air to the mid paced stuff on the remainder of the album. ‘Too Much’ really is a latter day Kiss tune, it’s so similar, maybe a hybrid of that and the ‘Asylum’ era sound, very full production and quite bombastic and quite retro, if you close your eyes, it’s very very very Paul Stanley, I wonder if I have the right CD in the stereo! To be honest I like this tune, but then I am a huge fan of the aforementioned.
I am torn with this release, whilst it does rekindle memories of other albums I listened to years ago, perhaps that is not a good thing when Mama Kin are displaying their work in their own right, perhaps just that little bit more originality needs to come out, however, it is still a solid release in my book and Kiss fans would certainly like this, it would be fair to say that after a couple of listens I am too a fan.
http://www.mamakin.se
http://www.myspace.com/mamakin
http://www.leonmusic.se
