Kane Roberts
s/t

Kane Roberts known for playing guitar on some Alice Cooper albums and also for looking like some kind of Rambo caricature with a guitar formed like a machine gun but if you like machine gunning in hardrock there is always the Trillium song with that name. To be honest I would say that the guitar looks ridiculous, albeit there is one thing to say for it: at least it is a rather individual thing, I have not seen any other guy’s guitar looking like that. This is the self titled debut album by Kane and it has a cover artwork that looks dreadful, kind of Manowarish or some other stupid band like that. And reading up on Kane Roberts and looking at his website I would say that on the guy seems completely uninteresting on all accounts. Still, I don’t really go by that when reviewing and album, that is also why I do not bother to look up a band/artist before having formed an opinion about their music because I would probably have disliked this album on the face of it.

I think that you could describe the music of this album as insignificant, it sound like a typical late eighties hardrock album. The singer who is Kane himself sings like the typical rock singer, nothing special there either. The songs have typical rock structures with verses and choruses, but there is one track that is only Kane playing the guitar to break this off a bit. The sound is authentic eighties, it sounds quite dated when listening to it today if I am honest. The album in itself is decently varied so that you can recognise the songs and differentiate them from one another. Playing time is authentic eighties as well with eleven tracks and around 40 minutes of music is what it offers. It seems that this album has fetched some high prices so a rerelease might be a decent way to get to buy this album at a more fair price.

When listening to this album however, a question emerges. That question is why? Why rerelease this album? It is not particularly good for what it is, neither does it offer anything of significant in stylistic terms, it just sound like any eighties rock album. Sure Kane knows enough about guitar playing to make an album but his song writing leaves a lot to desire as the songs are quite insignificant and the listening experience of this album feels indifferent, maybe even dull. It is not a particularly good album, the songs often don’t feel connected as verses and choruses feels like put together from different songs, there is one song that is an electric guitar solo with no other instrument and it sucks so much that you just want to vomit all over the stereo when hearing it. The introducing song Rock Doll is also a very bad song that feels very fragmented like the parts are from a few different songs.

There is only one song that feels like a good song, the rest may not be completely bad but neither are they good. The song I am talking about is Triple X, it is catchy and falls into place really well even though the lyrics are dreadful. All in all I think that this is a completely insignificant album as it offers nothing you haven’t already got and even if you were looking at it when it was originally released that feeling would still be the same and it is not easy to shake off the feeling that it is a pointless album. If you like the typical rock music of the late eighties then maybe you would get some enjoyment from it but otherwise there is a lot of better music to buy out there. This album is just too bland, too insignificant, the guy is too full of himself and it is just too much of an uninteresting album to really work.