Mad Anthony
Party Heaven Hell Whatever!

It is party and whatever that comes around when we check this album by Mad Anthony. What strikes me is what a bad band name Mad Anthony is, and the title sucks as well. The artwork is funny though, cool socks. If you don’t know about this band it is understandable, they were part of the Bay Area rock scene in the eighties with bands like Y&T, Night Ranger, and the likes – in difference to named bands they never got any record deal, so they never got to sell plenty of records like those mentioned bands that are of a similar quality.

This was recorded in the eighties, 1987 I read on the backside, and now Eonian Records have dug it up to give it a chance to be noticed. And I must ask why, what is the point? This sounds like the genre usually does, touch of glam, sleaze, catchy choruses, some anthemic arena rockers, some ballad, what you expect to hear. They also have a singer that sounds pretty much like they all do, the backside of listening to immense amounts of music is that you realise that most of it sounds the same whichever genre you select, and the really exciting stuff are very rare. This is not one of those exciting records.

Mad Anthony makes a decent thing here, the songs are good enough, the sound as well, sounds like the eighties. But is it good? Well, I would say that it is about as generic as they come, so very average, or mediocre. I find this album to be okay to listen to, the songs are catchy enough and so on, but it is as exciting as going to the dentist or painting a rock in the colour grey. Mad Anthony doesn’t wow or excite, the songs feels borrowed from others. I am sure that they would have been successful if they had gotten the proper backing for a release back in the day, I mean Warrant, Y&T, Night Rangers were all quite successful despite making mediocre albums, so why couldn’t these guys have succeeded as well?

In the end I think that time has caught up and left Mad Anthony behind, the point of this release is not easy to see. There are better alternatives if you like the style, and I have never really understood why we should add things that were once deemed inadequate to a pool that keeps getting more mediocre for each release, the new stuff is more than enough to make the genre increasingly dull. Just another face in the crowd, or whatever parable you would like to use for something which existence is rather pointless.

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