Well, here's this year's post. It seems like life has kind of just flown by, and I decided I needed to get back to my hobby of listening to music. The album for tonight is Strength in Numbers by Tyketto. I've been thinking about this album a bit lately and decided to dig it up from my mp3 archive.
I'll start with the nostalgia bit: I first became acquainted with Tyketto via a bootleg tape I got from my brother who got it from a friend of his. So when I found a new tape of this, their second album, at Starbound back in '94 I snapped it right up. I remember cranking it up on the beat up speakers I had mounted up on my bedroom wall. Then after High School I kind of forgot about it until the summer of '04 when I rediscovered it and listened to it while I would go running in the mornings. Since then it's been on and off of my playlist but it's always been a favorite.
For those who don't know who Tyketto is, you should. Tyketto is a fantastic east-coast hair band from the early '90s who put out their first album "Don't Come Easy" in 1990 to critical acclaim but it was a bit of a commercial disappointment so not as many people in the USA know about them. The rest of the story you can look up on Wikipedia and I won't waste my breath on a bio.
Strength in Numbers was their 2nd album, which was released in 1994 after a bit of a delay, on a different label from the first, and featured a different bass player. But the core members including Danny Vaughn on lead vocals and Brooke St James on guitar were still there, and the sound of this record is very much a continuation of their style from the first. The impression I get is this band sounds very confident, both in their playing and songwriting. There's an honesty in this album that was hard to find in the mid 90s when everyone was trying to compete with grunge, and I commend these guys for sticking to their guns and releasing a real rock record with no attempt to change their style, playing the music the way it should be played.
The opening title track of the album starts of energetically, with Vaughn's vocal delivery sounding like a cross between Jimi Jamison and a pack of snarling wolves. (Ok I admit it, I wrote this entry partly just so I could say that.) Maybe I'm unduly influenced by the cover art on that point. But the sound has a great balance between the very low bass, the guitar riffs, drums and vocals. The whole record has a very polished sound and it carries through all of the songs.
Track two- "Rescue me" is another up tempo song with more great guitar riffs and excellent backing vocals that really enhance the chorus. The use of backing vocals on this record really lends a fulness to the overall production, again, expertly placed like all the sound elements on this album.
Track three- "End of Summer Days" is a mid-tempo ballad that moves along nicely and provides a good example of the country-tinged rock sound that in my opinion should have been the natural direction that rock music ought to have taken in the 90s. The lyrics of this track bring to mind universal themes of longing for lost love and summertime home-town experiences that I find easy to relate to. Plus the beat of this song is easy to dance to, it could have been a real crossover hit.
"Catch My Fall" continues the laid back mid-tempo neo-country feel with heavier guitars and more of those fantastic backing vocals. The album then takes an unplugged turn with "The Last Sunset", a classic storytelling song that chronicles a man escaping and settling in Mexico, slowly revealing that he's a wanted bank robber, who finally gives up on running and enjoys one more sunset while waiting for the police to come.
While I don't have time to do a full track by track, and I can't personally endorse the lyrics on every single song (that's up to the individual listener when it comes to hard rock music) this album has a lot of good songs and no filler, musically.
Another of the highlights of this record for me is "Meet Me in the Night", which has one of those clean pop guitar picking riffs in the opening and a gradual buildup of sound that I personally love to listen to just for the way it sounds structurally.
Towards the end of the album comes "Inherit the Wind" which has a cool intro, a similar beat to "Rescue me" and again showcases Danny Vaughn's vocal delivery in a way similar to the opening track.
The final track of the album, a remix of "Standing Alone" from the first album featured some re-recorded guitars and vocals and added a nice touch to one of their best ballads which made for a very good single to re-introduce the band to casual listeners. This song has a lot of meaning for me and was one of the songs that helped me through some of the loneliest times in my life, and is part of the reason I still listen to this band while other heavy metal bands fell by the wayside.
Rumor has it that Tyketto is finally working on an all- new album after all these years and I'm really looking forward to it.
