zebra

This is a strange one, even by schlock-rock stan­dards – imag­ine a cross between Rush and Led Zeppelin (plus a dash of Yes), com­plete with a lead singer who has absorbed the styl­is­tic tics of the singers from each band.  Then, imag­ine said band play­ing a radio-slick fusion of hard rock, prog and AOR, deftly jux­ta­pos­ing FM rock moves with AM pop hooks.  Zebra’s debut album offers this kinetic bun­dle of moods and styles  — and then some.

Zebra started in the mid-1970’s as a club band that spent years build­ing up fol­low­ings in New Orleans and New York, divid­ing their stage set between cov­ers and orig­i­nals.  By the time they got their record con­tract in 1983, they had cre­ated a schlock-rock fusion they could truly call their own.  Some of the songs on here were as much as five years old by the time they were recorded so each tune is highly pol­ished, with every hook neatly arranged in its proper place.  The pun­ters liked it, result­ing in album that was Atlantic’s fastest-selling debut record of that era.

The big radio hits were “Tell Me What You Want,” a swag­ger­ing tune that has singer Randy Jackson doing his best Robert Plant banshee-wail over a stomp­ing melody that pits cock-rock gui­tar riffs against sleek, Rush-style synths, and “Who’s Behind The Door?,” a truly bizarre mini-epic about alien encoun­ters that starts off like Zep’s “Over The Hills And Far Away” but ends with a synth extrav­a­ganza that recalls the end of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.  Amongst the album tracks, the good­ies include “As I Said Before,” a tidy speed-rocker that could fit in on an early Rush album, and “The La La Song,” a tune that rises above its goofy title with a wild prog-rock arrange­ment full of head-spinning time changes.

The album fur­ther ben­e­fits from sleek yet mus­cu­lar pro­duc­tion by Jack Douglas (Aerosmith, Cheap Trick), so the whole thing sounds as con­fi­dent and radio-ready as a great­est hits album.  Needless to say, this is not for those who can’t dig the influ­ences name-checked in the first para­graph but fans of classic-rock radio will feel like they have dis­cov­ered a trans­mis­sion from the Classic Rock sta­tion on Bizarro World.