1) One On One; 2) Oh, Atlanta;
3) You're Never Alone; 4) I Still Believe In You; 5) Ready For Love; 6) Waiting
On Love; 7) Can't Get Enough; 8) Is That All There Is To Love; 9) Love So
Strong; 10) Silver, Blue & Gold; 11) Downpour In Cairo; 12) Shooting Star;
13) Simple Man; 14) Weep No More.
There can only be two motives behind the
production of this kind of album, and neither of the two is particularly
cheerful. One is that you just don't have enough creative energy in you any
more to produce an entire LP of new material, and have to resort to
re-recording old standards out of plain old desperation. Another one is that,
deep down inside, you instinctively feel that your new material is not up to
par — mildly speaking — and that it would be a good commercial move to somehow
«legitimize» it by mixing it up with classic, sanctified material.
My personal feeling is that Stories Told & Untold must be a
combination of the two, because these new songs really, really suck. They do try to continue the «rootsy revival» of Company Of Strangers, but with a deeper
nod to adult contemporary this time: except for the opening number, ʽOne On
Oneʼ, whose riff sounds gritty enough for about five seconds before you realize
it has been shamelessly lifted from the Stones' ʽCan't You Hear Me Knockingʼ,
everything else is in the deeply sentimental vein and hopelessly generic.
ʽWaiting On Loveʼ and ʽDownpour In Cairoʼ, with slightly more down-to-earth
arrangements, are listenable if,perchance, encountered on a modern country rock
radio station. Everything else is disgusting plastic soul pathos.
Surely against a background like this the old
classics must sound revitalized and refreshing — especially considering that
the band was so intensely pushing forward Robert Hart's «new Paul Rodgers»
image. And for the most part, he is doing a fine job on the old tunes: I
personally find his tone a little bit more «grayish» than Rodgers', but that's
a purely subjective feeling. The real problem, of course, is that the
re-recordings slavishly follow the original versions, and when they do not, it actually gets worse — for instance,
setting the entire first verse of ʽReady For Loveʼ to a minimalistic
«unplugged» setting simply deprives it of one minute of enjoyment (the deeply
melancholic rhythmic arrangement of the original was one of its major assets).
ʽCan't Get Enoughʼ also gets a laid-back acoustic basis, but it's not as if the
entire idea was to make an «unplugged» version of Bad Company's biggest hits —
it just sort of happened that way, with the old bite surreptitiously taken out
of the arrangements. And these horn overdubs on ʽWeep No Moreʼ? No, can't say
that I'm a fan.
No big surprise that much of the material here
was recorded in Nashville and featured cameos from contemporary country-rock
stars, since it is contemporary
country-rock: professional, clean, formulaic, and deadly dull. It is true that
replacing Howe with Hart made Bad Company sound more like Bad Company, but the
price was that they sort of became the wax facsimile of what they used to be,
and who really needs that? Thumbs down for this whole cheesy business —
not even the regular fans were fooled, and Stories
Told & Untold became even more of a commercial bomb than Company Of Strangers.
I went to Grooveshark and sampled this "One On One" number. I made it through the first 30 seconds. Sure enough, you get to hear some shameless mug doing an animatronic Disneyworld impersonation of Free-era Paul Rodgers, while the band plays "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" in the background. Bad Company? Dead Duck, more like it.
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