Although they'd lost their deal with
Arista Records
and then exchanged the brief elation of their British sojourn for the sobering reality of their upstate New York breeding grounds,
the Rods
wasted little time sulking before getting back to work on new songs at Rochester's
Barrett Alley Studios
. The trio's sophomore opus,
Wild Dogs
, may not have performed well enough to satisfy the chart-topping expectations of their former label, but it was relatively successful by heavy metal standards, so it was no surprise when independent
Shrapnel Records
came calling with a new contract. Of course, instead of heaping money on
to polish off the material they'd been recording, their more frugal new backers were perfectly happy to take the songs that became 1983's
In the Raw
just as they were...yes, raw. Welcome back to indie-land, boys! Then again, one could argue that
' proletarian metal was arguably best served by a minimal amount of production gloss anyway, and so, resulting barnstormers like
"Hurricane,"
"Go for Broke,"
and the proto-thrashing
"Hot Love"
hardly seemed to suffer while hammering their head-banging directive home with minimal fuss or distractions. And even though most of these new songs still sounded partly like crossbreeds of
Twisted Sister
and
Y&T
(or, in the case, of the plodding mysticism of
"Witches Brew,"
Dio
), they finally helped
sever their once overwhelming dependency on '70s hard rock influences in order to sound like a true '80s heavy metal band for the first time (this in spite of the
"Man on the Silver Mountain"
clone,
"Another Night on the Town"
). Having said that,
's full complement of songs wasn't as consistent as
' because of a few forgettable fillers like
"Can't Get Enough of the Fun"
"Evil Woman,"
Shrapnel
's modest marketing abilities weren't capable of breaking
in any event, so the band would soon be going back to the drawing board with their fourth effort,
Let them Eat Metal
.
was reissued on CD in 1998 by
High Vaultage Records
, which fleshed out the original track listing with five bonus cuts, including the "tastefully" named guitar solo,
"In Your Panties,"
and a 13-minute live jam on several
Led Zeppelin
song named, aptly enough,
"Whole Lotta Led."
] ~ Eduardo Rivadavia