44. Stryper / Against The Law. 1990. 1/5.

For the previous five or so years prior to this album coming out, Stryper had found a way to place themselves in a happy medium, in a place that seemed to work perfectly. Overtly Stryper was a Christian rock band. They sang about God, they sang about Jesus, they sang about the power and the glory that their religious beliefs offered them. And for this they gathered a following that exuded the gratitude that they expressed in the lyrics of their songs. Along that path, their music had managed to draw the interest of the mainstream scene, those that followed the different genres of heavy metal that existed at the time. Though their music could well have been said to side on the glam and hair metal side of the border, some of their songs actually crossed that border into genuine heavy metal, and by this fact they had managed to lure this fan base towards them as well, even those that were far less interested in any message that their lyrics might be promoting. In doing so, through albums such as “Soldiers Under Command” and “To Hell with the Devil” had gained exacting followings.
The band’s third album “In God We Trust” had not garnered the same reaction, enmeshed as it was with a slightly altered sound and perhaps a too heavy focus on the power ballads. Or perhaps, as was discussed at the time, perhaps the fans of the band who were not religiously motivated had grown tired of hearing about what the band was singing about, that no matter how excellent the music might sound perhaps the tide had turned when it came to the band’s viability to fans of all music genres.
Was this a motivation as to what happened next? It does seem feasible, though never truly investigated. Because when it came to their follow up, there were a great many changes that took place. The first was the abandonment of the stage gear that the band had worn since their inception. The yellow and black spandex was discarded, and in its place came the leather jackets and jeans of a more familiar scene that was occurring around this time. More noticeably however, was the change in the lyrical style and substance of the songs produced for the next album. Rather than visibly evangelical lyrics that had come from the first three albums and the initial EP, now we had songs that were most noticeably about relationship troubles and more common world topics. There was still a slight bent towards the ideals that they had once sung about, but the themes in general left the preaching aside.
This was all intimated well before the album hit the shelves, and the reaction at the time was as mixed as you might expect. The fans of the religious side of the band were confused and concerned, the fans of the metal music side of the band thought perhaps this might be a revelation. And in the long run, perhaps no one really knew what to expect when Stryper’s fourth studio album finally landed, under the name of “Against the Law”.

The opening song sets the mood and the direction for the album ahead with the title track “Against the Law”. Gone is the anthemic and holistic musical rhythm of earlier albums, replaced by a more workmanlike and layman's hair metal hard rock sound driven by bands such as Ratt and L.A. Guns. It follows a template away from their usual style, and immediately announces that this is a statement album from the outset. Lyrically it also tells the listener that there is a change of attitude here, with lines such as: “You've got to point your finger, you think you know it all, I want you to remember, I don't live for you, 'cause I'm against your law” and “We've still got the fire burning in our souls, but we're just rockin' harder to make our music roll”. The message seems clear from the start. We might be singing about different topics here, and we are making music for ourselves, but we are still the same band. Opinions as to whether this worked or not would be mixed. “Two Time Woman” follows, and this is where it begins to get a bit strange for Stryper fans. We are used to hearing Michael Sweet singing his praises to a higher power, but hearing him sing about a two timing woman... that’s a bit weird. You get used to songs that preach a love for Jesus, but the love for a woman who is doing the dirty on him? Hearing him sing: “Hangin' out at a party, all my friends everywhere, thought you were right beside me but you weren't there, no. Then I caught you with someone else, that's the end of the show”... is a little off putting. Then “Rock the People” is very lyric-nascent, simplified and very much in the style of I’m a rocker, I just wanna rock. It has a basic rock riff, that to be fair is improved by Oz Fox’s solo in the middle of the song. And then we have “Two Bodies (One Mind One Soul)”, the next song to reference the ‘girl in a relationship’ vibe. I mean, in many ways, Sweet has just change the focus of his songs from the ’almighty’ to the ‘all-woman’, though more pointedly not avoiding the conflict in the earthly relationships than he was with the heavenly ones on previous albums.
“Not That Kind of Guy” is a complete Van Halen rip-off song. Musically, lyrically, the way Michael sings it, the backing vocals in the chorus, even Oz Fox’s guitar solo sounds like Eddie Van Halen. Everything about it. You could take this song and put it on any of the first few Van Halen albums and you wouldn’t skip a beat. Hey, it sounds fine, but this is a little too close to plagiarism for my taste. “Shining Star” is a cover of the Earth, Wind & Fire song, and has more energy in Michael’s vocals and the two guitars, working together to push the harder rock variety of track. It continues to induce more of the hard rock into the music than previous Stryper albums have, but is still missing an ingredient to make it work. Perhaps that ingredient is polish, because although they have Tom Werman as their producer, who had been involved in albums by bands that this album feels as though it is trying to replicate, such as L.A. Guns, Poison and Twisted Sister, it doesn’t quite make it. “Ordinary Man” which follows is in exactly the same boat, a song with some bones and structure but without the basis to fill it all out. This is followed by the only ballad of the album (which at least was a step in the right direction). “Lady” is lyrically desolate, with wonderfully basic and unwritable lines such as “Lady, I wanna be your man, Lady, I’ll love you all I can”. I mean, at least in the ballads on the previous albums, when they were singing to their God, they sounded like they meant it!
This at least is saved by the next track, “Caught in the Middle”, the only song that sounds like a Stryper song. Everything cooks on this song. The lyrics at least show some heart, some meaning. Michael is singing in the style we know, Oz is riffing and soloing the way we know he can, the backing vocals are Stryper, and the pace of the song is fantastic. Easily the best song on the album. It is followed by “All for One” that moves back to the style of the first half of the album, a style that, as I have already mentioned here, if it had been refined a little would have worked better than it does.
The closing track is “Rock the Hell Out of You”, the fastest and dare I say it heaviest song on the album. For the first time, Michael attacks with his vocals, hitting the gruff scream and the typical high sweet screams that he was renowned for. One might ask the question - ‘why did it take until the final song on the album to really go down this path, if what they wanted to do was do a more mainstream metal album?’ The core elements are all here to show that they COULD have gone further down this path – if they had wanted to. It isn’t a perfect song, but perhaps with a bit more work they could have achieved what it was they appeared to be aiming for.

For me, I think everything about this album just didn’t work when it came to the timing of its release. I had all of Stryper’s releases up to this point, and had even seen them live twice on two different tours of Australia. So it couldn’t be said that I wasn’t a fan. And if memory serves me correctly, I am sure I greeted the news that they were going to release an album that did not focus on religious ideals and instead would focus on other topics with open arms. The possibility of this fabulous band unleashing with some true heavy metal and with lyrics that I could perhaps indulge in without second guessing myself seemed like a perfect match.
Two things probably didn’t help. The first was, I didn’t think the songs on the album were... great. They didn’t have the hooks that songs on each of the other albums had. It is true that I do not find every song on every Stryper album to be appealing, but there were always four or five that had great hooks and riffs, and those Michael Sweet screams that made them conclusively awesome. But for the most part, that just isn’t the case here. In changing the focus of their lyrics, they also changed the focus of their music, and that just didn’t work as well as it had previously. There are some okay songs here, ones that are still enjoyable today. But they aren’t exceptional like on previous albums. The second was, the timing of the release of the album sucked. Like I mentioned on the recent episode for Ratt’s “Detonator”, this album was released in a six week period where some of the greatest albums ever were released – and that list again included Alice in Chains’ “Facelift”, Anthrax’s “Persistence of Time”, Queensryche’s “Empire” and Judas Priest’s “Painkiller”, and with others just around the corner. It meant that even if this had been a better than average album, it would have struggled significantly to get listening time with me on the release of those other albums. And the fact is – this wasn’t a better than average album. It was slightly far less better than that.
Over the years, nothing much has persuaded me to give it much airtime when it came to listening to it again. There have been occasions when it does come up, and I have taken it off the shelves and given it a go again. But that has only been as a result of not really knowing what I wanted to listen to at the time. So for the occasion of this podcast episode, it has had a far larger run in the CD player than it perhaps ever has in the years since its release. And what do I think of it now? Well, given it is 35 years in the past, I found it to be listenable. It is still, for the most part, uninspiring. It is... generic... in a way. It sounds like it was trying to jump onto a trend but missed its mark. Take out “Caught in the Middle”, which is the closest to their original sound, and this album is a missed opportunity. Compared to what had come before, and absolutely compared to what they have released since their reformation in 2005, this is the dullest album of the band’s career. Michael Sweet eventually left to pursue a solo career, and it wasn’t until the next decade that the full band performed together again. Time was to be a great boost for the band’s sound going forward, and to confine this period to the discount racks.