731. Poison / Look What the Cat Dragged In. 1986. 3.5/5

At a time when it was almost mandatory to wear makeup and have teased hair if you were going to make the scene (ala bands such as Motley Crue, Ratt, Bon Jovi and W.A.S.P.), Poison came forth with their debut album Look What the Cat Dragged In, hoping to break into an already saturated market where MTV and sugar coated power ballads seemed to be the only way to make an impact. Winding back to those days, and if you ignored the physical features as they were presented to you (I was from the denim-jacketed Maiden/Metallica side of metal rather than the spandex/glam side) you could generally find something on the vinyl that caught your interest from such bands. If you could do that, you could hopefully see past the syrup-dripping ballads that came as part-and-parcel of albums like this, and enjoy it for what they were, and concentrate on those songs that had some balls about them.
When this was released it was almost impossible to ignore given the airplay on music video shows that the singles received. What was tougher was finding anything gritty enough to make it worthy of purchase. In the days where you hoped one of your mates bought the album so you could tape it to cassette for your own use, no one was jumping at this on the basis of the singles that were released. Eventually, the purveyor of all to those kids with no income, the second hand record store, provided my first vinyl copy of this album, and I was able to finally experience what was beyond the money-spinning singles.

Fast forward back to the present day, and listening to the album now still reminds me of those days in the late 1980's. It also shows the double edged sword that most hair metal / glam metal bands were working under. You could write and play the harder, faster songs, the ones that made teenagers jump around their bedrooms playing air guitar (something that it always looked like CC DeVille was doing on stage anyway). But to get on the radio, you had to have a ballad, or a pop song, thus singles such as "I Won't Forget You". Ugh. You also had to have a video to support that power ballad, in order to get heavy rotation on the music video shows.
As an album, I still get a lot of enjoyment from this. The songs are mostly up-tempo teenage anthems, preaching good times and anti-parent themes with the usual sexual innuendo thrown in. Get past some of the lyrical content, and you have some fairly impressive happy guitaring from C.C. DeVille, while the rest of the band are tight and precise. Rikki Rockett's drumming is excellent, as is Bobby Dall's bass work. There can be no complaints about the quality of the musicianship. Bret Michaels vocals convey each song's message to a nicety.
Still, some songs for me are of a better quality than others. The high energy songs such as "Look What the Cat Dragged In", "Talk Dirty to Me", "Want Some, Need Some" and "Let Me Go to the Show" are my favourites, and given they all feature on the second half of the album it probably helps my enjoyment of the album as a whole. I'm not as enamoured with songs such as "Cry Tough", "I Want Action" and "I Won't Forget You". They don't really do anything for me lyrically or musically.
There's no doubt I probably enjoy this album more now than I did back in the late 1980's, and most of that is because of nostalgia for the end of those teenage years, and what they represent. If it was only to be represented by that, this could even rate higher.

Rating: The night rolls up and I do it again. 3.5/5