779. Ratt / Reach for the Sky. 1988. 3/5

On the back of two stellar albums to start their recording career, both based in the growing glam/hair metal market that was coming out of the west coast of the USA, Ratt had captured the imagination of the music listening public, through great albums, catchy singles and watchable music videos that gained traction on MTV and other music programs. Following on from this had come the band’s third album, 1986’s “Dancing Undercover”, an album that had produced a heavier sound overall and an almost complete lack of the ballad-type songs that many bands of their era formulated in order to gain commercial success. It was an unexpected move but one that was met by a solid reaction from the fans. On the other hand, the critics were less enamoured and felt that Ratt had moved away from the sound that had made them such a terrific band. Thus, moving into the preparation phase for their fourth studio album, this is something that could well have proven a catalyst for what was to come on “Reach for the Sky”. It's a long way to fall when you start off your music career with a bang, and release not just an album that makes people stand up and notice, but follow it up with another one. The challenge is always to maintain that level of excellence, and continue to find a way to keep the fans interest in wat you are producing, while also retaining your own ideas of what that creative output should sound like. Not an easy thing to do. In fact, sometimes what you come up with sounds just a little bit routine, lacking in the hooks or inspiration that have come before, and leaves the fans feeling a little bit blasé about it all. And with the increasing interest in bands of this genre in the back half of the 1980’s decade, pulling the right rein would also have been a difficult task. In many people’s ears, this is the challenge that “Reach for the Sky” faced, and its success in this regard has a mixed opinion.

This is Ratt's fourth album, and while the band was one of the frontrunners of the glam metal explosion during the early to mid-1980's, much of this feels tired and lacking in what made their early releases so great. Where has the energy and motivation gone? There's a real sameness about the material here, and not in a good way. On previous albums the songs may well have retained a similar tempo all the way through, but there was still a furiousness about them, fired by the guitars and their solos or the harder hitting drums or simply the vocals taking centre stage and finding that intensity that made you listen and love them. Here on “Reach for the Sky” a lot of that seems to have washed away, leaving just that interior core of the same drum beat through each song, the guitar riffs that can seem to just drift from song to song, and Pearcy's vocals that try to exude some toughness but eventually move very little from the same register throughout most of the album.
Take the two singles that came from this album. "Way Cool Jr." was the first released, and garnered heavy airplay (in the places that played this kind of music) and was well received generally. For me though it was always just irritating, one of the songs that seems formula written for the commercial market, and given its head to do just that. It was an obvious single I guess, and for me at the time I was rebelling against that kind of track from any artist. But even now it just doesn’t grab me. The second single was "I Want a Woman", which apart from a heavier feel and some good guitars from both Warren de Martini and Robbin Crosby, again seems purpose written for a single release. It feels as though they just put a few clichés together in both lyrics and music and thought 'number one single!' Which wasn’t quite the outcome, but it still did reasonably well in the US.
Beyond these two songs though there is a bit more attitude and desire to create a heavier song selection. The opening track “City to City” is a solid hard rock song, “Chain Reaction” comes out of the blocks hard and fast and brings a great attitude to the second half of the album, while “No Surprise” and “Bite the Hand That Feeds” both have great vocals from Stephen Pearcy as well as excellent guitar lead breaks pieced into the song. “Bottom Line” draws from that early Ratt era in style and substance, and this bleeds into both “What’s it Gonna Be” and “What I’m After”, making the second half of the album a better balanced series of tracks than perhaps the first half offers.
The mix of styles – between a commercial bent of the two singles and then the rest of the album – is perhaps what does pull the album between a fan’s love and a critical assessment of its qualities. This album doesn't work at all in that kind of way that perhaps some wanted it to. It feels more like that it is caught in a trap, a conveyor belt of songs where the similarities far outweigh any individuality in the music. In many ways there is an unfair comparison of this album to others of the era. Bon Jovi's “New Jersey”, L.A. Guns' eponymously titled debut album, Poison's “Open Up and Say... Ahh!”. All of them saw terrific commercial success, where this didn’t gain that same attention.
This ignores the great aspects of the band and its individuals on this album. Stephen Pearcy on vocals is still terrific, Bobby Blotzer on drums and Juan Croucier on bass continue to provide a wonderful rhythm section throughout, and Robbin Crosby and especially Warren de Martini on guitars are still the highlights. The quality of the musicians is not in question here, just perhaps the writing.

When I first got around to reviewing this album for my blog – which still exists for anyone who is interested in reading it – I gave this album a fair panning. I was quite critical of its content, something that offended one of my oldest friends who felt that my criticism was unfair, though considering he loved the album that was probably always going to be the case. That reaction was actually uppermost in my mind when it came to this album’s anniversary popping up again, and requiring me to revisit this album, probably for the first time since I had written that scathing review a decade or so ago.
On this occasion, I made sure that I gave this album a thorough chance to prove itself, and allow it the chance to find its redemption. That previous review had been some time after I had first gotten this album, around about the time of its release. And it is fair to say that the differentiation between this album and those first two brilliant albums should have AGREED with me rather than pushed me away, as this is realistically a heavier album than those first two albums and should have gelled with what I was listening to at the time.
In retrospect, and having listened to this album a lot over the last few weeks again, my belief is that I was always listening to “Reach for the Sky” and wanting it to be a copy of both “Out of the Cellar” and “Invasion of your Privacy”, and that was what was stopping me from getting the most from this album. I never considered it to be a terrible album, but I also gave it short shrift most of the time. The past couple of weeks have had me enjoying the album for what it is, which to me is a reasonable collection of songs that makes a reasonable album. It is interesting that this ended up being a speed hump for the band, with the tour to promote the album stalling after a short period. It was perhaps a wake up call to the band that they couldn't release an album such as this and just expect their fans to embrace it without question. And as a fan I was as guilty of that as anyone else. To me, it still stands in limbo from a true glam metal album to a real modern metal album, much like they did with the quite amazing “Infestation” album a lot further down the track. But that is certainly a story for another day.