779. Ratt / Reach for the Sky. 1988. 2/5

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 cooking. Not an easy thing to do. In fact, sometimes what you come up with sounds just a little bit routine, lacking in hooks or inspiration, and leaves the fans feeling a little bit blasé about it all. In essence, this is what Ratt has served up here for us on Reach for the Sky.

Where has the energy and motivation gone? 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 most of this feels tired and lacking in what made their early releases so great. 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. Mind you, not from me. It really just annoyed me. It was an 'obvious' single I guess, and at the time I was rebelling against that kind of track from any artist. The second was "I Want a Woman", which really has no redeeming features at all, and again seems purpose written for a single release, despite the fact it just doesn't have any strength or character. It feels as though they just put a few clichés together in both lyrics and music and thought 'number one single!'

It feels like there is a much more 'commercial' direction on this album than in previous efforts, and by that I guess I mean that the songs have been softened in a similar way that Def Leppard had done previously - it's just that this album doesn't work at all in that kind of way. It feels more like that it is a cop out, a conveyor belt of songs where the similarities far outweigh any individuality in the music. Perhaps that it unfair, but if you put this alongside other similar releases of this era, such as Mötley Crüe's Dr. Feelgood, Bon Jovi's New Jersey, L.A. Guns' debut L.A. Guns, Poison's Open Up and Say... Ahh! and even Vixen's debut Vixen, then it really struggles to stand up.

This was a speed hump for the band, with the tour to promote the album stalling after a short period. It was probably 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.

Rating:  Don't you bite the hand that feeds you.  2/5

Listen to full album here