1196. Scorpions / Savage Amusement. 1988. 3.5/5

The years leading up to the production of this album were arguably the most successful of the Scorpions career. On the back of albums such as “Lovedrive”, “Animal Magnetism”, “Blackout” and “Love at First Sting”, the band had found the perfect mix of hard-rock-to-heavy-metal tracks that could get the fans fist pumping and air guitaring, with power rock ballads that could find their way onto commercial radio and attract those fans that enjoyed this side of their personality. On the back of Klaus Meine’s amazing vocals and the twin guitars of Rudolph Schenker and Matthias Jabs, Scorpions had managed to crack the US market with songs like “Blackout”, “Rock You Like a Hurricane” and “Still Loving You”. The band went on a world tour that stretched beyond two years, in the process recording the hit live album “World Wide Live”, and the music world through that period of the mid-1980's was at their feet. Backed by MTV and other music video shows having their hits on regular rotation, their success was at critical mass.
On the back of this, the band returned to write and record their follow up to “Love at First Sting” through 1987. In a move that suggested “when it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, Schenker and Meine did the bulk of the writing, with Schenker writing the music and Meine the lyrics. They also retained the services of Dieter Dierks as producer, and the trio who had been behind the band’s success came together to create an album that could stand alongside the success of their recent releases.

From the outset, this is a different album than what had come before it. While the basics on the surface appear the same, there is a definite mellowing or cleansing in effect. It’s interesting in retrospect that this album has been compared to the way Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” seemed to have been smoothed out and commercialised, that the production made it a much more streamlined and sauna-ed album. That might be an over simplification for the way this album turned out, but it has its truths involved.
The true heavy songs on this album are few and far between, the ones where the band really extends themselves, and allows Klaus to get right into the vocals on the song and Matthias is allowed to let rip on the lead guitar. “We Let it Rock, You Let it Roll” and “Love on the Run” could in fact be the only songs on this album that go in that direction. The majority of the songs are mid-range, mid-tempo tracks that are enjoyable enough because they are Scorpions songs, but they lack that energy and push that had been present before this. And with the success of albums such as “Hysteria” and Whitesnake’s “1987” album, perhaps this was what the band felt was their logical step in regards to their music.
The opening of “Don’t Stop at the Top”, “Rhythm of Love” and “Passion Rules the Game” - the last two of which were released as singles from the album – are all very formula-written, almost songs-by-numbers with vocals and guitars that are inoffensive and meant to appease all fans. They feel like they were the purpose-written songs here to promote the album to the MTV generation, and not turn them off. The songs through the middle of the album, such as “Media Overkill”, “Walking on the Edge” and “Every Minute Every Day” are good solid Scorpions tracks that the band has always been good at.
“Believe in Love”, the other single released from the album, and the song that closes out the album, with a music video that shows lots of shots of the band playing live on stage and the crowd holding lighters in the air, and snatches of people gathered in large city squares, always felt like it was trying to make a statement without getting into too much controversy. A couple of years later it all made sense, as this was an obvious precursor to “Wind of Change” that came on the next album. Play them back to back, you’ll see and hear what I mean. Just change the lyrics from being about love to being about peace, and you have the same basis in both.

It would not be unfair to suggest that, having loaded up on “Lovedrive” and “Blackout” and “Love at First Sting” over the previous three years in my opening years of heavy metal obsession, I expected a lot of this album when it was released. I absolutely believed it was going to be one of the albums of 1988, that it would continue down the route those albums had taken, and would blow me away with its awesomeness. It would be more accurate to say that this confused me somewhat with its averageness. And, again to be fair, it was released in the same two week period as Yngwie Malmsteen’s “Odyssey” and the majesty that was Iron Maiden’s “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son”, so it had a lot of competition just with those two albums to compete against for my listening time and my love. But if it had retained that excellence of those earlier Scorpions albums I mentioned, it would have competed just fine.
And that’s the bare bones of the facts. This album isn’t as good as those albums. It certainly sounds like a Scorpions album, it has all of the required usual aspects of a Scorpions album. It’s just that the songs here are just not up to the level of those previous albums. They aren’t bad, in fact many are quite good, but for SCORPIONS songs, they are for the most part just average on their scale. They lack the intensity and fire power that would lift them and the album itself to a higher level.
I’ve still enjoyed catching up with this album over the last couple of weeks. It definitely wasn’t an unpleasant experience. But it did confirm to me that what I thought of it at the time, and at other periods over the past 35 years when I’ve put it on, hasn’t changed that much. There’s nothing wrong with “Savage Amusement”, it’s just that if you were choosing a Scorpions album to listen to for some great music for an hour, there are others in their discography that you would choose before this one.