Come On

ith no record label waiting in the wings, ready to release it, Shame Club's third album, Come On, was recorded at a leisurely pace between 2006 and 2007, and even though the long-running St. Louis hard rockers would probably choose a slightly less positive adjective than "leisurely" ("tortuous," perhaps), their patience certainly paid off when Detroit's Small Stone picked up the record for a mid-2008 release. By then, the quartet had relinquished some of the disproportionate Thin Lizzy influence that had characterized their early work, and opened up their sound to a broader palette of classic rock cornerstones like Aerosmith and ZZ Top -- all evident to differing degrees in songs like "Transamerica," "Light Shines," and "Chasm." There's also a discernible Southern rock aesthetic filtering into the twangy licks of "How Far," the bombastic boogie of "I Ain't Surprised," and the melancholy melodies of "Sweet Mercy's Gate"; an early-'70s blues-rock simplicity (think Bad Company, Foghat, and BTO) keeping others like "Don't Feel Like Making Love" and "Can You Feel It" honest and straightforward, and an even more retro, post-flower-power vibe permeating the otherwise thumpin' "I Just Want You to Be Free." Finally, the band takes it down a notch for the acoustic instrumental, "Alicia Circles," which is reminiscent of Zeppelin's "Bron-Yr-Aur," only with a hillbilly instead of Welsh folk flavor, and then closes the album with an extended, tipsy blues jam called "Lurch." With all of these recognizable influences flowing through its gears, one might expect Come On to live out the image on its cover and sink to the bottom of the murky Mississippi, in abject anonymity. But, if anything, Shame Club's wholesale reshuffling of all these elements renders the whole pretty natural in its own way. Its overall sense of restraint may all still prove pretty boring and sedate for new millennium listeners, tweaked on impatience and adrenalin, but classic rock lovers will likely get a huge kick out of sifting through these songs' familiar sonic hallmarks. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia|