Hoodoo

The best AC/DC impersonators in the world are back, and they're rocking as hard as ever. Hoodoo was hailed as a comeback album for Krokus, but for a band that was established in 1974 and went through a number of hiatuses, a four-year gap between records is just one milestone among many. There's honestly little that needs to be said about the music on Hoodoo, because the AC/DC reference really sums it all up: this is dirty, swaggering rock & roll, a heap of primitive bluesy riffs piled over a nondescript rhythm section that is there for the sole purpose of compelling the listener to tramp down that accelerator pedal on the highway. The lyrics are even simpler that those of AC/DC, and Marc Storace is a clone of Bon Scott, though maybe a tad less rowdy, naughty, and lewdly suggestive in approach -- not for lack of trying, of course. In the past, Krokus were known to dabble in a number of styles, right down to symphonic prog of their roots, but this is all in the past, and Hoodoo is as solid as a wrecking ball, with the exception of "Ride into the Sun" and "Firestar." The former is a more serious, midtempo number, equally similar to AC/DC's "Hail Caesar" and Def Leppard's output circa 1983 (the Lepps had their own song named "Ride into the Sun," but this has nothing to do with the Krokus title). As for the closer, it's an ultra-raw proto-power metal song in the vein of early Grave Digger -- a nice direction, but not explored enough on the album. Generally, the sort of hard rock found on Hoodoo stopped being original around the time of Perestroika, but novelty isn't its main selling point anyway. The best testament to the quality of this record is the fact that a cover of "Born to Be Wild" blends right in without dwarfing the rest of the songs, even though those songs are 30 years too late to be classics of the same caliber. ~ Alexey Eremenko