Album Review: West Bound - Volume I

The music business is tough these days. It's very easy for even good musicians to get lost in the fray, to get swallowed up by the never-ending churn of releases. And with seemingly everyone needing to be in multiple bands to make a go of it, even names you remember... you can't really remember. West Bound, the band we're here to talk about, is the new collaboration between Roy Z (who produced a lot of great records a decade ago), and Chas West. I don't say this to be insensitive, but I knew I had heard Chas' name before, but I had to do some searching to remember who Resurrection Kings (his other band) are. That was him playing with the re-animated corpse of "Dream Evil" era Dio, so the hope is a more lively combination can have better results.

"Never Surrender" was the first song we got to hear, and it immediately told me two things; 1) This band has potential, and 2) It's the worst sounding Roy Z album I can remember. When Roy was making albums with Bruce Dickinson and Halford, they were tight and sharp, with dry but crunchy guitars. The guitar on "Never Surrender" sounds like an 80s record played through an extra delay pedal. The sound is so watery and soft there's no bite to it whatsoever. It has a feel to it I sometimes describe as sounding underwater. It's awful, which is a shame, because the song is good.

That production also doesn't make much sense, because this isn't an 80s rock record. The songwriting is far more in tune with the hard rock of the 70s, with hints of blues groove powering the riffs. This is far more Jimmy Page than Eddie Van Halen. The songs are simple, and designed to deliver the only two things good rock needs; a riff and a strong vocal. It mostly achieves those things, though there are often too many effects on Chas' voice that limit how much credit I can give him.

Both "Beautiful Dream" and "Nothing" are solid songs with balladic tendencies, like the nice addition of piano in the background of the latter, but they can't sound sincere when the emotion of Chas' voice is buried under echo and delay. We need to hear him feel the music, and instead we get the producer thinking they're clever by putting their choices at the forefront the recording. Let the damn music be.

If we focus on the songwriting, West Bound delivers a good record. It's not as good as the similar record Inglorious released in January, but it does find the right approach to classic hard rock. And if you compare it to Resurrection Kings, it's world's better. Songs like "On My Own" have a Whitesnake feel, but without the sleaziness David Coverdale grew to embrace. When the band is delivering material like this, I quite like what they're doing.

The problem is that no matter how good the record is, I have trouble looking past the production. The issue isn't that it isn't polished and perfect, it's that the choices made are distracting. You can make gritty and raw records that still sound good, but all the echo, reverb, and delay slathered all over this record are too much. At a certain point, my ears hurt from hearing sounds that are so unnatural. A good record is ruined by not letting the music speak for itself.

Geoff Tate's version of Queensryche put out a terrible sounding record in "Frequency Unknown", and then they realized their mistake and put out a version that sounded great (and then another that was bad again, but let's forget that). West Bound needs to do the same thing. "Volume I" is a good record that I want to like, but I just can't, because I hear the production instead of the music. With a few different choices, I would be happily recommending West Bound as a welcome addition to the ranks of new classic hard rock bands. But that's not the world we live in, and I don't see me subjecting myself to the uncomfortable experience of listening to these tones very often. What a shame.