Album Review: Scorpions - Rock Believer

Stop me if I've said this before.... this band RETIRED. Yes, just like Candlemass, who retired only to give us the finger and go back on their word, Scorpions have done the same thing. They claim it was their manager's idea, but let's be real about this; they were men in their 60s when that announcement was made. Your management works for you, so if you didn't want to announce your retirement, you wouldn't have done it. But with the blame shifted, Scorpions have come back to.... put out more generic rock music.

I know I'm the oddball for thinking "Humanity: Hour 1", the album they made with a bunch of pro songwriters, is their best, but everything they've done since has been so bare-bones and generic I just don't see the appeal at all. Yes, Klaus still sounds great for his age, but the band hasn't put together a great riff in years, and they've given up on writing songs with true melodies. It's 80s stadium rock, but with all the energy sucked right out.

At least that's true of the singles. The three released in the lead-up to this record did not paint a very rosy picture. "Peacemaker" is the sort of dumb chant-along that went down well before rock music figured out it could have melodies, and "Seventh Sun" plods along showing every year and mile on the band's odometer. They sound old, tired, and not at all like a band that can still rock.

But "Gas In The Tank" leads off the album by showing exactly that. Klaus has a strong melody, and the song bounces along quick enough to feel peppy. Frankly, that should have been a single over "Peacemaker", no questions about it. "Rock Believer" wasn't a great single either, but if there's one thing rockers love, it's songs about how much rockers love to rock. I don't get the need for the constant justification for their rocking-ness, but the canon has way too many songs of the ilk for me to say the audience doesn't eat them up. I hate them, but a lot of people need them, it seems.

The other issue with the record is that it has fifteen tracks to get through. A lot of the album is actually far better than I thought it was going to be, but trimming it down to 10-12 songs could have made it even better. There are a few obvious songs that don't add enough to the proceedings to not be missed if we left them off the track listing. "When I Lay My Bones To Rest" is inconsequential, as is the aforementioned "Peacemaker". I get the inclination to want to give the fans more, but more isn't always more. A shorter album of just the best songs would not only be better, but it would have higher replay value, than bloating things with a couple extras.

"Call Of The Wild" is over five minutes, and feels every second of it with the overly repetitive lyrics. It's another song that could have either been left off, or cut down, or better yet rewritten to have more lyrics than the chorus currently does. It's little things like this that don't seem that big of a deal, but when you add up a bunch of them across an entire album, it's enough to shift the way we think about it. Every little demerit compounds, and when you reach enough of them, it's harder to see the gold stars on the other side.

As I said, there's a lot of this album that's better than I was expecting. "Gas In The Tank" is great, and "Hot And Cold" is 80s rock done right. The ballad "When You Know" is also a strong outing. There's plenty of good here, more than the last time I heard a Scorpions record, but all the good things are pulled down by the nits I've been picking. Not enough to say this is a bad record, but enough to say it isn't a great one. Scorpions have done well for themselves here, but it could be even better with a few different decisions. The 'what if' is the biggest takeaway I have.