REVIEW: RAVEN – The Pack Is Back

 

RAVEN – The Pack Is Back (1986)

Atlantic Records

Yesterday, while out record shopping with a friend, I saw him pick up this particular album. I told him: “Don’t! It’s a poser record…” But what can you do? Being a poser himself, he bought it! Well, I’ve got the album too… you know, for the collection! Just so it’s there!

So, here we have RAVEN hanging up their athletic metal gear—as you can see on the back cover—putting athletic rock aside for a while and deciding to start shaking their asses seductively, with a guitar in front of them, hoping to become commercial. And not just commercial… very commercial!

The Pack Is Back, released in 1986, is the album where RAVEN decided to try out a much more polished, radio-friendly and FM-oriented identity, leaving quite a bit behind of the manic, unpredictable energy of Wiped Out and All for One. Atlantic obviously wanted something more accessible to a wider audience, so the band entered Bearsville Studios in New York with Eddie Kramer behind the production—yes, that Eddie Kramer, of KISS, Hendrix, Zeppelin fame and so on. Only this time, the man found himself having to turn RAVEN into… almost a completely different band!

If we were talking about demonic possession, I’d say this album was possessed by the Commercial Spirit of DEF LEPPARD. Big choruses, polished production, synths, “easier” melodies and, generally, an attitude screaming: “Let’s get this played on the radio!” The only problem is that, with RAVEN on the logo, it was pretty much inevitable that this particular recipe would have… side effects.

And in the middle of all this, we get “Gimme Some Lovin’”, a cover of the classic Spencer Davis Group song, while tracks like “Hyperactive” and “Don’t Let It Die” even feature horns! Yes, you read that correctly: horns on RAVEN! At that point you just go: “Hold on, guys… who called you and told you this was a good idea?”

And yet, the funny thing is that the album isn’t actually bad as a listening experience. We have to give it that. It has its melodies, it has catchy choruses, it has some nice moments and, if you’re into AOR-ish melodies, more commercial hard rock and the whole 80s poser vibe, you can actually have a pretty good time with it. “The Pack Is Back” itself is quite a catchy song, while “Youngblood” has that old RAVEN spark that shows what this album could have been if they hadn’t covered everything in quite so much… polish. John Gallagher himself said years later that some of the songs from the album, including “Youngblood” and “The Pack Is Back”, worked very well live.

And that is precisely the problem: you don’t hear the RAVEN you expect to hear when you put a RAVEN record on the turntable. You hear a band trying to squeeze itself into the commercial climate of 1986 and ultimately looking a little like it has put on a suit two sizes too small.

Seriously… what were they thinking?

Anyway… it’s a good album as a listening experience, especially if you like AOR melodies, poser vibes and, generally, that more polished 80s hard rock sound. A bad album if you’re into RAVEN.

And somewhere right there lies the whole essence of The Pack Is Back: a good record to listen to — a strange record to listen to as RAVEN.

Nick Parastatidis