07. Icon Night of the Crime 1985 (Capitol)
Heavy Metal
Can you feel the throb of my heartstrings?
The Lowdown
The second album from Icon was actually one of the first albums I considered for a top ten placing this year based on memory, but then as I always do I listened to the album again and started to have doubts about it being in a metal listing. These doubts though were nothing to do with its quality but more to do with its style, because
Night of the Crime sounds a lot like it should be in an AOR listing rather than a metal one and in fact when looking the album up on Wiki I saw that Kerrang! had placed it as the third best AOR album of all time and me being a whopping AOR fan never even knew that this album had been considered like so, but in the end I decided to go with it as it will still appeal to mainstream metal fans that like a strong AOR feel to their metal. The band’s debut album and also one of the best releases from 1984 had been an album that had solidified what mainstream metal should be all about which was a loud and pounding experience, with punching choruses, catchy anthems and nearly every song ending up just sounding so damned good to boot as well. In many ways Icon kind of remind me of Y&T that LA based band that helped to set the stage for the west coast hair metal scene a few years earlier and much like Icon they were also a superior metal band that just never got the commercial success that they deserved based on their talent, for example less talented bands like Quiet Riot and Ratt etc ending up hogging the limelight instead.
Night of the Crime is an extremely polished album as you’d expect anyway from an album that is revered by some AOR fans, which is a surprise when you consider that its producer Eddie Kramer of Kiss production fame was in my mind a producer that like to go in for a rough around the edges approach, but given that fact that he had produced some big or AOR orientated acts over recent years that may have something to do with his more polished approach, artists like Angel, Foghat, Triumph and Pete Frampton had been amongst a sizeable listing. The album also sets a tone with the use of some outside songwriters in Bob Halligan Jr. and Mike Varney. Now the use of outside songwriters was nothing new of course in rock, but towards the end the decade and into the 1990s a number of rock acts that weren't overly commercial by nature had writers like these, that were employed on a whim by the record labels to give these artists a guaranteed commercial sound and a possible hit single, just think Cheap Trick and
Lap of Luxury circa 1988 as a prime example of this.
Night of the Crime starts with prime AOR material like “Naked Eyes” which in hindsight sounds like one of the great AOR tracks from this period and its truly a glorious song heightened by the vocals of Stephen Clifford. Second track "Missing" sounds like it could've been on a Heart album from this period and "Danger Calling" is the kind of AOR style track I love anyway and it's no surprise that it was chosen to be a single here and shows just how stellar the album material is overall.
Night of the Crime surprisingly doesn't have a title track but any number of its tracks could've easily accommodated in that department. Tracks like "(Take Another) Shot at My Heart" and "Whites of Their Eyes" are just simply great tracks with so much energy. The most metal offering comes in the form of "Out for Blood" which actually threatens to come off like an instrumental for the first part of the song. "Raise the Hammer" is one of the other muscle songs on the album and ended up being the second single from the album and the even better "Hungry for Love" falls into similar territory, and album closer "Rock My Radio" is a loud finale from the band. The sedate "Frozen Tears" was another contender for a single despite the fact that it's the most generic and weakest sounding song on the album. Despite the album being revered in AOR circles most metal reviewers who were big fans of the debut were less sympathetic to the album’s change in direction with Allmusic called it ‘MTV fluff’ but most of these negative reviews really just allude to the band’s change in direction from a loud metal outfit to a more polished AOR orientated one, but either way
Night of the Crime is a credible record from a very talented band and forms an important part of the mid 1980s rock commercial scene. Finally if this wasn't a metal orientated journal then
Night of The Crime could've easily ended up as a top 3 album for the year, so I kind of took its overall style into consideration here.
Stephen Clifford- Vocals
Dan Wexler- Guitar
John Aquilino- Guitar
Tracy Wallach- Bass
Pat Dixon- Drums
Production- Eddie Kramer