Forty-eight years after Cheap Trick’s debut, you’d imagine they might be running on fumes. And yet here they are, back with their 21st record. If you stop and think about all the trends they’ve outlasted and all the ways the world has shifted in that time, the remarkable thing is what hasn’t changed: Cheap Trick still have one of the greatest arms of harmony in rock.
It’s still about melody. Still about choruses. Still about fun.
And this isn’t fun in an ironic, wink-to-the-audience way. This is the real thing – the sort of “dancing with the band” feeling that’s wired into every great Cheap Trick moment.
Robin Zander and Rick Nielsen sound as fresh as ever, even after all these years. From the very start, the record reminds you that there’s only one band that sounds like this.
The title track, “All Washed Up”, is definitely not a statement of defeat. Instead it proves the opposite, even throwing in what feels like a sly nod to “The Time Has Come Today”.
“All Wrong Long Gone” has an AC/DC backbone but delivered with that Cheap Trick sugar hit – call it sugar-rush boogie, “dirty deeds done sweet”, if you like.
If you don’t know what a song called “The Riff That Won’t Quit” is going to sound like, then honestly, you’re on the wrong website. This is Cheap Trick doing exactly what they do, and doing it like no one else.
Like all their records, this thing lives and dies on the choruses and the blend, and they absolutely deliver. “Bet It All” and “The Best Thing” show that glorious guitar sound – sometimes slower, sometimes surprisingly doomy, almost Sabbath-y in places – but always carried by harmonies that just make you feel better.
There are lighter, brighter songs, and then ones that go to the darker side, like “Bad Blood”, but even those never lose the band’s innate sense of uplift. “Twelve Gates” is a mid-paced highlight, while “Love Gone” feels like the long way round to something cathartic. “A Long Way To Worcester” adds a touch of wanderlust to the back end of the record.
It’s all rock ’n’ roll, but rock ’n’ roll with universality hard-wired.
It ends with “Wham Boom Bang”, an acoustic, slightly jazzy piece that takes a left turn just when you think you’ve got the measure of it. A lovely way to finish.
And honestly, listening to this, I went right back to the time I first came across Cheap Trick as a kid. It was my love of bands like Poison and all that sleazy, glam-leaning stuff that led me to them. Those bands always referenced Cheap Trick as something godlike. And they were right.
They gave me the blueprint for every bit of hard-rocking power-pop I’ve ever enjoyed. And the fact that, after all this time, they can still make something this good?
That’s not just testament to their skill – it’s testament to their desire to still be Cheap Trick.
“All Washed Up”? Absolutely not. Not even close.
