There’s a lot to be said for knowing exactly what you are. Chez Kane plainly does. “Reckless” isn’t interested in reinventing melodic rock, dragging it somewhere clever, or pretending the last four decades never happened. No, this thing throws on its finest shoulder pads, turns the gloss all the way up and heads straight for the neon.
And honestly? Good.
I’m listening to a book about the golden age of AOR at the minute, and “Reckless” sounds like it ought to have a chapter to itself. The title track is loud, proud and absolutely doesn’t give a shit. “I got the soul of a sinner but I got no shame,” Kane sings, and if that wasn’t enough, there’s a sax solo in there too, because of course there is. Anything less would have been letting the side down.
What follows is a record that understands the assignment from the off. “Personal Rock N’ Roll” has one of those choruses that just lifts clean off, and when Kane sings about “living in a video” it’s impossible not to think that, in the MTV age, she’d have been enormous. This is music made with neon lights reflected in aviators, and all the better for it.
“Night Of Passion” has all the hallmarks of Pat Benatar at her most direct and most urgent, while “Strip Me Down” doesn’t so much hint at the sexiness of this record as put it in massive letters and underline it twice. Kane said herself that this one was going to be “bigger, bolder, and yeah… sexy as hell,” and you can’t accuse her of false advertising.
Then there’s “Tongue Of Love”, which is the type of slow, slinky thing almost designed to make me blush, before “Love Tornado” tears in. And any song that starts with a solo is getting bonus points round here, just on principle. “Bad Girl” is all glee, energy and mischief, the sound of a singer absolutely revelling in what she’s doing, and that matters because there’s a joy running through “Reckless” that stops it ever feeling too polished for its own good.
That said, Danny Rexon — frontman of Swedish hard rockers Crazy Lixx — has absolutely honed these choruses. “Street Survivor” is so polished it practically sparkles, and “Too Dangerous” flat out soars. Arena-ready? Maybe. Arena-dreaming, certainly. Either way, it reaches for the cheap seats and gets there. And by the time “Bodyrock” arrives, sounding so familiar you’re almost convinced you’ve known it for years, you realise that’s the whole point.
Because the thing with “Reckless” is this: saying it sounds like you’ve heard it before isn’t a criticism. It’s meant to. The damn thing is called “Reckless”, for goodness sake. Any more 80s and it’d be watching “Dynasty” in a pair of shoulder pads. But that’s not a weakness, it’s the selling point. Chez Kane isn’t chasing nostalgia so much as grabbing it by the wrist, giving it a fresh coat of gloss and sending it back out into the night.
Written and produced once again by Rexon, frontman of Swedish hard rockers Crazy Lixx, the album leans hard into the golden age of melodic rock, but it never feels lazy. Kane’s confidence is all over this thing, and if her first two records suggested she was one of the better voices in this whole retro-rock lane, “Reckless” sounds like the point where she really nails down her identity.
So yeah, Chez Kane blows in like a melodic rock hurricane and leaves very little standing.
RATING 7.5/10
