Rocket Roll

The Rockets 1982 album Rocket Roll represents a dramatic drop-off in quality from the albums that had come before. The warm Jack Douglas production of 1981's moderately successful Back Talk is gone and is replaced by a glossy sound that pulls off the neat trick of sounding over-produced and under-played at once. The songs are forced and thin, nearly every one is an up-tempo rocker that attempts to sound exciting but it just sounds like the band is desperate. Desperation rarely makes for good AOR records, only good art, and the Rockets were AOR to the core. The lyrical concerns of the songs are pretty flimsy; the main topics being rockin', testifying, mean streets, rock & roll girls and record machines. Great topics for a group who is making exciting music but these guys were in the throes of their last gasp at making a record the "kids" might dig. They didn't dig it and the band called it a day soon after the record justifiably flopped.