So here’s my review of a UFO Best-Of album that I did for Blog Critics magazine.  Keep in mind, I only do positive reviews so if the album sucked, you wouldn’t see it here!  It was fun to write about UFO since I missed out on them back in my budding hard rock days, which were filled with the sounds of AC/DC, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Motley Crue, etc.  Dig…

Okay, is it cool to like 80’s Metal again? With the hugely triumphant return of David Lee Roth-era Van Halen to the old hair metal guys even having their very own 4-day Bonnaroo-like camping festival, Rocklahoma, in July, it seems like the scene is set for the 80’s Metal Gods to rise again. So you’ll definitely see a hasty repackaging of catalogs and best-ofs from bands like Ratt and Poison and Motley Crue and Dokken, and even new albums from some of these guys. Some will be be great and make us wonder why we ever stopped listening to them and some will be quite the opposite… as with any genre of music.

Then if you’re really searching, you’ll find a brilliant compilation of songs from a band whose music informed that whole genre; a band who actually had little to no success in the 80s, but whose sound you could find all over the popular hard rock music of the decade. The band is UFO and the new compilation is Chrysalis Records’ The Best of UFO (1974-1983).

Now, as the band was coming to the end of their powers in 1983, I was turning 11-years old and beginning to be turned on to hard rock and metal. So I had definitely heard the name Michael Schenker since the Scorpions were just starting to see huge success in the States, as I was eating up their Animal Magnetism, Blackout and Love At First Sting albums, and knew that Scorps guitarist Rudy Schenker had a brother who was once in the Scorpions in the 70s and currently had his own creatively-named Michael Schenker Group. But I had not properly been introduced to the work of Michael Schenker in UFO until the last couple years. That’s pretty damn late for a band that formed in 1969 and who started hitting their creative stride in 1974, when I was 2-years old!

Over the past year, I’ve slowly been acquiring classic UFO albums and digging further into their catalog and just now, somewhat serendipitously, I was called upon to review the new Best Of UFO (1974-1983) collection, as it saw its April 2008 release.

I was happy to hear a great sequencing of songs when I first popped on the album, and a pristine remastering job! The comp kicks off with the 6 1/2-minute scorcher, “Rock Bottom”, from the time when the band lost their trippy space rock sound of old (another era of UFO I like a lot for different reasons) and picked up the aforementioned German guitar guru, Michael Schenker who gave them a more straight-ahead rock sound for their 1974 Shenker-debut album, Phenomenon. If this song doesn’t hook you, then you may want to check your pulse, for perhaps you’ve expired!

The comp continues on chronologically with rocker after rocker, certain to turn the uninitiated listener into UFO believer by mid-disc. The Schenker-era tracks roll, including the highlights “Shoot Shoot”, “Lights Out”, and “Too Hot To Handle”, from the 6 classic Schenker-era albums, punctuated with “Doctor Doctor” from the highly successful live album, “Strangers In The Night” which would go down as Schenker’s last with the band, at least for many years, as he stormed out of the studio as the live album was being mixed. Schenker has returned and quit the band since then almost a countless number of times. It’s rumored that he’s not the easiest guy in the world to get along with.

The remaining seven tracks out of the healthy nineteen total are all after 1978 and all post-Schenker. Surprisingly enough, the songs never lose steam and the band keeps firing on all cylinders pretty much right up until 1983 when UFO realized they weren’t selling any records. They disbanded (but not forever) and made way for the next generation of rockers on whom UFO undeniably left their stamp.

It’s the last track in the collection that Michael Schenker plays on where I think I run into my only issue with Chrysalis’ compilation. That’s the inclusion of the live version of “Doctor Doctor” instead of the rippin’ studio version that I personally just like so much better. If it were up to me, I would have put the Strangers In the Night live version of “Out in the Street” and the studio version of “Doctor Doctor”. Now that’s a minor discrepancy with an otherwise spotless compilation of widely-forgotten rock gems. Well… and the fact that the live version of “Doctor Doctor” is edited will not please some of UFO’s hardcore fans.

But then again, this is not a compilation for the hardcore fan. It is more the hard rock fan that somehow missed out on one of the genre’s most important bands who influenced the 80’s-era rockers as much as did Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Sweet, Slade and perhaps even Zeppelin. And we shouldn’t forget the guy who had plenty of UFO on vinyl in the 70s and departed with the whole collection and the turntable at a garage sale in the 90s, after he had kids and just didn’t seem to find the time to rock like he used to. This compilation is for you, That Guy, so you can get back to your metal roots and show the world that you’re never too old to rock!

Link to this article on Blog Critics