This review covers the hard rock track Billy Idol – Cradle of Love.
This track was released in 1990 on the album Charmed Life.
The track starts with a few drum hits before the guitars come in. The vocals then come in shortly after. Interestingly enough, the vocals are launched straight into the main chorus.
From there, the track then goes into the next verse. Piano plays somewhat subtly during the verse. After this, the track then goes into the main chorus. The track goes into the next verse after.
At that point, the track then pulls back by a fair bit, leaving only the keys and subtle guitars along with the vocals. From there, the track then picks up and goes into a guitar solo. After the solo, the track then goes into another verse, main chorus, then another verse.
From that point, the track then gets capped off with another main chorus. When that ends, the track fades out on an instrumental.
The good news is that the track does smoothly transition from section to section. The bad news is that there’s very little differentiating the verses and main chorus save for the lyrics. From what I heard, the only main difference I found in the instrumental section of things is the guitar solo and the brief pull back. Beyond that, it’s just one solid wall of sameness. Even though there is a pretty decent audio atmosphere going on here, it stays repetitive for the most part and falls into the category of bland after a while.
The vocals don’t really help a whole lot. This is because it’s hard to understand what some of it even means. There are several sections where the vocals get somewhat garbled and unintelligible.
Generally speaking, this is one of those tracks I wanted to like more than I actually did. It has a great sound atmosphere, but not much else. The guitar solo did break things up a bit, but it isn’t enough to really save the track in my view. There is so much sameness that, unless you are able to get some of the lyrics, it’s very hard to tell the difference between the chorus and the verse. Unintelligible lyrics parts of the time just didn’t help matters either. An interesting attempt at a track, but one that just falls flat in the end.
Score
4.5/10
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
