Airbourne
No Guts. No Glory.
(Roadrunner/EMI)
After listening to Airbourne’s No Guts. No Glory., I asked my editor whether I could forgo writing a review and instead simply post an image of Bon Scott’s penis tearing through an Australian flag, and ejaculating 90 proof bourbon.
Here’s the review.
Rock. Rock used to have meaning. When you exclaimed, “This rocks!” people would endorse your statement with an exhausted sweaty nod. It was a word with weight behind it that tragically became diluted as just about everything started to rock. “Oh my god, this Pear Tarte Tatin with clotted cream and shaved nutmeg rocks”. Does it? Certainly not in my reality and definitely not in the world of Airbourne.
The songs on No Guts. No Glory. hark back to a simpler time. An era where men would hit their woman with a closed fist to say ‘I love you’ and an open fist to say ‘I’m hungry, what’s for dinner?’. An era when you could safely say someone had balls because you could see the bulging outline in their restrictive jeans. Airbourne have faithfully echoed the style of their heavy metal heroes with impeccable attention to the details, but that’s all it feels like. A dramatised re-enactment from a crimestoppers episode about a gang of youths that ram-raided a store and stole all the Rock.
There is nothing noteworthy about the individual tracks, you could pretty much skip to a random point in another song and not notice the shift at all. Sing about booze, sing about women and when we get to the chorus make sure to yell the title of the song as loud as humanly possible. It’s rock by numbers, all style over content. This is expressed perfectly on the album cover, where a blonde, bikini clad woman, sips a martini, American hundred dollar bills strewn amongst the empty bottles of Jack Daniels that surround her buxom body. Yes, all the true icons of an Australian band are represented.
Admittedly most hard rock and heavy metal songs are fairly shallow, but that was the point of it all - the ego. What made bands like Judas Priest so exciting was their steadfast conviction to their own vanity. The booze and broads were a side effect of their blinding egos. Airbourne seem to have idolised the concessions of celebrity instead of the spectacle. The music should be the reason for partying, not the partying being the reason for the music. It’s a shame when the associated drug becomes the hard sell for the tune. I prefer my songs to not have the asterisk of *must be at least this drunk to ride.
Airbourne drummer, Ryan O’Keefe, said this album is about “standing up and going for it, and being a man.” I quite literally have no idea what that sort of rhetoric is supposed to mean. It sounds cool enough, but nothing is actually said. He could be talking about urinating. And if gulping whiskey is all it takes to be ‘a man’ then my Grandmother’s giant leathery penis must swing between her knees with every push of her walking frame like a blue-rinsed, reanimated John Wayne.
Simon Keck