Does One Song an Album Make?--Saigon Kick's The Lizard Makes You Wonder

I'll readily admit that there's not much music outside the classic rock area that interests me, but when I when I first heard Saigon Kick's sublime hit single Love Is On The Way back in 1992, I bought the album, titled The Lizard, out of pure curiosity. As I'll relate in a moment, not all of the album sounds like Love Is On The Way, but it has its good moments.

Saigon Kick was formed in Miami, Florida, in 1988, and spent a couple of years doing the circuits in that area. No one paid much attention to their first album, titled Saigon Kick, but with the release of The Lizard in 1992, the band finally broke through and achieved some degree of commercial success. What followed was the inevitable change in personnel, and a couple of albums which have been described by most critics as mediocre. Although the band still has a large following in Asia (maybe because of the name), Saigon Kick has more or less faded from the American music scene.

The personnel on The Lizard were:

Matt Kramer, vocals
Jason Bieler, guitars, vocals and keyboards
Tom DeFile, bass
Phil Varone, drums, percussion

Track Listing

1. Cruelty
2. Hostile Youth
3. Feel The Same Way
4. Freedom
5. God Of 42nd Street
6. My Dog
7. Peppermint Tribe
8. Love Is On The Way
9. The Lizard
10. All Alright
11. Sleep
12. All I Want
13. Body Bags
14. Miss Jones
15. World Goes Round
16. Chanel

My evaluation of The Lizard is made in somewhat of a vacuum--this is the only thing I've ever heard by Saigon Kick, so I really have no point of reference to compare this album to--I'm told that their first album has a charm all its own, while the later albums were so humdrum that Saigon Kick soon became a band without a recording contract. Suffice it to say that the music on The Lizard qualifies Saigon Kick as a solid, hard rocking unit with an emphasis on distinctive guitar riffs--a lot of the harder stuff sounds the same, but the ballads on The Lizard sort of save the album. Like I said, I bought the album for one song, and I think I got my money's worth.

Highlights

The cacaphonous Cruelty sets up the strong riffs on the rest of the album--Hostile Youth has an angry message communicated by a heavy guitar line, while the taut harmonies of Feel The Same Way contrast the drone of the accompanying music. God Of 42nd Street is a stripped down semi-ballad with a distinct British sound, and Peppermint Tribe revisits the anger theme, with an aggressive thrash guitar dominating the mix. Other notable riff-driven songs are The Lizard, All Alright, and Body Bags--one of the faults of this album is that all of the hard rockers start to sound a little alike after a while.

The immaculate Love Is On The Way features a beautiful classical guitar solo and absolutely gorgeous seamless harmonies, while All I Want is another song on this album that has a distinct British sound. Finally, Chanel is an interesting exercise that manages to sound Beatlesque and jazzy at the same time.

Like I said, I bought this album for one song, but after hearing the whole thing, I found other tunes that I liked. This is not one of the greatest albums of all time, but it is an interesting effort by a band that briefly blazed across the skies before sinking into oblivion.

You decide.

Thanks for reading.