:: Buckcherry - All Night Long

Buckcherry

Los Angeles based hard rock outfit Buckcherry have certainly enjoyed some incredible success over their fifteen year career. But throughout that time, they’ve also endured hard times as well. But despite their rollercoaster ride of high’s and low’s, the Buckcherry continues to forge ever onward on their hard rock crusade. Following on from their first live album from last year, the five piece act have returned with their fifth full-length effort ‘All Night Long’.
While Buckcherry have never been the sort of band to radically change direction from one album to the next, it has to be said that ‘All Night Long’ does show a return to the band’s rawer sounding rock roots of their earlier releases, rather than continuing the more mainstream and accessible direction of their last album ‘Black Butterfly’ (2008). The opening title track ‘All Night Long’ is an up-tempo rocker that combines the right amount of catchiness within the choruses to counterbalance the songs huge riffs, which will no doubt become a live favourite in no time at all. Continuing in the same vein as the opener is the simple rocking anthem ‘It’s A Party’, the fast paced ‘Recovery’, ‘Never Say Never’, the sleazy blues swagger of ‘Liberty’, the environmentally conscious ‘Our World’ and ‘Dead’, with Todd really hitting his stride as a singer, while the guitar tandem of Nelson and Stevie D. seems to have improved ten-fold in the last couple of years, with the solos this time around sounding more interesting in their extended format, while the riffs too prove to be a vast improvement on previous efforts. In terms of slower material, Buckcherry seem to still have issues maintaining a sense of consistency with their past efforts, but the strength of their energetic material this time around seems to have extended to most of the songs on the album, with the AC/DC like ‘Oh My Lord’ and ‘Bliss’ the stand out picks on the remainder of the album. ‘All Night Long’ isn’t quite up to the classic status of the band’s first three releases, but it’s a definite return to form after the rather disappointing direction the band took with ‘Black Butterfly’.
Buckcherry have never been the most original of acts, but their album’s have always been the kind of discs you could slip on at a party without destroying any of the good time vibe. Thankfully, ‘All Night Long’ marks a return to that sound for the band, and for that deserves to be turned up loud and enjoyed purely for just what it is.