Twisted Sister

Tapping further into their revived legacy, riff rockers Twisted Sister reissue 1999 venture Club Daze Volume 1, a collection of pre-1982 debut Under The Blade studio sessions. While the affair captures their amusing youthfulness before establishing the bold personas evident on their first two albums, or the more popular disposable side ingrained by "We're Not Gonna Take It," this is far from essential. At best, it intriguingly reveals the band's bare-bones rock'n'roll influence, nailing aspects of AC/DC, Chuck Berry and the like with stylish ease. Still, when compared to their more notable years, Club Daze Volume 1 is incredibly rudimentary. The band sound great and vocalist Dee Snider is the perfect frontman, but every song is so mired in basic blues rock that there's little invention, inspiration or meat to the majority of these 13 tracks. That said, renditions of Shangri-Las staple "Leader of the Pack" and their "Under the Blade" are rather captivating. Fun and integral for understanding the band's legacy, Club Daze Volume 1 is still a hard-to-justify bit of vault dust for anyone other than Twisted completists.