Private Angel
Nailed

Private Angel… Nailed… An album cover that has a sign with an angel nailed on something screwed… Seems reasonable.

As the AC/DC-ish vocals has sunk in and been put in perspective, I actually think that Private Angel comes with a sound that probably will work quite well with most people. The band plays a sort of classic hard rock without anything radical about it. Rock 'n' roll melodies and flow is the philosophy they play by and the tender, elegant and delicate playing is put in the form of old mans rock music in the same vein as my "favourite band in the world" - Bonafide, a band calling themselves "Sweden's finest". Private Angel makes no attemps being Swedish, but calls themselves "finest traditional hard rock" (or if it's the label that calls them that, it's hard to know sometimes). I'm not very sure of that "finest" thing, but otherwise it sounds correct to me. But calling them the finest of anything is arguably something you wouldn't get by without an argument.

'Nailed' begins with Human Wreck, a typical rock 'n' roll song that's perfect to open an album. It has a repetitive chorus and is fast and rocking. After this they move on with some more mixed candy, like Tomorrow Today Is Yesterday, Shine On, Tramp Stamp Boogie and My Haunt. These are all songs with varied characteristics and they come in the form of slower, mid-tempo, softer, somewthat harder and something a bit more classy songs. There's really an album-full of good and enjoyable songs. The candy bag following Human Wreck begins with the title track, a quite typical mid-tempo rock song until they free the choir and goes for almost a full minute part with choirs at the end. This is somewhat of a new experience for me when it comes to this kind of traditional 70's and 80's hard rock that Private Angel place themselves among. The album is varied and rich on so much more than just recycled hard rock melodies from the past that we've heard many times before.

However, the first thing I would do if I were the band would be to get someone else than the person that has written the album information for them to do the job. Here are a few "minor" issues, the name of the band is miss-spelled, a few of the songs have got "alternative" names than their actual names and last but not least - there's no information at all about either the band or the album in the information sheet. Like which years their previous albums was released, who's in the band or where and with whom this album has been recorded. The only thing noted in the sheet is that the band members have known each other since 25 years ago and they're apparently known as Peter, Dazz, robbo and Jo. Last but not least it says that the members in pairs has played with two different bands earlier - Maggie's Madness (later renamed to Wildcat) and Vacancy. This is information that makes no difference what so ever to me! As I've looked around I've found out some more information about them, but the otherwise so complete Hallowed information part on the left is now quite poor… and this is solely due to the fact that there is no more information to find out. In the end though, this may not be the most important thing for us that is interested in the band. I'm guessing most of us are more interested in how the album sounds and here Private Angel does a much better work. It might not be freash and inventive or innovative… but it has a nice flow, lots of charisma and emotion. And is quite catchy too...

Most of the songs on 'Nailed' are good or really good, but not all. Some songs are merely decent and some just fills out the playing time. I do, however, think that the good songs cover the less good quite well and overall I think this album is pretty interesting after all. Not an album I think I'll play on daily basis but I'm quite sure I'll play it in the future from time to time. The hammond gets the music moving forward, the guitars fdo the melodies and the drums seems inspired by ballads (they are very weak, especially put in context) and at the very front we find this hoarcus vocalus - a vocalist as hoarse as he's enthusiastic. And that actually works quite well here.

Maybe not "the finest traditional rock" but the Germans definitely makes it good enough to maintain the interest fo 12 songs and 45 minutes and in my opinion, the best song on this album is Valiant Song.

HHHHHHH