Club Daze (Vol. 1)
Spitfire Records
It has been a long time coming but over the last year the entire Twisted Sister back catalog has been made available on CD. Starting the whole lot off was the Spitfire release of Club Daze (Vol. 1), a 13-track compilation of unreleased studio sessions and demos. “It really shows the evolution of the band,” phones in Jay Jay French, one of the group’s guitarists and producer. “By this time we had reformed for the fourth time. Dee joined taking over the vocals and bringing in a lot of Zeppelin covers. My voice was more
like Lou Reed and didn’t really fit the direction we were going. Dee brought in Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath and later Judas Priest and AC/DC – the harder stuff. He also wrote killer heavy pop-rock tunes with memorable hooks. Obviously, that’s where we went.”Club Daze is packed with great photos and extensive liner notes, sadly missing from the reissued CD’s of the band’s remaining titles. However, each reissue is decorated with song lyrics and several bonus tracks taken from the session linked to the album from which they appear. Explains French, “Tony O’Brian, a good friend of ours from Atlantic, arranged to let us have the masters to pretty much the whole catalog. That’s where the extra tracks came from.”
Sound quality is virtually unchanged from the vinyl version. Under The Blade sounds especially nice with its dense production and ‘live’ feel. “Back then, we thought, ‘It doesn’t matter who produces us, we’ll sound great’. In a way we were right. The less we messed with it the better. What you heard on that record was brutal Twisted Sister – edgy and ready.”
Website: www.twistedsister.com