The Sweet answers the question once and for all: What would happen if some combined the glam of T. Rex, the metal of Slade and the modernity of Jay Z? What’s that? You said you never asked that particular question?
Well, the Sweet answers it anyway, with an effervescent take on “New York Groove” to open their forthcoming album of mashed-up cover tunes, New York Connection, due April 27, 2012. Original guitarist Andy Scott is continuing the name, and the attitude, that made the Sweet such a great party band in the mid-1970s — despite the kind of hard luck and bad times that would have soured most.
He’s joined on New York Connection (named after a 1971 Sweet tune) by lead singer and bassist Pete Lincoln, in place of Brian Connolly — who left the band in 1979 and, after a long battle with alcoholism, died in 1997 from liver failure at age 51. Original drummer Mick Tucker passed at 54 in 2002 after a bout with leukemia. That’s left Scott to carry on with guitarist and keyboardist Tony O’Hora and drummer Bruce Bisland, while original bass player Steve Priest has continued with his own version of the Sweet. In the studio for the first time since 2006’s Sweetlife, however, Scott shows that he’s lost none of his will to fun, and that’s perhaps best heard on their romping update of Kiss’ “New York Groove.”
The Sweet runs through a smart reading of the verse and chorus, so familiar from the spacey Ace Frehley solo version from the late 1970s, with only a slightly sharper edge to set it apart. The ex-Kiss guitarist sang the song as if through a cloud of dope smoke in the back of a limo, whereas the Sweet floors it from the first. In their best moments, going back to the bubblegum kitsch of their glam-rock favorite “Ballroom Blitz,” the Sweet has always had this reckless abandon — and that’s unchanged here: Suddenly, the track makes a hard left — and runs smack dab into the soaring vocal counterpoint originally sung by Alicia Keys in Jay Z’s “Empire State of Mind,” thus constructing a brilliant mix that traverses decades of music, yet still conveys the same sense of limitless possibility as the bright lights of the Big Apple whiz by.
That’s but fizzy prologue for what’s to come, too: “Ballroom Blitz” is referenced in their cover of the Ramones’ song “Blitzkrieg Bop.” Scott’s familiar guitar signature from the Sweet’s “Burn on the Flame” can be found lodged in their take on Electric Frankenstein’s “It’s All Moving Faster.”
Elsewhere, the Sweet covers Pete Townshend’s “Join Together,” echoing their take on his “My Generation” from the breakout 1974 hit album Desolation Boulevard — original home to “Ballroom Blitz.” They do a howling, heavy-metal version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Because The Night,” reclaiming the proto-hair band verve of their earliest recordings. And they take on the Black Keys (“Gold on the Ceiling”), the Yardbirds (“Shapes Of Things”). George Benson (“On Broadway”) and Dead or Alive (“You Spin Me Right Round [Like a Record]”) with a similarly thrilling anything-goes attitude.
But it all starts with this old Kiss tune, one that shows — despite everything that’s been thrown at them — the Sweet is still very much in the groove.
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