Album review: Highway Child – On the Old Kings Road

Denmark is an astonishingly productive musical country considering its meagre population. Few bands have really broken out into the European mainstream (Kashmir pre-date Radiohead by several years, but apparently the world wasn’t ready; The Savage Rose are determinedly wide in musical ambition but insular in terms of commercial success) but the range of styles is healthy. While Scandinavia has always been a hotbed of extreme, black and death metal, and Denmark itself continues its love affair with jazz, Highway Child are looking entirely westwards for their influences and musical heroes as exemplified in On the Old Kings Road.

With a band name culled directly from Jimi Hendrix and a (purposefully?) ambiguous album title (do they mean “travelling on the ancestral road of Danish Kings” like Harald Bluetooth or are they hinting at the swinging sixties’ London mecca?), Highway Child have a lot to live up to.

One thing Highway Child really have done well is the strikingly effective cover art, which isn’t always easy on the small canvas of the CD. Of course, the advent of downloadable music has begun to make the notion of cover art virtually prehistoric; the joy of owning a physical entity is fast becoming obsolete…

OK, yes, all right – I’m waffling to postpone the moment I actually have to review this third rate old-fashioned album. So, to business: “Lonelytime Blues” sets the benchmark low as an opening salvo, a basic blues-rock stomp that only hints at the bland, mindless plodding that follows in “Change Yourself”. Aiming for classic seventies blues-rock in the vein of Bad Company, AC/DC or late period Deep Purple, Highway Child sound more like Free being mugged by The Stereophonics (without the crowd-pleasing choruses) and have all the lyrical “sophistication” of David Coverdale (the singer from Whitesnake, for all you young-uns out there).

“Branded A Fool”, “High-class Bitch”, and “Gold” all possess brand-name titles and a lovely fuzz bass sound, but there’s precious little else to recommend them. “High” attempts to do acoustic Led Zeppelin, but it’s the wholesale plundering of the genuinely classic seventies rock bands in On the Old Kings Road that really rankles. “Lovin’ Lovin’” snatches the entire riff (and extrapolation) from Blue Oyster Cult’s seminal “Dominance And Submission” and manages to make it both less urgent and less exciting. It stinks lyrically, too; Highway Child would have done better just covering the original. The only passing interest is brought on by the sudden backwards tapes/swirling psychedelia/phased-to-the-max end section, which shows the band do have some ideas and talent.

The curiously untitled eighth track is a harmonium based (!) Stereophonics b-side, while “Love For Sale” is as generic a slice of cocksure blues-rock and roll (complete with Little Richard piano and Robert Plant screams) as you could hope to find; elsewhere, “Just Like You” heads straight for the soulful blues of Thin Lizzy without understanding that their way with a tune was their strength. Highway Child miss the point and chuck in an overlong effects-heavy guitar solo to compensate for the lack of a second verse or any hint of song-writing talent. Ending on the band’s title track is a monumental piece of hubris that neatly encapsulates the fatal flaw of On the Old Kings Road: a yearning ambition matched to mediocre talent.

It’s a crying shame, really; Highway Child are an imitation as pale and faceless as the duck-egg blue of the cover. There’d be much more promise if they married that fuzz bass to the vastly more exciting sonic ideas buried underneath the seventies rock conformity and then shot the lyricist. I’m sure Highway Child are a blast as a live act, but their derivative sound and lack of personality on record are a huge hindrance to their plan for global success.