Back in 1988 a fella named Lenny Wolf (vocals)put together a new rock band featuring a bunch of L.A rock dudes and in the process writes a batch of tracks and heads north to Vancouver B.C and Kingdom Come record their self titled debut produced by Bob Rock and Wolf.
This may be Rock’s first stab at the Producers Chair before he took the reigns of other acts like The CULT/Blue Murder/Electric Boys/Metallica/Motley Crue/David Lee Roth/Bon Jovi and made a ton of loot for all parties involved!
Rock gives this album a real and I mean a real huge drum sound that is so friggin bombastic it will make your walls shake! After this album I was onboard with what Rock produced as you knew the sound of the records would be huge!
Kingdom Come is a 10 song album which for all intent and purposes when the lead single Get It On was released it had a bunch of Zeppelin’s vibe in the track. Big Bonzo like drums/Robert Plant like vocal phrasing/Jimmy Page like Riff’s all wrapped up tighter than a Taco!
I easily bought this right away due to the Get It On track and the fact that Bob Rock was involved.
It didn’t matter to me that Kingdom Come borrowed(ahem) from Zeppelin it was just when Lenny Wolfe said he never heard of Zeppelin in interviews at the time of the albums release was just a plain dumbo rock move if any to deny that.
To me it didn’t matter. The songs were good rock tracks peppered with hard rock trimmings throughout!
From opener Living Out of Touch. Guitarists Rick Steier/Danny Stag/Bassist Johnny B Frank and Drummer James Kottack prove that these guy’s are all excellent players. Pushin Hard as well as17 and my personal fav on this album The Shuffle are rock solid tunes.
Course there is the prototypical Ballad as it’s 1988 and Lenny and Crew deliver What Love Can Be which is Yup you guessed it as it does indeed sound like Zep!
Side 2 opens with the heavy drums of Get It On as well as the Guitars are right locked in with the Bass as this song just reeks of greatness! Seriously man….the Drums lead the charge and carry this tune and listen to that quick little ditty of a smash a roo of the drums that Kottack lays down at the end of the song! Brilliant! Vid is posted below…
Now and Forever almost sounds like to me it could have come from KISS’s Crazy Nights album which was released the year before.(87) It drives at a decent clip as well.
Hideaway is a different sounding rock track that is exact opposite of anything else on this album. Hideaway is a good track as the verses build into the chorus. Loving You puts the breaks on the hard rock tracks of the previous three tunes. Don’t be fooled by the title as you may think it will be a snooze a roo tune but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Use of Mandolins are mixed right up front with Wolf’s voice.
Shout it Out ends the album on a high cranked up note. The album ends with an uptempo beat that ends the album on high….
A year later in 1989 Kingdom Come released the fantastic titled Kingdom Come- In Your Face album and they went about as far as a way as you could from Zep. It was a good album folks but it did not sell as well and by late 89 the original band broke up….
I bought this album on CD back upon its release in 1988. So a few months back there it was at New Day Records in mint condition for $9! 9 bucks well spent says I!
Its funny looking back on this album upon the time of its release these guys got hammered by the press for being Zep rip offs. Jimmy Page himself questioned their authenticity. Than again Zep gets sued themselves for swiping music. Gary Moore(RIP) took it a step further and wrote a tune called Led Clones which I thought was Goofy. Whitesnake was pissing off Robert Plant and on and on it goes! People need to Fuckin Relax as it’s just music man…Everyone is ripping everyone off musically so no biggie in my world but to others it irked them. I guess when money is being made there’s the root of the problem!
Page was pissed perhaps as Plant didn’t want to reunite and do a Zep tour so he raged on Kingdom Come. Page as well released his own solo album in 1988 called Outrider that no one cared about while Moore was maybe mad as well as he could not crack the North American Market…
Kingdom Come went Platinum in both Canada and the U.S.
Ouch …
Who knows, those are my reasons. Look at Greta Van Fleet who are riding high up the charts with their own Zep borrowed riff rock and everyone is chill about it. Greta is a great band make no mistake about it but everyone is relaxed about what they’re doing.
Guess 30 years between Kingdom Come and Greta Von Fleet has made people not get so bent out about stuff musically …
But than again who buys full albums anymore other than some of us?!
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