This review covers rock track The Black Crowes – Hard to Handle.
This track was released in 1990 on the album Shake your Money Maker.
The track starts with a general drum kit sound. It is then joined by guitars layered with a piano. It doesn’t take long for the vocals to come in.
At this point, the track does into the main chorus with every instrument going away. From there, the track builds up into the verse and is joined by a piano in the process. It doesn’t take long to go into the main chorus again.
There is a general verse with nothing too distinct about them. Shortly after, the track goes into the main chorus. After this, the track goes into a guitar solo. Shortly after, the track goes into another main chorus. From there, some additional guitars come into play as a sort of mix of vocals and guitar solo. From there, the track then just ends.
This track takes a rather unusual tactic in putting together a track. Most track build up the instrumental section during the main chorus. This track, meanwhile does the exact opposite by pulling the instrumental section away right when the main chorus hits. While I can appreciate trying something different, this, for me, causes the main chorus to be highly anticlimactic. In my view, the part that is supposed to be the best part shouldn’t be the most boring. What winds up happening in this track is that the verses are more interesting than the main chorus. Given how prominent the main chorus is in this track, you can imagine how bored I got with this track on this fact alone.
Another problem with this track is the fact that the lyrics are virtually impossible to understand – especially in the main chorus. For me, the flub is so bad, it’s impressive. Not only do you have the main chorus being boring with no instruments playing, but you manage to isolate the lyrics and still make it unintelligible. The net effect is that you almost think the instruments stop and wait for the vocals to stop doing their thing so the track can continue. It’s enough to give me a headache.
Probably the only positive element I can think of in this track is the piano. The piano does add a nice sound to the overall track. Because this takes such a minor part of the track, it winds up not helping that much.
In the final portion of the track is a mess of guitar solo and vocals. The lyrics are hard to understand as it is, but mixed with a guitar solo that winds up sounding like nails on chalkboard, this just sounds terrible. For me, the ending guitar solo should have been cut because it just doesn’t sound good.
Generally speaking, this track is a flop for me. The main chorus is gibberish and boring. The verses wind up being the best parts of the track and they wind up being mediocre. Probably the only thing decent in the track is the piano, but it’s a small part that has a small influence on the overall sound. Even the ending sounded bad with the mess of vocals and bad guitar sounds. It’s really hard to find positives in this track as there are far more negatives than positives. An overall boring track not worth listening to.
Score
3/10
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
