Review – Steve McNaughton ‘Hardly Softly
Rock’
Steve
McNaughton is
not typical of the artists you would normally find on samplers like BBY’s MIDEM
99. His press tells us, and the album ‘Hardly Softly Rock’ proves,
that the guy with the look of Tom
Selleck and Cash Backman delivers right across that
genre today referred to as ‘rock’.
From the ZZ
Top/Texas rock & boogie styled opened Believe In Me, the
country-rockesque Stalingrad Still Stands and the Oz Rock duet with
John (Swanee) Swan, through the
gentler moments of Chris
Isaak’s Somebody’s Crying and the almost-annoying but
completely compelling Hold Me Tonight and Can’t Be Denied,
Steve and his hand-picked session musicians deliver in a very
radio-friendly way for both rock and AOR stations alike, but the latter approach
continued a little longer than necessary and lost me until Find Your Soul
breathed new life into the record, just in time to close.
The aspect of leading us on with those
strong opening tracks (the Hardly segment) only to let us down with probably too
much of the Softly was the disappointment of what promised to be an excellent
album. Full production and presentation points but maybe more of the style that
radio has taken to for the next album ««¾