Following an ill-advised flirtation with nu metal, Lita Ford has been in nostalgic mode for the last few years, revisiting her glam-metal glory days on her last album and in her recently published autobiography, both titled Living Like A Runaway.
Intended as a companion piece to the book, Time Capsule unearths various ‘lost’ recordings from the late 1980s and features starry cameos including Gene Simmons, Dave Navarro and Chris Holmes. These are pop-metal anthems from a pre-grunge age of innocence, and Ford embraces every spangle-riffed, big-haired cliché with an impressive lack of shame or irony: ‘The deeper the shock, the harder it rocks.’ Preach it, sister.
That said, these formulaic limitations start to grate over the long haul. It’s easy to see why generic blues-metal grunters like Black Leather Heart and the perfunctory Simmons duet Rotten To The Core finished up left on the shelf. But Ford has few rivals in the croaky-voiced, widescreen, ladymetal power-ballad league, as she proves with the Bonnie Tyler-sized Killing Kind and the brooding King Of The Wild Wind, which combines a Spinal Tap-worthy title with an epic Paradise City-style blow-out finale. Guilty pleasures all.
