REO Speedwagon: Good Trouble : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The most immediately appealing aspect of REO Speedwagon's new album, Good Trouble, is its sound. In fact, it's remarkably easy to identify the band before singer Kevin Cronin so much as opens his mouth. The basic component of the REO sound as forged on Hi-In-Fidehty, this LP's platinum predecessor, is Gary Richrath's fat guitar tone, but the key ingredient that distinguishes them from their hard-pop colleagues is Cronin's acoustic strumming, which opens a broad spectrum of stylistic possibilities for the band.

Take "Keep the Fire Burnin.'" Thanks to acoustic guitar and piano, the song carries enough country-rock overtones to swing convincingly, while Richrath's well-placed power chords add drive and urgency. The two join together to strengthen Cronin's skipping vocal line and awkward lyrics, giving the song a pop credibility it almost doesn't deserve. Any band that can pull off this unlikely sort of fusion can't be relying on calculation but on dumb luck. Perhaps a more charitable term would be instinct, because Good Trouble seems to draw heavily on bar-band smarts, an innate sense of just how far you can go in playing on your listeners' taste for the familiar.

More difficult to camouflage, however, is REO's utter lack of anything to say. Granted, Cronin and company never had much of a reputation for profundity in the past, but at least Hi-InFidelity delivered its moon-June-spoon banalities with a modicum of wit. Good Trouble instead relies on tired standbys like the "ragin' Cajun" of "I'll Follow You," or everybody's favorite cliché, "Girl with the Heart of Gold." Even the group's thank you to its fans, bassist Bruce Hall's "Let's Be-Bop," is so fatuously grateful it could have been written by SCTV's Sammy Maudlin.

Ultimately, though, the question is whether lack of content will hurt REO. Not so much as losing their instincts, I'd guess, because unlike the majority of bands cashing in on the hard-pop sound, REO seems to have arrived there almost by accident, after years spent touring the heartland. Now that they've made the big time, we'll see how deep their roots run. Don't get your hopes up, though: Good Trouble already finds them piling on the fertilizer.