Bad Boy - No Regrets
Bad Boy, Milwaukee’s exemplars of hook-laden hard rock, had their major label moment back in the late 1970s. But it’s a credit to the band’s perseverance that they continue to mine the same artistic vein for the better part of a half-century as a regional attraction.
Their first album of the current decade, No Regrets, proffers the sound of dudes untouched by grunge, much less the tousled glam of the hair metal. It’s like late-period classic rock ripe for a radio format that, alas, can't accomodate new music regardless how vintage it comes off. No matter, Bad Boy are making music for themselves, their peers who remember them from back when and the children—and grand kids!—they may have turned on to the sort of rock that blared from the speakers of muscle cars during Jimmy Carter's administration.
Lead Boy Steve Grimm and vocal accomplice Xeno (a pre-Robin Zander alum of Cheap Trick, whose aggressive take on power pop sneakily colors a few tracks) could come off as ageing goofs were they not so unironically committed to the material. Commitment, thankfully, doesn’t preclude fun; songs about libidinous goings on at a Catholic parish festival and not being a paramour’s pack animal, plus a fresh use for the Bo Didley beat, make for levity among more yearning and mature offerings. It’s almost as if Bad Boy are power-chord-crunching Ponce de Leons who have tapped a fountain of youth in music that is at once very much of its time, yet curiously timeless.
