Lee Aaron – Fire and Gasoline Review
Gabor Kleinbloesem
April 24, 2016
Released by: Big Sister Records/ILS/Caroline
Release Date: Out Now!!!
Genre: Rock
Tracklist:
01. Tom Boy
02. Fire And Gasoline
03. Wanna Be
04. Bitter Sweet
05. Popular
06. 50 Miles
07. Bad Boyfriend
08. Heart Fix
09. Nothing Says Everything
10. If You Don’t Love Me Anymore
11. Find The Love
Fire and gasoline is the new album of the legendary Canadian singer Lee Aaron and after all these years, she is back rocking again. Together with engineers Ben Kaplan (Mother Mother, Hedley) and vocal engineer/keyboard guru John Webster (Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, The Cult), she recorded one of her finest record in ages. She started life as the Metal Queen back in the early 1980s, changed to AOR in the mid-late 80s, turned poprock and blues later on, while in the 90s and 00s she became active as jazz performer. She did everything at a high level, but it was about time she started to rock again and that’s why we have Fire and Gasoline.
Opener Tom Boy is the only slight let-down, as this a very simple teenage poprocker, but following tracks are much better thankfully. Titletrack Fire And Gasoline is a slow bluesy rocker, followed by Wanna Be (a catchy poppy punky uptempo rocker, nice little pop hit chorus actually a la early Blondie mixed with The Runaways and featuring a rather cool Talk dirty to me guitar riff), Bitter Sweet (southern midtempo AOR ballad, great song, fantastic vocals of Lee, classic style with 1980s touch), Popular (1990s uptempo rocker a la Alannis Morrisette), 50 Miles (good slow bluesy semi-rockballad), Bad Boyfriend (nice poppy uptempo altrocker), Heart Fix (another bluesy semi rockballad a la Alannah Myles, Chrissy Steele, Darby Mills and such), Nothing Says Everything (nice midtempo AOR ballad), If You Don’t Love Me Anymore (one of the absolute highlights, a lovely relaxing 1970s based AOR tune with nostalgic feeling, Heart ish meets Fleetwood Mac) and closing track is Find The Love, which is a nice semi melodic rockballad. In the end, this is a very diverse album, with all kinds of styles.
You will not find Metal Queen ish material here, because the material is lighter, but it rocks definitely and features Lee’s excellent vocals. Especially towards the end of the album there’s some great melodic rock orientated to be found. Definitely worth checking out Lee’s finest album in 20 years!
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