Pushking - The World As We Know It

When you think of great European countries, do you ever think of Russia?  I know it's not Europe, but it's pretty damned close.  When I think of Russia and heavy metal, two things come to mind: The Moscow Music Peace Festival and home grown metal band Gorky Park.  To best of my knowledge, Russia has not exported metal bands other than Gorky Park stateside.  Pushking is the first hard rock/metal band I've heard of in about 20years coming from Russia.  The band has been around since 94' and they have been churning out some mean hard rock ever since.  The band has essentially just been a country favorite, due to them singing in the native tongue, but in the last few years the band has been singing in English to grow a bigger audience.  The World As We Know it, is the band's first record released internationally, and to make sure they made a big splash in the hard rock community, they had brought along a few familiar faces.

Pushking have assembled an all-star cast of musicians to help them out on their debut release for Armoury Records.  The list is too long to print, so I will give you the highlights.  First off, Pushking is a classic hard rock band, that blends sounds of classic 70's and 80's hard rock.  The first track to catch my ear was Troubled Love featuring Alice Cooper and Keri Kelli.  This is an interesting track because the music sounds more like classic Copper than Alice does today.  It is a mid-tempo rocker full and melody a catchy chorus.  It reminds me of classic Cooper mixed with Ratt.  Killer track! The next cool track was Cut the Wire featuring Paul Stanley and Stevie Salas.  Rather than having a Kiss vibe, this one caters more to Salas' style, in that it has a funky groove to it.  The list goes on, but I do have to mention that there are a trio of songs featuring Glenn Hughes, that are just amazing.

Another strong aspect of this CD, is that not only has the band asked some killer vocalists to add to the tunes, but they have also, assembled a killer list of guitartists as well.  There is some killer axework provided by Nuno Bettencourt, Steve Stevens and Steve Vai.  I'm not sure if the band had this in mind when they were writing these tracks, but for the most part, each track caters to the vocalist driving the tune.  It makes sense, so you ensure that the track will work.  The only tracks that didn't work for me were God Made Us Free (Graham Bonnett), Open Letter to God (Eric Martin) and Head Shooter (Joe Lynn Turner).  These tracks were okay, but not as strong as some of the others.  All in all a solid release that should get Pushking on the map. 

Bottom Line: A solid hard rock effort.  A 19 track platter of well written songs executed perfectly, with the exception of a few.  This CD comes off sounding like a compilation due to all of the artists involved, so it will be interesting to see if the guys try this approach for the follow up.  The next effort will be the real test for the band, if they decide to do it alone.

Standout Tracks: Troubled Love, Private Own, Heroin and Cut the Wire.

-Ragman likes a good compilation.