Music Day - Powerhouse

This is perfect rocking-out concert material (see Exhibit A and Exhibit B). Big drums, big hair, great guitar riff, rumbling bass, and Rick Florian.

It starts with with a solid guitar riff, then the drums and bass come in and together they build a great little nest of straight-up rock goodness for Rick's vocals to slide into a few measures later. Halfway through the first verse you begin to hear a little bit of keyboard. Rick himself sounds just a touch edgier than he does on some of the earlier projects -- even the rockier songs on the previous album, Freedom, featured very clean vocals where he was concerned (which, now that I think about it, is precisely why I love this his singing so much. It takes a lot of skill to keep a clean vocal when you're singing Power Tools).

And now back to today's song...

I've always liked that guitar riff sliding down into the chorus, and then the band vocals burst on the scene: 'Pow-er-house!' In the second and subsequent choruses, there's quite a lot going on vocally -- band vocals, backing vocals, Rick's lead...

They take it down (slightly) for eight sets of eight, just long enough to give the song some texture (and add some light keyboard and a sort of otherworldly 'Power...' from Rick), then the guitar chugs back in and blazes through a solo that's loud if nothing else, and then it all stops, everything, and just the band shouts again 'Pow-er-house!'

And with a sparkling keyboard, the chorus kicks back in. I think my favourite part is just at the end of the chorus, that last high hold from Rick (We need the powerhouse...) and then the drum sort of 'stutters' before the guitar comes back in and does kind of a reprise of the solo (it actually sounds a little out of place here, but the sheer passion with which it's played makes it tolerable).

Title: Powerhouse

Artist: White Heart

Album: Powerhouse

Year: 1990

Label: Star Song

iTunes here; YouTube here.

Go ahead, crank it and roll down the window. If anybody asks, it's summer's last hurrah -- those are always allowed to be 1990 arena rock. (Beyond Belief, anyone?)