By JAY ROBERTS

The Cassette Chronicles is a continuing series of mini reviews and reflections on albums from the 1980’s and 1990’s. The aim of this series is to highlight both known and underappreciated albums from rock, pop and metal genres from this time period through the cassette editions of their releases. Some of the albums I have known about and loved for years, while others are new to me and were music I’ve always wanted to hear. There will be some review analysis and my own personal stories about my connection with various albums. These opinions are strictly my own and do not reflect the views of anyone else at Limelight Magazine.

STONE FURY – LET THEM TALK (1986)

When Kingdom Come hit it big with their debut album, a lot of the talk centered around how the band sounded like Led Zeppelin. Particularly singer Lenny Wolff.

Well, it would seem that, at least in part, that was something he was doing well before Kingdom Come came around.

Stone Fury, the band Wolff co-founded with guitarist Bruce Gowdy, had a lot of that same Zeppelin vibe going for it as well. However, as I listened to their 2nd and final album Let Them Talk, I noticed that the album actually sounded like a typical 1980s rock/pop album with plenty of keyboards threaded in the mix as well.

But the album does open up with what definitely is a Led Zeppelin inspired track in “Too Late”. Lenny Wolff’s vocals are hard to miss, that’s for sure. What does give the song a bit of its own identity is how strongly those aforementioned keyboards come through. Unfortunately, like a lot of stuff from that time period, the keys actually overpower everything else going on in the song and kind of wrecked it for me as a whole.

I did actually mostly enjoy the next song “Lies on the Run”. First off, kind of cool song title. It’s a bit more of a straight on rocker from beginning to end. There is JUST a touch too much keys in this song but the song sounds more of its own thing and not a clone of Zeppelin. As I was listening to the song, I was searching my brain for another band comparison for this particular song and I kind of settled on Honeymoon Suite…except the latter wouldn’t have had quite so much in the way of keyboards in the mix. Still, I enjoyed this track.

The album’s title cut sticks mostly to a slow and midtempo groove. It’s kind of a power ballad in spots but doesn’t quite blow up to a more intensely rocking sound towards the end as most songs of its ilk would tend to do.

What can I say about the the song “Babe” (not a cover of the Styx classic)? Well, honestly, the song was just pretty freaking annoying the whole time it was playing.

I was a tiny bit surprised at how much I liked the Side One closing track “Doin’ What I Feel”. I liked the rhythm established by the music and I thought the vocal delivery was pretty good as well.

As for the 2nd side of the album, it opens with the song “Eye of the Storm”. The song really gives Stone Fury another song that sounds something original versus being a clone. Uptempo in nature, it works pretty well.

On “Let the Time Take Care”, the opening flourish is uptempo but when you hit the first main lyrical passage, the music drops into a lower intensity and Wolff’s vocals get a bit softer in delivery. The chorus ramps the music back up of course, but the switching between sonic avenues gives the listener something to swing back and forth with, rhythmically speaking.

Wolff’s vocals get a bit more strident for “I Should Have Told You”, the shriek echoing what you are probably used to from the Kingdom Come material. What I did like about this song is that it has a vibe to it that left me thinking it would be used in some kind of montage street scene for a movie or TV show. The music, in the main passages anyway, has that kind of cinematic flair going for it.

The Let Them Talk album closes out with the singularly  titled “Stay”, which is a track that starts out with a mid-tempo pace. There’s a bit too much production on the vocal track but I like the way the song’s music comes through here. And while this is hindsight nearly four decades late, I think the lyrics would’ve been better served without the Wolff shriek. Still, this was another song that kind of grew on me as I listened to it.

While I don’t know that Stone Fury’s 2nd and final album Let Them Talk will be an album I go back to continuously from here on out, I am now kind of interested to check out their first release Burns Like a Star to see and hear what the band had going for them their first time out. 

I will say that I found this album’s 2nd side a lot more to my liking, but there was a surprising amount of stuff I enjoyed hearing for the first time. This musical history lesson definitely served to inform me better about what Lenny Wolff was up to just before he hit it big. So I’d say that Let The Talk did a pretty good job of getting me interested in the band as a whole.

NOTES OF INTEREST: After Stone Fury broke up when Let The Talk didn’t break them into commercial success, singer Lenny Wolff would return to Germany. He’d be back in the US a year later with Kingdom Come’s debut album which did turn out to be a commercial hit.

Despite having only two studio albums, there was a Best of Stone Fury compilation released in 1988.

Guitarist Bruce Gowdy would go on to work with prog rock band World Trade and the band Unruly Child as well.