The Treat’s ‘Phonography’ album is an extremely well-produced tribute album to just about every classic rock band you care to name. An accomplished three-piece dominated by singer/songwriter/guitarist/producer Mike Hyder, they have the chops to play everything from three chord AC/DC romps, via smooth jazz and through onto enormous Metallica-style epics. The band’s flexible approach is its greatest strength, but also its biggest weakness. Despite twelve impeccably-recorded tracks to choose from, I can’t say I liked any of them, and the source of my difficulties comes mostly from Hyder’s tin ear for language and inability to follow a good musical idea through to the end without ruining it.
Take the sole instrumental on the record, ‘Effervesence’. The first couple of minutes are heaven: laid-back jangly guitar meshing effortlessly with some wonderfully minimalist flute, but the idyll is shattered by Hyder bringing in a load of squalling guitars that reduce the remainder of the track to a load of empty bombast.
‘Make You Crawl’ and ‘Too Late’ are more rounded tunes, but AC/DC were doing this stuff perfectly serviceably in the eighties. Hyder’s voice, as nasal as Dave Evans’ but without that aura of gleeful malevolence, is solid but unappealing.
Still, these conservative tunes are preferable to the Treat’s attempt to be experimental, as on the dire ‘Black Cat Whites’ which welds Pink Floyd’s ‘Bike’ onto the Small Faces’ ‘Lazy Sunday Afternoon’ for no artistically defensible reason. Hyder’s journeys into fairytale as on the opening ‘Fanfare for the King’ or the eco-warrior anthem ‘Meadowland’ are unrewarding pieces of po-faced whimsy. ‘Bolivian Diary’, Hyder’s attempt to imagine himself into Ché Guevara’s army is just excruciating: try this for size:
‘I will take the first watch, even though I’ve had no sleep
Chino’s out of action, cause he’s slipped and broke his feet’
Priceless. Someone shoot me.
‘Clutching at Jagged Glass’ is perhaps the best song on the album, with a couple of top-class Zeppelin-style riffs driving the song along like some stentorian PT sergeant, but in the main this album is overblown, suffers from naïve and outdated songwriting and contains barely a trace of warmth or humour, although plenty of unintentional comedy. Like Chino, it’s lame.