BARÓN ROJO
"Perversiones"
Zero Records/Warner Music Spain 2003

Tribute albums are a very easy and fashionable thing to do: Each band plays a different song, and the producer puts them all together to make up a coherent record. Only very few artists have dared to do an entire covers album by themselves. Yngwie J. Malmsteen recorded Inspiration in 1996 with songs from Deep Purple, Frank Zappa, or Rainbow. Now the best Spanish Heavy Metal band has done the same.

Barón Rojo have just released Perversiones, a 16-track album full of Rock and Roll History. The songs covered range from the bluesy sixties to the classic revival of the nineties, due to the two different generations of the band’s line-up: Armando and Carlos de Castro grew up in the sixties and seventies, and Ángel Arias and Vale Rodríguez are influenced by the eighties and nineties.

In this album you can find all-time Heavy Metal classics like Deep Purple’s Pictures of Home (in a much different style than Mr. Malmsteen’s version), Black Sabbath’s Neon Nights (one of my favourites), Rainbow’s Spotlight Kid (an over-the-top version which could make Mr. Blackmore himself lift his hat) or Michael Schenker’s Assault Attack (with a typical Baron Rojo twist).

Nostalgia is revisited in Jimi Hendrix’s favourite Hoochie Coochie Man, Robert Johnson’s Crossroads (a song Eric Clapton always included in the Cream’s live setlist), or Janis Joplin’s Move Over.

There are some tracks which have really surprised (or even puzzled) me. One of them is Turn it Up, by the American fascist Ted Nugent (I know this is about music, but I can’t stand his “speak American English or die” attitude. A song I was positively surprised by was Jimi Hendrix‘s Spanish Castle Magic, very similar (in a sense) to Yngwie’s live version from his Trial by Fire-Live in Leningrad album. Another track which surprised me is Bob Dylan’s Father of Night, which he never recorded himself (this is a cover of the Manfred Mann version).

Most of the songs are from the seventies and eighties, but the nineties are very well represented by Shake my Tree, from the 1993 Coverdale/Page album.

And last, but not least, an AC/DC song. Highway to Hell? Whole Lotta Rosie? Back in Black? Let There Be Rock? None of the above. It’s What’s Next to the Moon, a pretty unknown song from the Powerage album.

This is not a typical tribute album full of classic hits revisited. This is not a “Typical Spanish” band. They are different. They are the best.

Text: Juan Carlos Laguna Jiménez.
05 July 2003.
In Spanish.