Vicious Circle

Vicious Circle is the fourth L.A. Guns studio album, released in 1994; Mercury issued the Japanese edition on 5 October 1994 as PHCR-1254. It is the last record the band made under Vertigo / PolyGram. Fifteen songs, about fifty-six minutes. Phil Lewis is back on vocals, and the album leans towards weight and speed rather than the glamour of Hollywood Vampires. "Long Time Dead", "Killing Machine" and "Kill That Girl" are exactly the titles a band was writing as the scene shifted under it, and a cover of Ten Years After's "I'd Love to Change the World" sits at number eleven. The instrumental "Tarantula" in the middle is something none of the earlier records had. "Killing Machine" comes back a quarter of a century later: the Japanese edition of The Devil You Know (2019) adds a live version of it as its Japan-only bonus track.