The Pack Is Back

The second Atlantic album, recorded at Bearsville with Eddie Kramer producing, with the title track and "Gimme Some Lovin'" pulled as singles. It is the last time Raven used an outside producer. Gallagher has returned to this record often, and never kindly. Kramer's gift was capturing a band playing together, but the drummer insisted on recording to a click with nobody else playing — and since he sat behind the beat anyway, Gallagher says the whole thing came out leaden. The stated aim had been a high-tech metal album; they bought a guitar synthesiser, and half its sounds turned out to be the ones on Judas Priest's Turbo, released the same year. He is no fonder of the sleeve, which was meant to show the band as crazed American footballers and which he reckons made them look like crazed hairdressers instead. A video with NFL Films was worked up as far as a visit to the company's New Jersey facility before Atlantic declined to pay for it. The lasting result was procedural: never record to a click again, and never spend eight or ten weeks in a studio again — put the time into pre-production and cut the album live in five or six days.