voila_la_scorie Coney Hatch returned in 1983 with their sophomore album “Outa Hand”. The band had achieved great strides of success the previous year with their debut and had opened for Judas Priest in North America for the “Screaming for Vengeance” tour. A minor hit had gotten them on American radio.

The band continued in a similar vein as on the debut, following the AC/DC-KISS riff-driven hard rock approach powered by Carl Dixon’s AO(hard)R vocals and Andy Curran’s more dirty sneering vocal style. To be truthful, Curran’s vocals have taken on more of Dixon’s AOR style. Still, right from the opener, you know that Coney Hatch are not about to haul out synthesizers in order to woo the top 40 female audience just yet. “Don’t Say Make Me” is an awesome hard rock ass kicker with a fierce eye and a fist that’s ready to be clenched. “Don’t say make me / Coz I will / I’ll make you / Don’t you push me in my own yard”. With that chorus, the lead guitar solo, and the AC/DC-like guitar riff, the band kicks off the album perfectly. The second track “Shake It” does begin a little softer with slashing guitar chords and a cool and easy opening; however, once the rhythm section comes in, we are back to killer hard rock.

“First Time for Everything” is brings the power down a bit and goes more for melody, sounding like a possible radio-friendly single. It’s in this song that a bit of trouble begins to show up on the Rock Candy remaster. After the guitar solo an echo of distortion can be heard hovering over the vocals. As the album goes back to solid hard rock with “Some Like It Hot” that echo becomes a little lost in the hard rock riffs, but for the ballad “To Feel that Feeling Again”, which is a kind of eighties Y&T type of power ballad, that echo begins to detract from the appreciation of the music.

The rest of the album sticks to that great riff hard rock but that echo becomes distracting from time to time. I swear it seems to disappear during “Love Games” but returns for “Fallen Angel” and “Music of the Night”. I believe the person in charge of the remastering levels fell asleep at the console and accidentally pushed the level switch a bit too far up the scale. It sucks because I find the echo rather distracting and the resulting inferior sound quality a disappointment. I have six albums remastered by Rock Candy and only this one and “No Rest for the Wicked” by Helix have this music distortion echo spoiling the songs. It’s very unfortunate because otherwise the album is a great hard rock offering. I sent a message to Rock Candy about this but they just replied saying that they were sorry that I was not happy with the remastering but I could expect a number of other Canadian reissues coming up. So for now I am stuck with this overly loud remastering.

The Rock Candy reissue comes with three bonus tracks which are wonderful additons with the understanding that "Fly On" is a demo and really sounds like one. Still, certainly welcome songs!

I’d gladly give this album 4 stars; however, anyone who gets the Rock Candy remaster will have to deal with this scratchy echo that’s in the recording in some places. For that I will warn you and slip the album down to three stars.

voila_la_scorie Coney Hatch got their big break when after a show at a Toronto club they spotted Max Webster lyricist Pye Dubois sitting at a table. He told them that they sounded good and that Kim Mitchell had just left Max Webster and would probably be interested in producing an album for the band. That got them signed to Anthem Records and taken under the wing of Ray Daniels Management. After some troubles with the recording process were solved, the album was completed and released in 1982.

Coney Hatch's self-titled debut is a solid piece of guitar driven hard rock. Though the band got lumped in with heavy metal (in those days Judas Priest, Scorpions, Blue Oyster Cult, Van Halen, Motörhead, and AC/DC were all collectively know as heavy metal) there's a radio friendly aspect to a couple of songs like "You Ain't Got Me" and "Hey Operator", the latter scoring them a top 20 hit in Canada and getting them on the U.S. airwaves.

To hear the more gritty side of Coney Hatch, you need to listen to songs like "Devil's Deck" (later to become a favourite of Steve Harris when the band toured with Iron Maiden), the AC/DC-inspired "Stand Up", the more aggressive numbers like "I'll Do the Talkin'" and "We Got the Night", and the fan favourite "Monkey Bars". This is where the tight, in-your-face hard rock punches and riffs best show up. But you'll not want to skip over "No Sleep Tonight" (another AC/DC type song, also crossed with KISS) or "Love Poison". The Rock Candy reissue includes three bonus tracks of which the misleadingly titled "Dreamland" and a demo called "Sin After Sin" match the rest of the album in punchy hard rock.

One of Coney Hatch's big assets are having two lead vocalists in Carl Dixon (rhythm guitar) and Andy Curran (bass). Dixon's voice has that smooth yet powerful arena rock sound while Curran's voice almost has a sneer to it that could sound a bit like Dave Mustain talk-singing rather than just sneering. Hear Dixon on "Devil's Deck" and Curran on "Monkey Bars".

Coney Hatch quickly moved ahead thanks to people at Anthem and Ray Daniels Management getting them in the right place. The toured with Judas Priest for the North American leg of the "Screaming for Vengeance" tour and though a U.K. tour with either Whitesnake or Rainbow fell through, the band were championed by Kerrang! Magazine's Paul Sutor and Geoff Barton. The future looked bright. A year later the sophomore release hit the stores, but label support waned when no hit single turned up.

As for this review, this debut effort is an excellent offering of hard rock that needs to be played loud. What else?