Круиз / Kruiz - Крутится Волчок / The Top Keeps Turning (1980) - Soviet versions of 70's popular rock and pop music - 64% (27/07/11)

Before Kruiz became one of the first and most important speed metal bands in Eastern Europe that also gathered some attention outside of the Soviet Union, the band played commercial hard rock that is clearly influenced by European chart breakers such as "KISS", "Alice Cooper" or "Judas Priest" on one side but also more commercial groups like "Talking Heads", "Hot Chocolate" or "KC & The Sunshine Band" on the other side.

With the first two tracks on the record, the band already shows us the different inspirations in an extreme way. "Madmen" is a solid hard rock track with slight heavy metal influence while the title track "The top keeps turning" could have played in any discotheque of that time in between a song of the "The Bee Gees", "Lipps Inc." and commercial "Genesis".

The first record that we have here gathers the first and most important demo songs of the band and offers a quite varied view on contemporary popular rock music interpreted with some Russian charm and of course with Russian lyrics but this clearly is no metal record and has almost nothing to do with the band's later works. The most interesting songs to me are those where the bands experiences with slightly progressive keyboard sounds like in "Aspiration" or "Bach" that seem clearly influenced by contemporary masterminds such as "Jean Michel Jarre". But those moments are rare and the band faces us rather often with strange unintentionally funny traditional Russian pop music like in "Get back to work" that may make an entire retirement home dance along like the "Chicken Dance" and this seriously is no discrimination, prejudice or bad joke coming from me but the best visual description I could find.

The strengths of this album are the high degree of variation, the fact that many choruses are truly catchy and that the band knows how to write great hooks and finally the keyboards on this record. On the other side, the album copies a lot from the mentioned idols and is not truly unique or innovating. There is a lot of hit and miss on this record that sometimes sound a little bit pointless as one might expect from a rather confusing collection of demo tracks. The sound quality and instrumental skills are also still rather limited in here. For fans of popular rock and pop music of the late seventies, this album is a great nostalgic ride, for collectors, this is an entertaining Russian interpretation of popular Western music but for anybody else and especially the metal community, this album has a rather low degree of satisfaction and may only be interesting for the courageous diehard fans. From an objective point of view, this record is an unoriginal but quite entertaining cheesy ride through the past that still merits an acceptable rating in the end.