Offering pure proof that good old-fashioned cock rock doesn’t need to sound as airbrushed as Nickelback (or as depressingly stupid as Hinder), AC/DC openers the Answer toss starving AOR fans a heavy bone with Everyday Demons. There isn’t a lick here you haven’t already heard a thousand times, but that’s sort of the point – each of these 11 tracks takes the most tried and true ingredients of your favorite classic rock records and regurgitates them with as much of that bad ‘n’ ballsy old-school spirit as you could reasonably expect in 2009. Don’t expect any Darkness-style camp, or any of the sour-faced defensive posturing you’ll hear from most other 21st-century rock revivalists, in these songs – the Answer, unlike most of their peers, remember that rockin’ is its own reward, and any given track on Everyday Demons would have sounded just fine being blasted out of a car stereo in the parking lot of your neighborhood liquor store on a Friday afternoon in 1990. It should go without saying that this is fairly awesome – but it should also be obvious that in sticking with screeched, fist-pumping choruses and double-tracked solos from low-slung guitars, the band essentially paints itself into a corner that it can only escape with the aid of songs that do more than evoke memories of every aging hesher’s misspent youth. Everyday Demons is unmistakably cut from “classic rock” cloth, but it isn’t a classic in its own right. Still, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. If you’ve been wondering which of the current crop of young rock bands has the balls to restore the genre’s faded glory, here’s your Answer. (The End 2009)

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