Unknown Soldier

Album
The third straight strong album by the Michael Schenker Group and with Michael Schenker’s trademark Gibson Flying V guitar right on cue yet again. On the band’s previous album MSG, the band had reached what was probably their peak in terms of truly putting out a group effort, after having put out the more Michael Schenker focused debut the year before. The weak link as far as some fans were concerned over the first two albums, had been that of vocalist Gary Barden (personally I really dug his gruff voice and still do) had left the band and was now replaced by the higher profile Graham Bonnet. Graham Bonnet was one of the great vocal acrobats of this period and had been a prime mover on Rainbow’s highly commercial 1979 release Down to Earth (see review) before he fell foul of Ritchie Blackmore’s usual clearout of band members and left the band. Also despite just recording only one studio album with Rainbow, he had seen his stakes as a vocalist go through the roof, largely thanks to songs like “Since You’ve Been Gone” a huge track at the time and one of Rainbow’s best ever remembered commercial tracks, even though I always preferred “I Surrender” sung by Joe Lynn Turner over it. In the meantime though, Graham Bonnet had recorded his third studio album Line-Up in 1981 and this had included ex-MSG drumming master Cozy Powell, as well as producing the hit single “Night Games” which reached the UK top 10. The rest of that album though consisted of a number of medicore tracks which ultimately let it down and after this Graham Bonnet had the opportunity to step into the higher profile MSG. Given the transitory nature of Michael Schenker’s band, Chris Glen on bass did well to be retained, but high profile artists Paul Raymond and Cozy Powell had departed the band, with Ted Mckenna coming in on drums (ex-The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and ex-Rory Gallagher amongst others) The band was also trimmed down to just a quartet with keyboardist Tommy Eyre only down as an additional musician. The band also had their third different producer for the album in Martin Birch (now in-house for Iron Maiden) after both Ron Nevison and Roger Glover had produced on the previous two albums. As for the album, vocally I don’t think there’s actually too much of a difference between the vocals of Gary Barden and Graham Bonnet, as on songs like the title track “Assault Attack” the groovy hard rock of “Rock You to the Ground” the noble “Samurai” and the best song on the album “Desert Song” hell **** yer, Gary Barden could’ve performed on these songs imo just as well as Graham Bonnet did. But I guess the reason why Graham Bonnet was brought in, was to perform on obvious commercial fare like “Dancer” which btw is probably the only track of its type on the album. Overall the fit of Graham Bonnet was quite natural really, as he was used to working with a guitar maestro in Ritchie Blackmore and Michael Schenker who despite his own greatness had certainly been influenced by the neo-classical guitar lines of Ritchie Blackmore. Overall Assault Attack is probably not as strong as the previous two albums, despite the fact that a lot of MSG fans rate it at Michael Schenker’s best with MSG.

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