Song Review: The Struts’ “Too Good At Raising Hell”
As the final wisps of daylight faded on June 17th in the town of Burlington, Ontario, U.K.’s The Struts took the stage in front of scarlet-red lights and billowing fog, and before a howling crowd. After whipping up the audience with sizzling hits from their previous albums like Everybody Wants’ high-octane “Dirty Sexy Money” and YOUNG & DANGEROUS’ heart-racing “Body Talks” and “Primadonna Like Me,” frontman Luke Spiller asked with a smirk if the band could play their then-unreleased song “Too Good At Raising Hell.” The Struts have never shied away from luxuriating in sensuality, glamour and vices a-la the legendary figures of rock music mythology, and “Too Good At Raising Hell” reads like the confession of a band that has many years of honouring the likes of Mick Jagger and Keith Moon under its belt.
A funky, bluesy guitar lick that would be no stranger on the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers and Spiller’s rich and shaky breaths open the song. A refrain of Southern Baptist gospel-style “Woos” rings for the first time, and an earthy drumbeat growls beneath the band's lead singer counting out a list of exploits that gossip magazines would salivate over. Guitarist Adam Slack plucks a sparser version of his earlier lick as Spiller lists one last tawdry item (“Sex so good make the neighbors smoke a cigarette”), then an exhale after the cheeky lyric, “But I'm still bored to death,” Slack, bassist Jed Elliott and drummer Gethin Davies slam their feet on the gas pedal. Underneath the frontman’s call-and-response shouting of the chorus, “I’m getting too good, too good at raising hell / But I’m wearing it well / I’m getting too good, too good at raising hell / I’m ringing the bell,” Slack’s electric guitar shreds a nostalgic riff, Davies’ drums are the kind of heavy that fills the air with metal, and Elliott’s bass is thick and smoldering. In the second verse Spiller’s swaggering songbird voice trips over a set of rockstar-branded experiences that have become cliches in The Struts’ own lifetime as a band, but that they nonetheless take on the chin with humour and gratitude, including “Driving [themselves] right into the storm” and “Staying at the party when everyone’s left.” A more potent reincarnation of Davies’ gritty drumbeat from the first verse, metallic and twanging lines from Slack’s guitar and flourishes of the gospel-style “Woos” add increased body and robustness to the second whirlwind of confessions prime for tabloid coverage. After a second and even dirtier round of the bombastic chorus, Slack’s electric guitar and Davies’ drums charge to centre-stage. Slack’s guitar solo is every inch as technically proficient and sweat-soaked as those played by Pete Townshend in The Who’s glory years, Davies’ drumming is clamorous and controlled, not incomparable with John Bonham’s playing on Led Zeppelin II, and Spiller’s lively and dynamic vocal improvisations imbue the song’s instrumental break with the teeming energy of live performance. “Too Good At Raising Hell” barrels to the finish line with a third and a fourth round of its thunderously ripping chorus, including another tingling hit of the lines, “It’s a little too easy, getting harder to please me / I know you’re starving to feed me, you know that you need me.” To borrow a historic rock journalism ism, The Struts have torched the barn to ashes with this single.
“Too Good At Raising Hell” revels vocally in the explosive energy, instrumentally in the sweeping excess, and, with a wink, thematically in the free-wheeling hedonism of rock music made in the genre’s golden-age. Midway through the live set that I first heard the song, Spiller announced that foreseeably, the fourth Struts’ record would be introduced to the world sometime before the end of the year. Though the frontman withheld from even teasing a release date, after the band’s performance of the playful and panting “Pretty Vicious,” he promised that a studio version of the sorely coveted song would finally be handed to fans. While only a few spoonfuls have been delivered of what the next Struts’ album has in store (including the swinging, Americana-textured “Fallin’ With Me” released in August 2022), my money is bet on it being a reverent homage to the holy days of rock’n’roll.
Catch the band on tour this year at https://www.thestruts.com/tour/, and listen to “Too Good At Raising Hell” for yourself – https://thestruts.lnk.to/TooGoodAtRaisingHellWE.
