Band:	The Chelsea Smiles
Album:	The Chelsea Smiles
Style:	Jazz rock
Release date:	2009
A review by:	Jeff

01. Bulletproof Bones
02. Breathe
03. Falling Dow
04. Redemption Day
05. Guilty
06. Yesterday Today
07. Hide
08. Handful Of Dust
09. Sins That Shape Your Lives
10. Save Me

"The Chelsea Smiles" is the second album of Todd Youth's combo (he played with Danzig and replaced Phil Campbell in Motörhead for some months). I never heard anything about this band before today but despite the ugly artwork of its last album, this is pretty convincing. The Chelsea Smile can be a good compromise between Garage and Hard Rock, so why couldn't you like it? Sure this is not Metal but good Rock can be refreshing sometime, I'm sure of it?

The music of The Chelsea Smiles navigates between Punk, Garage and Rock. "The Chelsea Smiles" is no truly Metal of course but some riffs are pure Hard/Sleaze and its groove is cool actually. I don't really like some aspect which are clearly too "brit-pop" and can be disturbing for someone who doesn't like this kind of music! But hey can't we be a bit open minded sometime? After all our roots come from Rock N Roll and this release has the groove if you see what I mean. The music is catchy, the melodies are convincing and even if you won't have any real surprises, you'll listen to good tunes at least. "The Chelsea Smiles" remains a classic release in the genre but this is perfectly done and the songs rocks so?

Luckily the production is really good because the cover is one of the worst that I ever seen. I suppose that the band wanted to give some "Garage" look to the album and then that's probably perfect but damn it's just repulsive and terrible and I doubt that a lot of people will even try to listen to this album because of this rubbish? Too bad because the music is not bad at all, not new too of course but it's cool Rock and the guitar soli of Todd Youth are classy and full of groove.

"The Chelsea Smiles" smells Pop Rock and some of its Brit-Pop (too) big influences can be boring for someone who likes real aggressive Rock (I'm not even talking about Metal). But all in all this release has good songs and a lot of groove. Todd Youth and his mates are not re-inventing a genre with this album but they play good music and after all that what we're looking for. "The Chelsea Smiles" is recommended to the people who like Rock and Garage, if you're one of them, you shouldn't be disappointed.