Veteran Swiss rockers Krokus are back with a new album. I won't go into great detail about the history of this band and their important contribution to the early 80's metal scene as I have already done that here with my review of their last album Hellraiser. However, this new release is of great importance to fans of the band as it is the first album in over 20 years to feature original members Marc Storace, vocals, Fernando Von Arb, guitar, Chris Von Rohr, bass, Mark Kohler, guitar and drummer Freddy Steady. Marc Storace had already returned to the band for the Rock The Block album a few years back but it was a supposed one-off live appearance on Swiss TV last summer in celebration of the Swiss Independence Day that lead to the reformation of the original line-up. They also performed a new song, Live For The Action during the Ice Hockey World Championships last year in Switzerland. Things went so well that they decided to permanently re-unite and record a new album. Hoodoo marks the return of the original Krokus band.

I was actually surprised by this reunion. Bad blood was spilled in the press over the years and in fact, Krokus seemed to be doing just fine with the line-up that recorded 2007's Hellraiser; the band's best album in decades. Picking up where they left off with their earlier albums like Metal Rendezvous, Hardware, One Vice At A Time and Headhunter, Krokus once again revisits the Bon Scott era of AC/DC-fueled bluesy hard rock that was their original (for lack of a better term!) claim to fame. This entire Hoodoo album is a throwback to a more bluesy hard rock sound and much less "metal" than albums like Headhunter. The album opens with the charged up Drive It In which contains every classic hard rock cliché ever used including the Check Berry like lead fills of 50's rock 'n roll. Hoodoo Woman is far more catchier with more of that bluesy mid-tempo feel. The AC/DC worship is revisited with Rock 'N Roll Handshake which uses almost the identical melody for the chorus as AC/DC's Rock and Roll Damnation. It continues with In My Blood, a fired up AC/DC Powerage era rocker along with Dirty Street, a slowed down It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Want To Rock 'N Roll) as well as the If You Want Blood-like Keep Me Rolling to the Highway To Hell rip-off of Shot Of Love. I mean come on....I couldn't honestly write yet alone record a song that so blatantly rips off a classic song like that. Continuing with the non-original theme, Too Hot has very Lick It Up (Kiss) qualities yet the band delivers a simple yet very effective hard rock sound with an awesome memorable chorus. They almost rip themselves off with Ride Into The Sun, a track that follows the Screaming In The Night style of arrangement and the album finishes with a barn-burner entitled Firestorm. A cover of Steppenwolf's Born To Be Wild is not even worth a mention other than to say that it is a complete and utter waste of time. In fact, they AC/DC-ize the song by transposing the whole song into the key of A. Two things here: 1) why bother doing a song that every garage band in existence has ever done and 2) why in the key of A when the original song is in an E? 'nuff said about that trainwreck

Not that Krokus was ever all that original, I was initially a bit disappointed with this album. I still think that Hellraiser is a much better album with quality songs and a better overall sound. The guitars on Hoodoo sound thin with the lead guitar work being nothing more than standard pentatonic blues scale based stuff. Aside from the obvious song similarities to the beloved Aussies material, the whole album has a very familiar sound to it. Having said that, after repeated listens and getting the AC/DC versions of some of these songs out of my head, it's actually a pretty good album. It could've been a little longer and would've benefited by them using their collective heads and shit canning their version of Born To Be Wild in favour of a few more original songs but it's just a fun classic Bon Scott era AC/DC type of hard rock album. It's catchy and has some great memorable choruses but overall falls a bit short of my expectations. On the other hand, some may argue that this band was never really capable of anything better than we get here so why should we be expecting anything more?