• AllMyVinyl #21
• Band: Night Ranger
• Album Title: ATBPO
• Release Date: 6 Aug 2021
• Date purchased: 24 May 2021
• Location purchased: Frontiers Music Direct
• Color of vinyl: Translucent white (they call it silver)
• Number of discs: 1
• Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website | Complete album on Youtube ]

I’ve written about Night Ranger before on my blog/social media.  I was there at the start with Night Ranger in 1982 for the Dawn Patrol album (which will pop up later), and then they had a mega hit with Sister Christian, and IMO, it ruined ’em, because they’re a great hard rock band, but they “power ballad-ed” themselves to no radio airplay when they didn’t do Sister Christian II.  They had 5 albums in the first six years they were around, then kind of fell off the map.  Had three albums in the mid 90s (95/97/98), and then fell of the side of the world until a random album came out in 2007.  But then in 2011 they had what I called their renaissance.  Between 2011 and 2021 they put out four albums that to me are all awesome – front to back.  IMO, if they put out the 2011 album right after the 1983 (second) album, they may not have fallen off the face of the earth for awhile there.

2011’s album and the one I’m writing about today is “ATBPO”.  That stands for “And the Band Played On”.  This was released to honor the 40th anniversary of Night Ranger.  I thought it was a great title for an anniversary album that ends on a zero. I got this album new, and it came out after I got back into vinyl.  I bought it direct from the label (Frontiers) as they were selling a cool looking vinyl – it’s officially labeled “silver”, but to me I call it translucent white.  If it was plain silver, you couldn’t see through it.  You can (somewhat) here, so I call it translucent.

The cool thing is they’re still doing it the right way.  Full album, with a couple of music videos, tour, rest, repeat.   They’re on a good cycle, and ATBPO is the fourth album in a row (Somewhere in California, High Road, Don’t Let Up, ATPBO) that is just damn great.  It’s my experience that a lot of people don’t even KNOW these albums exist, and that’s a shame. ATPBO is an awesome as hell album.  As I sit here listening to it today, I feel bad as I should listen to it more.  It’s killer shit, IMO.  It’s not metal, but has a hard rock edge to it.  I’ve always felt that the band’s lineage is that  cuz of Brad Gillis coming from Ozzy’s band to form Night Ranger.

The first three songs are all bangers. Coming for You, Bring it All Home to Me, & Breakout are an amazing start to the album.  The second and third had music videos, too.   They’re not fully conceptual, they’re the band standing around miming in a setting, but I love that there ARE videos, and not just “no effort lyric videos” like a lot of bands do now.  It keeps going, as track 4 (Hard to Make it Easy) is quite great too, and the end of Side A (Cold as December) has a nice blues feel to the bridge in the middle.  More hard rock on Side 2 (Monkey & The Lucky Man).  There’s a song on Side 2 called “The Hardest Road” which is slower, which I suppose could be the power ballad.  But it’s NOTHING like Sister Christian, it’s a good slower power ballad type song.  I quite like this, but then that leads me to the next remark…

That’s a problem with this album for me, it’s hard to quantify individual tracks for praise and write a lot about each, because I *LOVE* this album and I’d de-evolve into “It’s just awesome – listen to it!”.  It’s solid from front to back, and is a great piece of melodic hard rock that just worked for me from first listen until now.   If you’ve never partaken in modern Night Ranger, I urge you to take a listen to ATPBO.  It’s a damn awesome album that I can’t recommend enough.

If you’re looking for more on “modern” Night Ranger, I wrote this really short piece on the first three (before ATPBO came out) with some song recommendations from these three albums.

One amusing thing.  When it came out I asked my Amazon Alexa to play the album, and it tried to prounounce ATPBO as a single word.  It’s quite comical.  Here’s a video of me doing that – fair warning, I say “Alexa” at the start, so it could set off yours.  :)