Motley Crue - Too Fast For Love (1982)

This is it, the greatest glam-metal album of all time. Forget Kiss, this is nasty, sleazy, leathery, lipstick-coated, hairspray-frizzed sex on a stick. A sound well oiled to match the image, greased to rip up the New York Dolls, and perfumed to bring back Sweet and T-Rex but with a sticky sweet attitude and swagger.
Motley Crue have often been criticized for being more image-based than musically conscious but they've released some damn-fine songs over the years, but as a record 'Too Fast For Love' is a masterpiece.
It chugs, it rocks, it swaggers, sways, spits, vomits and rumbles and never once lets you out of the strip show it has created. In Vince Neil there was a frontman whose whine was as deadly as his bark, and behind him a crew of dandies dressed to kill, steaming in leather and strutting in heels, and with an album cover that screamed raw sex. This is pure Crue, a record that leaves you wasted, fulfilled, sweating, drunk and drained yet begging for more. From the opening grunts of 'Live Wire' this ride never lets up, it's a record to shag to, to headbang to, and to fall over to, it's a going out record and a waking up record, a storm, a party and wild drive. Everything you want is here, rock 'n' roll leviathans penned by Nikki Sixx, bassist and rock god. 'Come On And Dance' with its Mick Mars shredding, 'Public Enemy #1', 'Take Me To The Top', 'Merry Go-Round', an endless stream of fragranced classics, battered and bruised by Tommy Lee's violent thumpings, making this record a wild, sleazy ride into some joint where the girls are easy and the drink for free. The title cut is a memorable anthem, although the alternative version with the into far better, and the bonus tracks are also pure genius, 'Tonight', 'Stick To Your Guns' and 'Toast Of The Town', and that's even without mentioning the brilliant cymbal-clash entrance of 'Starry Eyes' and orgasmic 'Piece Of Your Action'.
File 'Too Fast For Love' in your Top Ten of metal records of all time and become lost in the hangover of glitzy heaven, because this is real sleaze.
10/10