Crimes of Insanity

What a difference two years can make. Despite a very promising debut with 1984's Beware of the Dog, by the release of its second album, 1986's Crimes of Insanity, England's Tysondog was barely holding it together. Having only recently returned from an enforced, health-related hiatus, the band was also coping with the non-involvement of former driving force, guitarist Alan Hunter, and, perhaps most troubling of all, the bandmembers were forced to produce the album themselves by a conspicuously disinterested Neat Records. Yet for all of these challenges, all appears well enough through most of the album's first half, which sets the ball rolling with "Taste the Hate" and "Blood Money" (two of the band's more memorable, energetic numbers), and, sandwiched in between them, the more patient but equally effective "Don't Let the Bastards (Grind You Down)." It's therefore down to the album's second half — characterized by increasingly forgettable offerings like "Hotter Than Hell," "Judgment Day," and "Eat the Rich" — to show that Tysondog's songwriting was quickly growing sketchier than bandmembers' handlebar mustaches. Perhaps even more damning is the group's well-intentioned but completely unexciting rendition of Alice Cooper's "School's Out." And despite a rather strong finish with the curiously named "Smack Attack," there's no ignoring the fact that Crimes of Insanity signified an irreversible acceleration of Tysondog's career-end slide. [All of Crimes of Insanity was later included in Sanctuary/Neat's 2002 Tysondog anthology Painted Heroes.]