‘Shock Treatment’ represents another obscure, early ‘80s heavy outing from the Southwest United States, specifically Albuquerque, New Mexico. Overseas metalheads should not read Southwest US and associate such bands with the early ‘80s Texas metal underground scene. It’s about 700 miles (1100+ km, there I did the math for you; you’re welcome) from Albuquerque to San Antonio, so these areas had little-no direct exposure to one another during the early 1980s. Voltz and their contemporaries in NM and Arizona (
Loosely Tight,
White Noise,
Slayer, Icon) developed a hard rock-metal hybrid sound and did so quite well. I have no idea how these bands established a scene in New Mexico and Arizona back in the day. It’s a region of the US best known for deserts and nuclear bomb testing, where there are more Gila monsters than metal heads. I guess Metal really does reach the furthest corners of the land.
Anyway, Voltz delivered this album, which is best summed up as an incredibly fun affair in that middle ground where rock meets metal. While not overtly heavy- they took their cues more from Starz than Motorhead- the album has a great, energetic production and decent presentation, especially considering it was pressed up in a state with more sand dunes than people (I used to live a few hundred miles from Albuquerque, so I feel perfectly justified in making fun of the area’s remoteness). Take your late 70s hard rock heroes such as UFO and inject a bit of early 80s energy into them and you get the idea. I’d bet my Ronnie James Dio autograph that they were huge Starz fans, with a cover of ‘Hold On to the Night’ being included hereupon.
You get the sense that Voltz were doing their best to be the breakout band from the area while still realizing their own limitations. The cover art is somewhere between cool and corny, while the back cover is plastered with full-color action shots of the band… in a mostly empty stadium. Coliseum Rock indeed! You could say it’s a riot looking at the photos, but now I’m probably bludgeoning the Starz comparison into the trinitite-coated ground. The lyrics from album opener ‘Rock Stompin’ Rock and Rollers’ sums them up perfectly: “We’ve been playing everywhere we possibly could, we’re not the best but we’re so damn good”. It’s that bit of bravado, that youthful swagger, that puts this album over the top for me. The song titles are quirky, but tracks like ‘Right Hand Baby’, ‘Too Bad for a Girl Like You’, and ‘.357 Mistreater’ deliver the goods. It’s clear this band is having fun; they’ve put in their time, developed their chops, and have a set of songs that are pretty damn tight. No, it won’t stand up to ‘Endless Pain’ or ‘Persecution Mania’ in term of heaviness, but I’ll bet these guys were a blast playing live when all 23 teenagers in the state of New Mexico threw a couple of cases of cheap beer into some coolers and partied all night in the 96 F desert heat (=35.5 C, there I did the math for you, you’re welcome; now you can go Google
trinitite).
While they’re so damn good, they’re not the best. Side B fades down the stretch a little. After opener ‘Shock Treatment’ the flipside starts to wane a bit. ‘Rock and Roll Party’ sounds like, well, the title tells you exactly what it sounds like. You don’t even need to hear the song and you could probably hum along to it anyway; slight boogie feel, simple structure, etc. ‘We Do What We Want’ is rather laid back, and the Starz cover pretty much tells you where Side B has drifted (‘So Young, So Bad’ would have fit them so much better). They do wrap things up on a high note, returning to the form of Side A with closer ‘She’s Hollywood’.
The album is a real bitch to find these days. If you must have a slab of Voltz vinyl, they also released a single featuring two of the album’s best numbers, ‘Rock Stompin’ Rock and Rollers’ and ‘.357 Mistreater’. It’s also hard to find but has a more reasonable price tag on those occasions when a copy surfaces. Give it a chance; you might be shocked at just how damn good they were.
This band from New Mexico had all the elements to be categorised in the crossover metal style along with bands like IMPECCABLE or LOOSELY TIGHT. Strongly influenced by NWoBHM groups of the time VOLTZ offered a quite good record with dynamic riffs and solos that will please all the funs of early US metal sound. Unfortunately, both this LP and their single very rarely turn up making them one of the most obscure metal items from USA.