UFO

Take a washed-up ’70s heavy rock group whose initial claim to fame was being the group that convinced guitar virtuoso Michael Schenker to leave Scorpion, and add a marginally talented son of a rock legend (John Bonham’s son, Jason) and you get… Ghost World’s Blueshammer? UFO’s latest in a string of attempted comebacks, You Are Here, once again finds the group without Schenker after another short stint with the group in the early ’90s, and also completely devoid of any personality or contemporary relevance, resulting in a tedious run through the usual "progressive” bar-band numbers to the point where you wonder why they bothered masquerading these 12 cuts as new material at all. Opener "Daylight Goes to Town” is symptomatic of the monotone album as a whole: lifeless riff-rock devoid of imagination or the kind of inspired songwriting that had brought UFO a series of mediocre to good singles in the ’70s. The songs are sung with equally banal lyrics by a withered Phil Mogg over a thin, seedy production courtesy of Tommy Newton that sounds just as complacent and bored as the band. Bonham’s drumming remains one of the album’s few redeemable qualities, though even it is only sporadically of note, never coming close to making such a poor culmination of 20 years’ worth of comeback attempts even remotely desirable.