Cheap Trick – Twelve Gates Review

Stick around too long, and longevity becomes a burden. Cheap Trick is a name all too easy to drag through the mud when they release a dud track. We forget their Live at the Budokan effort is among the very best live albums. Had they stopped there and sailed on with that success alone, they would be in a similar spot to now. They are doing that but releasing new material also, dribbling into the void and receiving little return for their efforts. Twelve Gates, a single released ahead of their aptly titled All Washed Up. The jokes write themselves. What does not, though, is a piece contextualising what Cheap Trick are now trying to do with their work. They accepted their legacy rock structure some time ago. Only dedicated fans are sticking with their latest works, and even they would admit it is not as incredible as their earliest outputs. Twelve Gates is far off that mark, too.

Between the album’s title suggestion and the generative artificial intelligence slop used for their album cover, it is fair to say Cheap Trick are beyond washed up. Washed up implies there is still a little fight left in the band. Twelve Gates is devoid of that spark. A song which lifts from rock and roll’s steady, declining past. But it’s more than that for Cheap Trick, who are heard on Twelve Gates throwing few, if any, unique stylings out on this latest song. Where hardened listeners, all six of them, will be satisfied with the steady vocal work which Robin Zander still has, they will be let down by the writing. If the cover is anything to go by, it seems like generic, throwaway spots are all part of the plan for Cheap Trick. They sing of “brand new starts” the same way a soon-to-be shot prisoner asks for a cigarette. There is a resignation in their voice, a truly beaten sound which makes Twelve Gates feel like a disengaged mess.

Lyrically the song is not much better than that defeatist outlook. Disconnected and jumbled writings, which are all too like the plodding noise of other guitar veterans. It’s a hard sell getting anyone to listen to Cheap Trick, let alone their recent output. Heartland-like rock without the heart. A guitar riff lifted from Bruce Springsteen, a spaced-out voice filtration which would be better suited to their space-rock peers. Messy doesn’t cover it. This is Cheap Trick running from one side of the room to the other and deciding on which instruments to use based on whichever they tripped over. Legacy acts are fighting for attention in their final years of activity, and while Cheap Trick, rather unfortunately, show no signs of stopping, their relevancy certainly does.

That is not through the need to go on, though. It is from suggesting their earlier works are not interesting enough to be plodded out for decades. Searching for new material should be applauded, but when it is so far below the bar of quality set by the band in their youth, when an artist has nothing of worth to reflect on, audiences will find new sounds elsewhere. It’s stiff competition for Cheap Trick, though no artist of this longevity is hard up for cash so badly that they are using generative slop for their album covers. Twelve Gates, written by the long-serving hands of rock and roll or not, is a ladle worth of slop into the ears of those too scared to find new acts in similar genres.