Retro Spins: Scorpions - Love At First Sting

Let's make August a heavy metal kind of month. One that thrashes with sick guitar licks, thumping drums and punchy bass. Let's also start it off with Scorpions.

You definitely get all of the above with their 1984 album, Love At First Sting. Aided by a successful live performance on MTV a few years prior, it was the record which cemented their international fame in the United States. Of course, it didn't hurt that it included smash hits, Rock You Like A Hurricane, Big City Nights and Still Loving You.

Coincidentally, these are the only stand out tracks to be found. Mind you, there's nothing necessarily "bad" here. They're just not anything as impactful as these three. They set the bar pretty high for the remainder of the album.

Despite their popularity, longevity and impact on the 80's, believe it or not, none of them ever broke into the top ten. Rock You Like A Hurricane peaked at number twenty-five, Still Loving You debuted and disappeared the following week at eighty-six and Big City Nights didn't chart at all. This was unexpected news when I dug into the history of the album.

Over the years, the band has come into a lot of controversy over their choice of album covers. While there was none more worse than their original for 1976's Virgin Killer - A cover anyone with any sense of moral compass would find vile and disgusting, the original cover for Love At First Sting continued this trend of backlash. It's because of this that you can find two versions of the album. The original as depicted here and the alternate "clean" version, which is a picture of the band walking towards the camera against a blank background.

Album covers aside, if you're looking for the three powerhouse tracks noted above, this is definitely the place to find them. You'll get a solid album overall, but as I said, these ones definitely stand out among the rest.

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