Power Surge: Prisoner (Love Theme from The Eyes of Laura Mars)

OMG! Where to begin? A bubble-gum hair metal band takes on a minor Streisand gobbet ca. 1991: Words will not suffice. Hear for yourself:



From deep within the dusty bowels of the waning pop metal years is Long Island bar band Power Surge. (Google searches offered no history.) Clearly, they’re a band that understood Spinal Tap as a template and not a parody. (My wife had friends in bands like these.) The band’s vocal stylist, Corey Bond, presents squeals that imagine a cross of Bruce Dickinson with Geddy Lee crotch-tased. His vibrato creates swells that’d splash over the deck of the Titanic. His castrato upper register is impressive and muscular yet his hapless uvula has a habit of going rogue at times. Much of his upper register gets flattened like linguini noodles. Poodle-cut guitarist Michael Klotz solos like a Berlitz version of Hanon finger exercises (though thankfully spares us the shopworn Van Halen tapping), and drummer Tom Pizzela (man, if those aren't Long Island names!) proves his metallic ecstasy by screwing his visage into an ever-present duck face. No mention in the credits for the platinum crop-top bassist. (Perhaps lost in a later acrimonious Power Surge divorce.) While head banging and devil horns may’ve been de rigueur for the time, between Power Surge’s and Streisand’s Prisoner, my horns lean Streisand.

The appropriate soundtrack for cracking twelvers of Rolling Rock and toking on pipes made in shop class.