Krokus - Stayed Awake All Night (1989)

It's hard not to pan the stunning averageness of Switzerland's Krokus, one of the more insignificant -- yet visually amusing -- European contributions to the mid-'80s hard rock landscape. Yeesh! Talk about aging badly. At their best ("Long Stick Goes Boom" and "Eat the Rich"), the group sound like a very poor man's AC/DC; at their worst, their cock-rock posturing simply defies description. OK, so the near-thrash intent of "Headhunter" does manage to evoke the infinitely superior Accept, but there's little else here to even justify the group's existence. In all fairness, there definitely were worse bands than Krokus, but you'd be hard-pressed to find them, and the material here hardly deserves a "best of" tag. © Eduardo Rivadavia