All flash and no cash is the bottom line on this one. If Down N' Dirty, consisting of vocalist Staci Dayz, guitarist Kaptain Kemo, bassist Jay T. Secksey and drummer Greg Tracii, would have spent as much time and money on penning imaginative songs and practicing as they did on fancy packaging, then the story might be different. I may have even liked the tape if the music was original. Any band that lists Poison and Warrant as two of their top three sources of influence can't have much in the way of musical substance.
Lickety Splitz opens with "Wham Bam, Thank Ya' Ma'am," which sets the lyrical pace for the rest of the tape. Thankfully, it doesn't set the instrumental pace as well. The drums lag behind through most of the song, and the guitar phrasing is completely uninspired. To give you an idea of where Down N' Dirty are coming from, during one of the song's bridges, two of the band members engage in the following discussion:
Staci Dayz: "Hey, Kemo!"
Kaptain Kemo: "Yeah, Stace!"
SD: "Remember that girl I brought home last night?"
KK: "She was bad as hell!"
SD: "Y'know what she told me to do?"
KK: "What'd she tell you to do, buddy?"
SD: "She told me to give her 12 inches and make it hurt!"
KK: "So what did you do, man?"
SD: "I did her twice, then hit her in the head with a brick!"
Please, people!
"Pretty Boy Blues" follows in pure Poison fashion. I hate clone bands, especially when they clone mediocre musicians. No more worth saying on this song except that the guitar work and drumming are far better than on "Wham Bam. . ."
Next up is the guitar instrumental, "Falling Asleep." The opening is cool overdubbed phrasing that breaks into about 30 seconds of melodic picking. I can ignore the fretboard mistakes, but I'm not sure the 50-second long tune warrants its own title.
"Big Shot" proves that Down N' Dirty can copy from Skid Row as well as Poison. "Big Shot" finds the band tightening up a little more instrumentally, but the vocals lack strength. Rather than adopting Bas' furious edge, Dayz seems to lose his ability to maintain pitch when he grinds it out. The guitar and bass solos stand out for their quality here, and the drumming has reached peak accuracy, but the song is only barely an original.
Side two includes "Cry Baby," the vocally horrendous ballad "One More Chance," "Don't Need You Anymore" and "Egassem Drawcab" (that's backward message spelled backward. Clever.) Rather than go into tedious detail, let me just say that the writing is tired, the vocals waver in and out of tonal accuracy, the drums begin to downswing out of time and the guitar work is at times moving, at other times annoying. But boy, what a fantastic packaging job!