Reception Professional ratings Review scores The panther is often thought to be intended to represent Lynott, but Fitzpatrick has confirmed that the panther referred to the Black Panthers and African-American political figures like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. The album cover, designed by Jim Fitzpatrick, shows a panther-like creature in a city scene. The song "Philomena" was written for Lynott's mother. However the original album title is Nightlife. Some reissue CDs, and occasionally other sources, spell the album title as Night Life, the same as the song title. It was produced by Ron Nevison and bandleader Phil Lynott, and was the first album to feature the band as a quartet with newcomers Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson on guitars. Nice, warm, comfortable rock and roll, this is.Nightlife is the fourth studio album by Irish rock band Thin Lizzy, released on 8 November 1974 by Vertigo Records. As such, it’s an album to listen to when you need a break from ground-breaking, years-ahead-of-its-time, lost gem-type albums that strived to reach new territory or blow up old institutions. It’s a very safe album that seems set to appeal to the lowest common denominator. There’s no pushing of boundaries or envelopes, no going out on limbs, no daring attempts, no cunning stunts. The four-piece band don’t challenge themselves beyond making a good album of hard rock riffs and catchy melodies. The riffs and melodies are simple and repetitive. The turn-off point for me is that this album sounds very safe. Some remasters have all the levels pumped up and they sound like nothing you’d ever hear in the seventies while others keep everything flat. The music is warm and clear, punches when it needs to, but doesn’t get over loud. The remaster of this 1976 classic sounds great. It’s the one track I am tempted to skip when it comes on. I personally find this cowboy theme uninteresting and too obvious. “Cowboy Song” is mentioned in the liner notes as the style of song that appealed to rock and rollers who lead a lonely life on the road and inspired the concept of Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive”. “Running Back” has a simple hook but is quite catchy and easy to have running in your head, while “Romeo and the Lonely Girl” has a memorable and melodic chorus. They even get close to a metal vibe in the darker and heavier tracks of “Warriors” and “Emerald”. As an album to represent the band, my conclusion is that this is a prime example of what to expect. To be fair, the whole album is very well done. What we have here is a typical hard rock album of the seventies, and that is one which includes a good balance of hard rock numbers and non-hard numbers. But Thin Lizzy didn’t start out very hard and if they even became a full-fledged hard rock outfit, I don’t know. They are solid hard rockers with good riffs and cool solos. The band is often included in hard rock and heavy rock lists because of songs like “The Boys Are Back in Town” or “Jailbreak”. Thin Lizzy is a band that I call “metal by association”. “Jailbreak” sounded like it could be a little edgier. So, as I checked out the year 1977 for hard rock and metal, I came to Thin Lizzy’s “Bad Reputation” but found the album to have too much non-hard stuff. It was just the first rumblings of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and “heavy metal” as it was known in 1977 included mostly bands that we classify easily as hard rock today. I was listening to Judas Priest’s 1977 album “Sin After Sin” and began pondering the state of heavy metal in that year. The reason why I finally felt inclined to buy a Thin Lizzy album is thanks to 1977. But it’s often the case that I’ll become interested in a band, buy a couple of albums and discover that I’ve already heard a song or two countless times, I just didn’t know whose song it was. I can’t think of any other Thin Lizzy songs I might have known. Classic rock radio tends to have that effect on music: it plays the same songs day in day out until they become as familiar and unnoticeable as the wallpaper in the staffroom at work. The song that was always on the radio was “The Boys Are Back in Town”, which for me was just another one of those classic rock songs that was played so many times that I became desensitized to it and basically ignored it. I’ve never been a Thin Lizzy fan, and that may be surprising given my deep interest in seventies hard rock and metal.
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