The last time Billy Idol released an album, with 2014’s Kings & Queens of the Underground, he was coming off a nine-year gap from his previous original LP and eight years since a dull and pointless holiday record. That 2005 album, Devil’s Playground, was one of the weakest of his career, so anything with a semblance of his old spark was bound to be better.
Kings & Queens of the Underground indeed had some life to it, albeit a life that looked back at Idol’s peak commercial and creative 1980s; wistful and inspired by a recent memoir, the singer dedicated 2014 to laying bare his occasionally problematic and tumultuous past. Eleven years later, he’s still in a confessional mood on Dream Into It. As he sings in the musically and lyrically self-referential “Still Dancing,” “It’s been a long ride, but the ride is all I know.”
That’s a common sentiment throughout Idol’s ninth LP, which often plays out like a diary of life highlights and lowlights, from the music that first inspired him to a defiant I’m-still-here conclusion. “They said, ‘Pick your poison,’ so I drank every one,” he sings in “Too Much Fun,” a recollection of his earliest days of success. “Half a line turned into five / I flirt with death to feel alive.“
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All this living on the edge eventually becomes remorse. “I know I missed your birthday,” he laments in “People I Love,” recalling relationships damaged by his excesses before concluding, “I keep pissing off people I love.” Dream Into It amounts to not much more than songwriting as a therapy session, but Idol also can’t help but to savor the good times; the more he looks back, the more Idol realizes he probably wouldn’t have changed all that much.
The music is also appropriately nostalgic, returning to the ’80s for big synth riffs and crunchy guitar power chords. Sometimes, it hits the right spot (the hooky pop of “77” with Avril Lavigne, the stage-fortified “Too Much Fun”); often, though, there are predictable patterns: a busy mix, stinging solos, female guest singers (Lavigne, Alison Mosshart, Joan Jett). Idol has never been one for surprises, and as he takes stock of his life on Dream Into It, his story is less about regret than resignation.
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Gallery Credit: Michael Gallucci
