The main problem with this album is that there's nothing new or innovative. By this I don't mean it's necessarily a bad album -- it's just that I can name ten bands off the top of my head who sound just like these guys!
The four members of XYZ (vocalist Terry Ilous, guitar-meister Marc Diglio, bassist Paul Fontaine, and drummer Paul Monroe) are definitely talented people, but they're treading a road already stomped flat by hundreds of bands before them, singing about sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, and lots more sex. It gets a bit boring after a while (and what kind of a name is "XYZ," anyway?).
They're typical hard rock/heavy metal to my ears, no more, and despite vocalist Terry Ilous' protestations to the contrary, I still think he sounds a bit much like their ex-producer Don Dokken.
Of the twelve tracks on Hungry, there were only a few I really liked. "Face Down in the Gutter," the opening sleaze-rock track, was alright, if a bit overdone (if you've ever woken up in a muddy gutter, I guess you can empathize with the song, but I can't).
"When the Night Comes Down" has some cool parts to it, too, but it is overshadowed by the songs before and after it: a rather sad-sounding remake of Free's "Fire and Water" and the babbling propositioning of "Don't Say No."
"Off to the Sun" is one of the two I really liked, mainly because I liked the idea behind the song, but also because the chorus is pretty good.
The other of my favorites, "H.H. Boogie," impressed me (for the first time on the album) with guitarist Marc Diglio's bluesy/funky playing style. At times on "H.H. Boogie" he wails and shreds, but he also shows some restraint and lays back in a groove, sounding a bit like Extreme's acclaimed funk-guitarist Nuno Bettencourt.
"When I Find Love" is the album's requisite "rock ballad," but it made even my stomach turn, and I'm a sucker for slow songs! (Listen for it on the radio...)
"A Roll of the Dice," "Whiskey on a Heartache," "Feels Good," and "Shake Down the Walls" are tunes I wouldn't be able to tell apart from any Slaughter/Dokken/Poison/Kix/many others' song I can name if I heard them back-to-back on the radio. "The Sun Also Rises in Hell" might be halfway-okay if it didn't sound like it were written for Slayer. I wouldn't listen to these five songs twice, if I could help it.
The bottom line is that this album is halfway decent hard rock, but if you're looking for something refreshing and original, this is not it (check the Alternative Music section or something).
If these guys had come up when Guns N'Roses, Great White, Badlands, and the other "blues/Zep revival" rock bands did, they might have been big, but the blues-rock wave is passing, and these guys'll probably be left buried in the sand.
The scary thing is that they'll probably be the next MTV hit...
(The Rice Thresher, Volume 79 No. 15, January 10, 1992)