With The Perfect Crime there's a real sense among the band that they might just have pulled off the most definitive musical statement in the band’s unparalleled four-decade career. The first half of the album is dominated by a set of pulsating, menacing rockers, at once distinctly Cold Chisel, and yet for the most part quite unlike anything they’ve previously committed to tape."It’s probably the most rock & roll album that we’ve done," said primary songwriter Don Walker. “It’s historically been one of the bugbears that everyone brings in ballads or mid-paced songs,” adds Don, “but our producer Kevin Shirley was relentlessly looking for stuff that was up-tempo." Lead singer Jimmy Barnes agrees: “We wanted to do a rock record and Kevin was pushing for that from day one.”The second half of The Perfect Crime then pushes all kinds of boundaries, ranging across slow-motion Soul Train-style disco (yes, disco!), ’50s Latino cabaret, smatterings of blues and jazz...and then, for the first time ever, strings (along with soulful female backing vocals) find their way onto a Cold Chisel song, on the album’s stone-cold classic lead-out single, “Lost.”
