Jason Bieler and the Baron von Bielski Orchestra - The Escapologist (2025)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 21 Feb 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

This is the third album from former Saigon Kick main man Jason Bieler and his Baron von Bielski Orchestra, which has coalesced into Andee Blacksugar and Edu Cominato, plus a bunch of guests on bass and all sorts of other contributions. It's very much what you might expect from Bieler, if what you expect is rooted in the Beatles-like melodies and grungy guitars that Saigon Kick often displayed but with songs veering off into what seems like every other genre possible at the drop of a hat. Industrious is precisely this, infectious melodies over grungy riffs but with an unusually repetitive lyric, almost a song built around a single repeated verse.

Now, it's not just that, because it goes instrumental soon into its second half and I found myself falling into this section on repeat listens. It explains why Blacksugar is credited on "extra guitars, noises and solos" because that pretty much covers what we hear. There are strong solos on Stars Collide and Violent Creatures too, to which I'm leaping ahead right now because I need to point out that both of them are worthy songs on their own merits. Even on my second time through, I deliberately skipped Savior to test this. Violent Creatures is better than Stars Collide, because it starts out with a lovely slow riff and later brings in tasty escalations, but both are decent songs. Cue them up on YouTube and you'll enjoy them.

The reason I mention that is that, if we listen to the album in order, as is surely intended, we'll be listening to Savior before them and suddenly they get lost in the mix. Savior only runs three and a half minutes, but its impact lasts for triple that, if not more, and it's literally hard to listen to a different song while it's partying in our skulls. If I hadn't deliberately skipped Savior, there's just no way I'd have even registered Stars Collide and it took a lot of effort from Violent Creatures to grab me back again. Savior is that dominant.

Needless to say, it's my favourite song here and it's a worthy first single. There's plenty else that deserves praise here, from the tasty guitar solo on Hollow to the grungy riff on Zombies & Black Swans, from the jaunty beat on No Real Goodbyes to the weird noises on Space Debris, but there isn't anything to even come close to Savior until the final two songs, Sacred Cow and March of the Vikonauts, which are very different indeed, both from each other and from Savior.

Sacred Cow flows delightfully and effortlessly until it gets jaunty in its second half. Somehow it's able to soar like Extreme singing a power ballad but experiment like Mark Ribot playing jazz and both happen in the same song without ever seeming out of place. To be fair, we never quite know what to expect from Bieler expect incessant melodies that are so effortlessly infectious that we wonder why anybody else even bothers to try to compete with him. This unuusal combination is a relatively straightforward one for him.

March of the Vikonauts gets serious with guitar, Blacksugar taking us into Joe Satriani territory. Even though his guitarwork would be a highlight in any other song, it's the groove of this one I'd call out the most. It's all over the map in the best possibly ways, trawling in lots of Led Zeppelin, the expected Saigon Kick and even some classical mindset, all of which flow so naturally that we have to concentrate to realise just how damn clever it all is. It's also a song that's good during its first half but which finds whole new levels during its second.

All of which means that this is another excellent album from Bieler, which doesn't remotely shock me. I gave the previous two Baron von Bielski albums recommended 8/10s and there aren't many albums I'd rate higher than Saigon Kick's Water. I can't see any reason why this shouldn't warrant a third 8/10 in a row, which is a fair acknowledgement of just how consistently good Bieler is, and, of course, his set of eccentrically named collaborators. I'm happy to live in a world where people named Diatribe Impossibles, Nigel Biggles, Renaldo Eclipse Jr., Pleasant Strife North, Steambath McCrarey, Wilhelmina Waistaway and Bernadette Babbles are credited on the same album.

But back to Savior. There's a mere hint of world music before Cominato launches into a beat that would have been worthy of an Adam Ant song but is even more in your face. The brass punctation and steel drums fit that approach too, as does the guitar solo, whistle and backing vocalisations giving encouragement. The lead vocals are quintessential Bieler, but everything else feels to me like something Ant and Pirroni might conjure up and given that they're the only songwriters I'm able to name who write songs as infectiously catchy as Bieler, bringing these mindsets together is a slice of heaven.

The only catch is that, once you've heard Savior, you won't be able to hear anything else without serious effort for a long, long time. That's my first candidate for song of the year right there. In fact, now I've heard it again as I polish off this review, I'm going to stop listening to all the other worthy songs here and throw on Friend or Foe. It's only taken forty-three years for something to match it.

Crazy Lixx - Thrill of the Bite (2025)

Country: Sweden
Style: Hard & Heavy
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 14 Feb 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

"We like it hard and we like it fast", sings Danny Rexon on the opener, Highway Hurricane, but this isn't extreme at all. This is old school hard rock/heavy metal with a strong focus on riffs and hooks, a lot heavier than when much the same band backs Chez Kane on her melodic rock albums. Oddly, I've reviewed two of those now but nothing by Crazy Lixx themselves, who have been around since 2002, so let's try to remediate that, or least start to do so.

The goal of Rexon and his fellow founding band members was to revisit the eighties and the glory days of glam metal. The band has evolved over time, with Rexon the only musician left from 2002, but they're still doing much the same thing, even if I wonder if they've moved away over time from the cheesier aspects of the genre. Highway Hurricane certainly has a glam metal flavour but it's a song structured like Saxon might structure a song, or even Vow Wow, who sang about a different Hurricane. Who Said Rock n' Roll Roll is Dead right after it has a Kiss vibe, with a great hook that extends beyond the chorus.

Where things could go horribly wrong is Little Miss Dangerous, because, while it follows up with a fresh great hook that extends beyond the chorus, it plays into the cheesier end of glam metal. It's more rooted in Hanoi Rocks or Poison and we cab easily imagine it, with a poppier outlook, played by a band of men dressed up to look like women, rather than the more masculine approach taken by this band on the cover of the album. I can even see the official video unfolding, with the band clumping together to stalk the camera during the midsection.

However, it doesn't go horribly wrong at all. It's an excellent song, with a catchy core hook firmly in the eighties style that refuses to leave your brain. However, on top of all the sassy moments, it has real meat to it with more Saxon-esque riffs, and it extends wonderfully to six minutes, leaving the last few for an emphatic build. Back in the day, there would, of course, be a three minute version intended for airplay, with a picture disc edition, and it would be a hit. Every song here is catchy but this one is earworm level of catchy. It's the best song here, with one exception.

What follows over this ten track album often mixes those two angles in very different ways.

There is a heavy side to everything, with strong and chunky eighties riffs, often in that Saxon style but sometimes in others, like Call of the Wild, which features AC/DC power chords and fretboard work, or Hunt for Danger, which sounds like solo Ozzy, from the Jake E. Lee era rather than earlier. Final Warning is so eighties that I could swear it's a cover. Sure, I can't place those vocal melodies right now or that opening guitar, which is probably the heaviest thing on this album, but they're acutely familiar.

However, there's also a light side to everything, every track pumped up with big glam hooks and a focus on melody that highlights why Crazy Lixx spend so much time playing with Chez Kane. Not all the melodies feel like pop melodies, as Midnight Rebels sometimes sounds like Skid Row covering Accept, but the other end of that spectrum is Run Run Wild, right before it, which could easily be a pop song with very different filters thrown on it. As it stands, it's more like Skid Row covering the Backstreet Boys. Or is it NSync? I can't tell the difference.

It's where those two sides collide best that Crazy Lixx shine brightest. I really ought to gravitate to the more traditionally hard rock songs like Highway Hurricane over the glam metal ones like Little Miss Dangerous. I do like the former but the latter becomes real highlight for me. It's simply done so well that it can't be ignored. My favourite track, though, is easily the closer, Stick It Out, which is Highway Hurricane done even better. Everything works in this song. The pace is up, the guitarwork is alive and the hooks are huge. It's a great six minute Y&T song in under four.

Crucially, everything here stands up to multiple listens. I may have my highlights and you may have different ones, because there's a clear love for an entire era here not just for certain bands, but I can't pick out a weak song for any reason. I guess that means that this is another 8/10 album.

10 Slip - Tense Lip (2025)

Country: Canada
Style: Blues/Stoner Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 7 Feb 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

This came to me as blues rock and that's not entirely unfair, being built on blues guitar, but it's not the primary genre I heard. What is depends on which track I'm listening to, because it spans quite a range, not all of it sitting on a straight musical line.

When it starts out with Dead Ain't Gonna Cry, it's heavy blues rock with a fuzzy guitar right out of stoner rock. It's heavy and raucous and surprisingly patient. The vocals in the second half build the live feel that we notice immediately in how hard the drums are being hit. That goes double for the end of the song, which is almost bludgeoning stoner rock. This continues into Cult but with far less intensity. The musicians are playing just as hard and the song is just as patient but it's slower and sparser stoner rock that's stripped down to almost garage rock levels. This counts as the bluesiest rock song on that album but it never cuts loose to jam.

If that gives you a pretty good idea of what 10 Slip sound like, the next few will surely shake that up considerably. 10 Split starts out like Nick Cave singing for a doom pop outfit, but it grows into a Red Hot Chili Peppers direction with plenty of punk attitude in the combatitive vocals during the second half. It's a greased up and dirty song that doesn't want to be clean and, while 10 Slip are a Canadian band, hailing from Sydney, Nova Scotia, there's an Australian feel here that extends far beyond Cave. There's some of Angry Anderson's confrontational attitude here, though the style doesn't come close to Rose Tattoo.

The most fascinating songs on the album come next. The Wall, all nine minutes of it, is rooted in a prog metal feel but filtered firmly away from metal, as if 10 Slip are Tool moonlighting as a stoner rock band covering new wave songs in weird time signatures. There's King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard here too, to keep that Aussie feel alive. I've never felt that Canadian and Australian music had much in common until now, but 10 Slip seem happy to be the causeway between them.

Then there's Shallow Waters, which is a story song, a deep vocal accompanied by a batch of power beats, maybe explaining that's why there's more Nick Cave here and even alt country. This one is happy to flaunt an outlaw flavour, refusing to kowtow to any genre's expectations, even alt rock, a sprawling genre that ultimately fits this best, whatever rich resonance the vocals find. The second half ramps up in intensity so that voice can leap into street preacher mode, underlining that Cave influence even more. And given all of that, it still has a real garage rock simplicity to it. It's quite the song.

I despise talking through albums in order, but this one seems to naturally fall that way: the pair of openers to set a particular expectation, 10 Split to shatter it, then The Wall and Shallow Waters to showcase just how diverse 10 Slip are with arguably the best and most memorable couple of songs on the album.

The remaining three don't need to be talked about in order, because they're simply another three songs to deepen that versatility, but I guess I might as well finish how I started, after pointing out that the vocals and guitars come courtesy of Brandon Hoban, while the other couple of musicians are Cameron Walker and Gregor MacDougall, even if I can't tell you who plays the heavy bass and who hits those drums like his life depends on it. Just check out his playing on Spore.

The final three are less notable tracks but they're still enjoyable. Mirrors goes back to stoner rock, but ups the ante into some agreable fast doom. Hallowed Ground, which is the single, is somehow the one song I never seem to write a note about. It's too deep to be truly mellow, but it works that way anyway and plays out slower and more melodically than anything else here, though it doesn't stay mellow all the way, that commanding Cave-esque shout of Hoban returning to lead into a sort of stoner rock knees up to finish. And then Spore, somehow the longest track here, even with The Wall lasting nine minutes, closes out like a stoner rock jam.

I believe this is a debut album, though 10 Slip did put out a five track EP in 2023 called Blackbeer'd that looks like something Alestorm might knock out, all pirates and booze. It's a strong album and I look forward to the next one.

Sotomonte - Decadence & Renaissance (2025)

Country: Spain
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 21 Oct 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

When I found Sotomonte, I was actually looking for Spanish language music, because I've found a few gems in end of year lists. However, while Sotomonte are indeed Spanish, hailing from Bilbao, the largest city in Basque country, they sing in English and their overt influences seem English or American. This is their second album of psychedelic rock and a Spanish language website I should read more from (in translation) lists it as the Best National Record of 2024. That website is called La Habitación 235. This list tells me that Spain might produce as much psych as Portugal, but I've only reviewed one of the top twenty bands before, Moura and then not for this album.

I liked this on a first listen, though the opener didn't particularly grab me, feeling over-repetitive. Ironically, it's titled The Nothing. It grew on a second listen, as did the whole album, and I can see myself spending a lot of time with this one, not just here in the office but elsewhere too. This may well play incredibly well on headphones in a dark room, where I can truly lose myself in it. Much of it seems to swirl to me, as if it's written in circles like a musical rotoscope. Gambit, the second song and the one that absolutely captured me, does that often, especially during the heavy jam within its second half. Much of What a Game to Play feels precisely that way too.

One of the joys of Gambit and, to a lesser degree, The Nothing, is that I can't place the pieces that Sotomonte used to construct it. There are moments that feel familiar and the result is obviously a folky psychedelia with heaviness added at points in a way that American proto-metal bands did in the early seventies, but only when the song needs it. It was The Beauty of Tomorrow where I heard clearer influences, as it unfolds like Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull singing for the Grateful Dead. That combination of English and American influences may be why it's so elusive.

The fourth song may be called Blind Faith, but it doesn't feel like them. I heard some Bob Dylan in the vocals and chaotic west coast psych behind them. I love how chaotic these songs seem to get, because they aren't. The musicians, all six of them, are doing very deliberate things to interact in very deliberate ways. It's not chaos, but it can feel that way because it's so busy and what they're doing is unusual. It's harder to subconsciously deconstruct these songs and much easier to just let them wash over us.

If Blind Faith feels American, Montecristo/The Riddle feels English. It's almost John Lennon doing a guest slot on a Tyrannosaurus Rex song. Marc Bolan is all over this album, but ironically the song that most fits his early psychedelic style doesn't sound remotely like him singing. There are four musicians credited for vocals, all of which also play at least one other instrument, so I don't know who sings lead, but the names are all Spanish so I have no idea where at least one of them picked up a tinge of Liverpudlian accent. Maybe they listen to a lot of the Beatles.

I had no intention of running through these songs in order, but it's worked out like that. My Cross to Bear showcases some glorious seventies organ and the heavier aspect that manifests here and there coalesces into a Mountain vibe. Little Vilma gets all jiggy with it, literally, incorporating an obvious folk dance section that doesn't sound like it's played on a regular acoustic guitar, more of a mandolin. I can't resist the musical circles of What a Game to Play, almost mathematical in the Philip Glass fashion but drenched in folky psychedelia and with Wishbone Ash transitions. An outro, The Everything, as a bookend to The Nothing that kicked the album off, is over too quickly.

I liked this on a first listen but I liked it more on a second and loved it by the third. I have a feeling it's only going to get better and better with each further listen. That makes it accessible but deep and I'm still trying to figure out some of what they're doing after five or six listens. It's already an old friend and I'm pretty sure it's going to remain one for a long time. I only gave out a handful of 9/10s in 2024, albeit partly because I lost a good chunk of the year, but this deserves another one. It's going to be hard to move onto another album but, if I ever manage it, there's one preceding it, which is From Prayer to the Battlefield, released in 2021.

Bonfire - Higher Ground (2025)

Country: Germany
Style: Hard and Heavy
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Jan 2025
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

While the five years between 2020's Fistful of Fire and this marks the longest period Bonfire have gone without releasing a new studio album, they've certainly been busy in that time. They hired a new singer in Dyan Mair, best known for Greek power metal band AngelMora, and a new drummer in Fabio Alessandrini, who's played for everyone and we all know how good he is. The last time his drumming showed up at Apocalypse Later was about a year ago in an album by Todd Grubbs. This new line-up also re-recorded the band's first three albums, which came out back in the eighties in a very different era for production. Before the line-up change, they put out an "almost unplugged album" in Roots.

So they've been busy, but they're back to business with another new studio album, which I believe counts as their eighteenth, discounting re-recordings and alternate language editions. It does the job that Bonfire tend to do, which is somehow always heavier than I remember it being. They skirt the boundary between hard rock and heavy metal, often shifting from one to the other within the same song, and they do that very well indeed. I gave Fistful of Fire an 8/10 and, while I'm not going to follow suit this time, this is an easy 7/10 that I enjoyed consistently through multiple times. Not a single song had faded by the fourth listen.

To illustrate how they hover around that border, this album kicks off with I Will Rise, a bombastic hard rock song with an obviously metal pace and mostly metal guitars. That's followed by Higher Ground, with a more overt metal riff in the Accept tradition but still featuring plenty more vocal hooks and melodies. This is a catchy song indeed. Fallin' and Jealousy, both later in the album, are driving hard rock songs that dip over the boundary frequently, while Spinnin' in the Black finishes the album proper with an elegant hard rock vibe and a serious kick.

The lightest the album gets is When Love Comes Down, which is a power ballad, but power ballad in Bonfire's mindset means a song that rocks a lot more and contains much less cheese than your average power ballad. The heaviest is Come Hell or High Water, which features a strong riff right out of the Tony Iommi playbook and prowls along just looking for trouble. New fish Dyan Mair has a good time channelling his inner Tony Martin and he sounds very authoratitive indeed. He works well in this lower register.

He's also very able to hit much higher pitches, something he does in escalation moments all over the album, but I felt that he didn't seem comfortable hanging out up there in the heights on first single I Died Tonight. It's a poppier song that opens up almost like disco and soon finds grounding in a Europe-esque pop rock mindset, albeit with plenty of crunch behind it. It makes sense to take this one higher and Mair has the chops to do it but I much prefer him in the lower register aiming high only when a moment requires it.

Mair is a strong addition to the band who feels like he's been there all along. While this is his first new album, he has those three re-recorded albums in the bag too, so this is kinda sorta album four for him. Alessandrini is always impressive and he has plenty of experience in a whole slew of metal genres. It doesn't surprise that he's ultra-reliable here, though he hardly shows off at all. He just makes this seem easy, whatever the pace.

That leaves the longer term members, but only Hans Ziller dates back all the way to the beginning of Bonfire in 1986, let alone its days as Cacumen in the early seventies. As obvious as the vocals on melodic hard rock and heavy metal albums tend to be, his guitar refuses to give way entirely and I appreciated the guitarwork as much as the vocals across the album. The riffs on Come Hell or High Water and Lost All Control are glorious and I have no complaints about the ones on Higher Ground and Fallin' either. There aren't as many solos as I'd like but what we get are enjoyable. Frank Pané joined Ziller on guitar in 2014, the same year that Ronnie Parkes joined on bass. Both are still here and reliable.

The reason I'm going with a 7/10 here instead of the 8/10 I gave Fistful of Fire is because the songs don't stand out quite so much. I had three easy highlights there and a few hovering behind. Here, I'd only place Come Hell or High Water at that level, though nothing else lets the side down. This is a strong and reliable album that remains enjoyable across multiple listens. The new fish don't feel like new fish in the slightest. It's all good stuff and it bodes really well for the future. However, by comparison, it's just not quite up to the standards of its predecessor.

Blind Golem - Wunderkammer (2024)

Country: Italy
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 1 Dec 2024
Sites: Facebook

"Wunderkammer" is a German term that translates to what we steampunks know and often make ourselves as a "cabinet of curiosities", but it literally means "room of wonder". This second album from one of my favourite new hard rock bands, Italy's Blind Golem, is a little of both but more the latter, I think. That's because this sound is always big, that patented seventies mix of heavy organ and wah wah fuelled guitar, and wouldn't fit at the cabinet size. Also, cabinets of curiosity have an inherent variety to them, each piece being wildly different from the next, whereas this plays in an relatively consistent fashion.

As with their fantastic debut album, A Dream of Fantasy, which was my Album of the Month here at Apocalypse Later in January 2021, the influences are obvious and English. The primary one is a gimme, given that the band grew out of a Uriah Heep tribute band called Forever Heep, and most of the best parts of this album are the ones that sound the most like them. There's a cover here in and amongst the original material, but it's an emphatically deep cut, Green Eye, recorded for the 1972 Demons and Wizards album but not making the final cut. It's generally findable as a demo on expanded deluxe versions of that album, deep in the bonus tracks.

Some Kind of Poet opens up very Heep with a simple riff and that glorious seventies organ sound. It stays slow and simple during the lovely guitar solo in the middle of the song and there's a tasty drop into a mellow section during the second half that turns into a bass run and then a wonderful keyboard solo. Golem! opens up like the purest Heep too, both in the slow intro and then the fast bounce, and, of course, there aren't really any tracks anywhere on this album that don't remind somehow of them at some point. Because Green Eye is such an obscure deep cut, I initially took it as a Heep influenced song rather than a cover. It features some bounce, but not as much as Born Liars before it, and it stubbornly refuses to blister along even though it could easily take off.

Oddly the first influence I heard this time out wasn't Heep but Rainbow, because they're all over the transitions in the opening song, Gorgon. Those are Rainbow transitions from the Dio era, but How Tomorrow Feels brings a later Rainbow to mind, the riff more reminiscent of the Bonnet era. Last time out, I heard plenty of Deep Purple, albeit mostly in Hammond organ solos from Simone Bistaffa, but there's not as much of that here. He focuses more on that Ken Hensley organ sound from early Heep, which was always his primary go to influence. I find it surprising that the Purple touches are all in the keyboards but the Rainbow touches in the guitarwork, given, of course, that Ritchie Blackmore was the guitarist in both bands.

If there's a third influence here, then the Rodney Matthews cover art can point the way. That's a notably Magnum-esque cover, ironically with just as much serpent as The Serpent Rings. Magnum came out of the Uriah Heep tradition in the seventies, dating back further than most people are aware, but they forged a new sound from it that was progressively less based in power chords and Hammond organ and more on the melodic hard rock vocals of Bob Catley. There are songs here I'd place at the point where Magnum started to diverge, like How Tomorrow Feels. Sometimes it's an older school Heep song. Sometimes it feels more like where Magnum went with that sound.

I adored A Dream of Fantasy in 2021 but found that it was a little off balance. The first half was an absolutely peach that I called "the best 1975 album I've ever heard that wasn't remotely written or recorded in 1975." The second side was pretty damn good too, but it couldn't match the first, a 7/10 instead of a 9/10. This follow up is far more consistent, more like an 8/10 throughout. The best songs are as great as the best last time out, especially when they nail that bouncy Heep groove in songs like Golem! and Born Liars, but also in many of the builds, keyboard solos and vocal hooks. Is the spaced out approach of Just a Feeling better than the epic nature of Endless Run or the heavy simplicity of Some Kind of Poet? Who knows? They're all great.

Crucially, though, the worst songs are the sort of songs you wouldn't expect to see next to a word like "worst". Every song here is worthwhile, right down to the substantial outro, Coda... Entering the Wunderkammer, which opens with unusual a capella harmonising vocalisations which keep on even after the instrumentation joins in, until it all wraps up with a cool jam. There's a hint toward that when It Happened in the Woods kicks off too, merely with words rather than vocalisations. It all works. Are these the least songs on the album? Perhaps. Are they at all unworthy? Absolutely not. They're well worth your time.

And that's why, even though I'm staying with an 8/10 for this album, I'd call it a better album than its predecessor. Sure, it's a little slower out of the gate, Gorgon unable to match Devil in a Dream, and its peaks aren't either as high or as clumped together, but the least song here is a step up on that 7/10 second half of the debut. The album as a whole is a gift that keeps on giving and it could be the easiest 8/10 I give out this year.

I've often found that tribute bands are often just as able as the original bands that they cover, the only component they lack being songwriting because their songs are inherently written for them. What I'm hoping is that more of these bands start to write their own songs too, because some of them are going to prove, like Blind Golem, that they're damn good at it.

Sheygun - Burn the Fuse (2024)

Country: Armenia
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Dec 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Sheygun don't quite represent a new country for me here at Apocalypse Later, but so far I've only reviewed one album from Armenia before, which was very different, given that Narrow Gate play progressive metal and Sheygun hard rock. Both hail from Yerevan, the nation's capital, but that's about it. I'm reviewing it as a 2024 album because it is one, but one that only just crept in right at the end of the year, on New Year's Eve Eve after the critics had finished summing up 2024. That's a dead zone for bands and this one deserves to be noticed.

Initially, I got an agreeably sleazy feel from this album. The openers, 69 Beauty and Get Up, seem to be influenced by bands like Hanoi Rocks and very early Mötley Crüe, with the latter betraying some AC/DC moments too. That continues into Chevy, though the vocals of Mos oddly remind of a rock-era Suicidal Tendencies. And then No Regrets opens up with a riff and beat clearly borrowed from the Scorpions' The Zoo. I was singing along with the guitar part that isn't there. I guess that means that these guys are old school, focused primarily on the eighties.

I'm not entirely sure who does what, but they're a five piece band that grew out of four friends in Yeghegnadzor, south of Yerevan, who got serious and added Arman on drums. Mos is both vocalist and bassist, while Varo plays rhythm guitar, which leaves Arthur and David contributing in ways I'm unable to explain. Surely one of them's the lead guitarist, but I'm not sure about the other. There aren't obvious keyboards here. A third guitar? Or is he the real bassist and Mos helps out on that front? Inquiring minds want to know.

I especially want to know because the bass player gets a couple of notable runs early in the album, one midway through Get Up and the other as the intro to Chevy. Neither of them require technical genius, which extends to everything the band does, but a bad player can screw up the simplest riff or run and whoever plays bass here doesn't. It's all good stuff and it highlights that every member of the band is playing their part and doing it well.

That leads me to point out that most of these songs come across with a live feel, even though the album was clearly recorded in a studio. I don't know how much they rehearsed beforehand or how long it took them to record, but it feels like they merely plugged in one day and let rip, blistering their way through seven tracks in the skimpy thirty-five minutes that the album runs and that was that. Of course, given that, they sound like a magnetic club band. I don't know how it would play in a stadium but I'd be paying a lot of attention in a tiny club.

Now, I say mostly because there are a couple of tracks that stand out from the norm. Everything I said above covers the first three, along with Hoyden and WTF is Going On, so five out of seven.

The first exception is No Regrets, which changes up the vocals completely. Suddenly we're almost in psychobilly territory, which I wasn't expecting. It's a much longer song too, running seven and a half minutes when only one other track nudges past five, and it lost me on a first time through. It kept me on the second because, rather than inadvertently tuning out, my ears caught on to what really counts as an epic jam. It's stadium material after all and they're jamming out the song to a moment still to be determined like signature songs tend to do. I'm thinking Freebird, Green Grass and High Tides, Whipping Post, that sort of thing. This isn't quite that epic and it's more subdued, but it has the same approach and could easily extend for another five, ten, fifteen minutes.

Whether I was focused on No Regrets or not, Hoyden grabbed me by the throat, because it's one of those songs that simply aches to get down to business and blisters from the outset. You can get lost in No Regrets or get detached from it but you can't ignore Hoyden. It's a good old fashioned eighties rock song, not so sleazy this time, more back to basics, with an excellent guitar solo in the second half from whoever's handling the lead guitar that I wish I could credit. WTF is Going On is a fresh dose of energy at the tail end of the album, but it's too repetitive to rank with Hoyden.

The other exception is Let's Go to the Room, which I feel I should underline isn't a bad song. There isn't anything wrong with the songwriting at all, but it feels much sparser and thus much weaker than everything else on the album. I don't know if it was recorded at a different time by someone who thinned out the production or if that was a deliberate decision made during the sessions the rest of these tracks were recorded during, but it doesn't work for me. What exacerbates that is a particularly odd decision. Given that it sounds weaker, why place it right after Hoyden, the most balls to the wall song on the album? All the decisions around this one seem wrong.

Fortunately, I was able to adjust eventually and listen to it on its own merits, but that sparseness took me aback on every listen. And, of course, the rest of the album kicks ass. I'd love to sit down in a bar in Yerevan with a pint of Armenian beer and watch the crowd's reaction as this wild bunch hit the stage. I'm sure that they'd all go home suitably drained and reenergised.

What About Tomorrow - Rage of Mythology Volume I (2025)

Country: Italy
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 3 Jan 2025
Sites: Instagram | YouTube

I've started off each day this year with a metal release from 2025 because I'm struggling to find a new rock album. Finally this one crossed my path, even though I know almost nothing about What About Tomorrow except that they're Italian, the band comprises of four musicians and they play hard rock in an odd variety of styles. Maybe they're versatile and maybe they haven't figured out what they want to sound like yet, but they're capable throughout this album, whatever influences they're manifesting at a particular moment.

For instance, after an acoustic guitar intro, Werewolves opens up, with elegant Iron Maiden-style guitar. The song doesn't stay there though. That's a bouncy riff and the hooks are far more in the Saigon Kick realm, a name that kept leaping to mind as I listened through. Big Brother has vocal phrasing that reminds of Danzig and especially Metallica. I'd say Diamond Head instead, but it's Metallica's Black-era guitar crunch that shows up on Moment of Glory and Kangarat, along with more James Hetfield-esque vocals. Namazu, on the other hand, sounds more like Extreme, with the lead guitarist channelling Nuno Bettencourt.

I should emphasise that all these influences are there in moments, often many of them, but never really full songs. Even Namazu, arguably the most consistently influenced song, starts out with a experimental section that's as jagged as the rest of the song isn't. There are a bunch of intros on these songs and they do a wonderful job of keeping us on the hop. Big Brother starts a bit jagged too, albeit not as much as Namazu, but Moment of Glory starts out with an agreeably funky bass and Kangarat opens with some sort of ethnic stringed instrument that I can't place. It feels more Indian than Japanese but it has the strong plucked sound of a koto.

The name I kept coming back to was Saigon Kick, partly because this is so diverse but also because anything Jason Bieler puts his mind to has a particular melodic flow, whatever else it's doing. It's what I heard so often here, perhaps most consistently on Desert Me but also in hooks all over the album, not only Werewolves and Kangarat. A lot of what goes down on Moment of Glory, its funky bass joined by a funky guitar and then sassy drums, could easily have been on a Saigon Kick album. And hey, I'm never going to complain about anything I can justifiably cite Saigon Kick on.

Given how these touches are often blatant, I'll hazard a guess that the songs I haven't mentioned yet are just as obviously influenced, just by names I don't know or don't recognise. Phoenix is the most tantalising of them, because I'm hearing seventies singer/songwriters, musical theatre and, almost inevitably, Saigon Kick again. However, the song itself doesn't sound like any of those and I wonder what the influence was. You Make Me Feel Down has a sleazy glam metal kick to it, albeit filtered down to rock rather than metal. I just can't place any particular band.

And that's fine, because the aspect I like most about this album is that it goes all over the map in fascinating ways. Whoever's listening is likely to catch this band here and that band there but the bands are going to vary based on our own tastes and backgrounds. Maybe these guys have no idea who Saigon Kick are and got their sound through another band. Maybe you'll hear those moments and know exactly who that would be, even if I don't. Such is the guessing game of influences.

Given that I know next to nothing about What About Tomorrow, I can't praise anyone in particular for their contributions. They do have an Instagram page, so I can see that they're all young, but it seems to have been set up in the last couple of months and they haven't got round to naming the band members yet. There is a mention that they used to be called Infills Chain and googling gives me a lot more information on them. But hey, are these two bands comprised of exactly the same four musicians? Inquiring minds want to know.

Whoever the lead guitarist is clearly knows what he's doing, whether it's Davide from Infills Chain or not. There are a bunch of strong solos here, with the one on Namazu perhaps the best, but not far ahead of the one on Kangarat. The vocals are strong too, but they do have the most derivative moments, especially the James Hetfield ones. There are a couple of moments on Big Brother and Kangarat where I started to wonder if I was listening to a cover of a song I'd never heard before. Both bass and drums are less flash but don't particularly seek moments in the spotlight, but they find them anyway, most obviously during the intro of Moment of Glory.

Their first Instagram post has "We know what we want know, so what about tomorrow?" as a sort of mantra. Ironically, I'm not sure they do know what they want know, because the only thing they need, I think, is a defining sound. The talent's there. The songwriting's there. The performance is there. I'm just not convinced they're themselves yet. I look forward to finding out who they'll turn into. Bring on volume two!

D-A-D - Speed of Darkness (2024)

Country: Denmark
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 4 Oct 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

I remember D-A-D from way back in the day, starting when they were still called Disneyland After Dark. They put out some excellent albums, though the one I played the most is the one you might expect, their 1989 breakthrough album, No Fuel Left for the Pilgrims. I never forgot where they throw the best damn parties and trawled Rim of Hell out to be played when I joined Chris Franklin in the Raised on Rock studios a couple of years ago. I completely failed to notice that, unlike most bands from the eighties, they never split up and only ever changed line-up once, swapping drummers in 1999. This is their thirteenth studio album.

It starts out how I might expect, with some real Aerosmith swagger on God Prays to Man and 1st, 2nd & 3rd. There's more of that to come, not least on Live by Fire, with a Mama Kin feel to it, and Waiting is the Way, which is angry Aerosmith with some pop punk in the chorus, but there's much more here than just one influence, even if it's an expected one.

I'll skip over The Ghost for now, because it stands alone on this album, both in style and quality, as the song that both impressed me most on a first listen and yet continued to grow with subsequent listens. I'll jump forward to Speed of Darkness instead, which sets a few other influences in play. It kicks off with a grungy riff, like Nirvana covering Black Sabbath, but then shifts into a mellow Red Hot Chili Peppers vibe. Before long, it does both at once, with is interesting to say the very least. There's a gorgeous guitar solo here, from one of the Binzer brothers, probably Jacob, and it isn't the last of those. There's another on I'm Still Here that puts him even more in the spotlight as he plays.

I'm Still Here takes the same mellow Chili Peppers approach and so does Head Over Heels, which adds some of the country that they used to play back in their earliest days. Then again, I recently watched The Charismatic Voice pointing out that Under the Bridge was almost a country song in vocal style, so maybe it came with the territory and muscle memory kicked in. That means that we now have sassy glam-infused hard rock, grungy stoner rock, mellow alt rock and country, all mixed together in ways that sound entirely natural for this band.

Strange Terrain relies on that grungy stoner country vibe. In My Hands does the same thing, with a touch more grunge and distortion for good measure. Jesper Binzer's voice is surely manipulated in post-production for effect. Everything is Gone Now ditches the country and makes the stoner rock more commercial to become a bouncy grunge song. Automatic Survival cuts back on the distortion and plays up that bounce to remind of the glam rock that started out the album. This one became my second highlight because it's more thoughtful than God Prays to Man or 1st, 2nd & 3rd and, like The Ghost, it's a real grower, getting better on every listen.

And, speaking of The Ghost, I'll jump back to that now that you have a strong idea of the flavours that pervade this album. I initially got a new wave vibe out of it, albeit played entirely with rock instrumentation rather than electronica, but it got more alternative as I listened to it again and again. I find the guitarwork especially fascinating, given that it sounds more and more like early U2 covering the Sisters of Mercy. It's a haunting piece that, like Automatic Survival, just keeps on getting better with every listen.

There are other songs here too, because most of them aren't long and they just keep on coming. I actually started to wonder on my first listen, before I took many notes, whether I'd left the album on repeat by accident and I hadn't paid enough attention to remember the tracks that were on a second time through. It turns out that I was only fifty minutes in, partway through the final song, so I'd effectively told myself that it feels like a longer album than it is. In reality, there are merely a lot of songs, fourteen in all, most ranging from just shy of three minutes to not much over four, the one exception being Automatic Survival, which milks its groove until five and change.

It looks like the band are talking up the album as their best in a while and, for once, they might be right and not just spinning their latest record as best they can to the press. I've heard that line on far too many occasions from bands who have completely lost the plot to take it as read. The single reason I can't back them up is that I haven't heard their previous few albums to compare. What I'd be happy to add is that this sounds like the D-A-D I remember but matured by a few decades to be wary of being pigeonholed. They take each of these songs where they feel they should go and, for the most part, I'm not going to argue with their decisions, with a little punk here, a little country there and even a bit of surf for good measure.

Here's where I'd say welcome back, but D-A-D have never been away, so instead I'll say well caught up to myself. I may well have missed some good stuff over the past couple of decades. I hope that you haven't.

Michael Schenker - My Years with UFO (2024)

Country: Germany
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Sep 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

Michael Schenker has been busy over the past decade, with a string of albums from a whole bunch of incarnations of his band, whether it's Michael Schenker's Temple of Rock, Michael Schenker Fest or the good old Michael Schenker Group. Here it's just Michael Schenker, because there are a slew of guest vocalists and musicians to help out revisit his glorious early UFO days fifty years ago with a set of old favourites.

I don't tend to review albums in track order because there are usually better ways to handle them, but I feel like it's needed here because these are such well loved classics that it's going to be easy to get them horribly wrong, meaning that we go into each with both hope and fear and which that track turns out to generate will flavour the next. Fortunately it starts out rather well, even though there was plenty of risk involved.

That's because the first guest vocalist is Dee Snider, a huge talent but not a logical choice to take on a Phil Mogg vocal. However, he does a shockingly good job on Natural Thing, and Joel Hoekstra helps the guitar to feel nice and crunchy. Joey Tempest is much closer to Mogg's style on Only You Can Rock Me, perhaps only Kai Hansen coming closer on Rock Bottom. There's a subtle bass from Deep Purple's Roger Glover, who produced the first MSG album, and Derek Sherinian elevates the second half with his keyboard work. He's one of three musicians here who are present throughout and, while this is always Schenker's show, Sherinian shines throughout. Barry Sparks on bass and Brian Tichy on drums complete the core line-up.

So far, so good, but next up is Doctor Doctor, which is one of the really big ones. I certainly got the tingles when it kicked in and there's glorious guitarwork and lovely keyboards, but I wasn't a huge fan of Carmine Appice's rolling drums, which broke the flow for me more than once, and Joe Lynn Turner, who I'd have expected to have been a highlight going, is the least important aspect of the song, even though he does a good job. I preferred Mother Mary, with Erik Grönwall, lately of Skid Row and soon to be the vocalist on the next original Schenker album. He's decent throughout but excellent on the chorus. Schenker duels with Slash on guitar to take the song home and that's just as good as you're expecting.

This Kid's is a deep cut, the closer from Force It. It's the only song here where I wasn't immediately singing along. Biff Byford is another legend who doesn't remotely sound like Phil Mogg but wisely he doesn't try to and he sounds great against a forceful backdrop. Unsurprisingly it's a merger of UFO and Saxon but that's fine and the instrumental section with Schenker and Sherinian, taking a lead role, is joyous. That's five tracks and it's been impressive thus far. Schenker sounds excellent, of course, and the guest choices, even where they don't seem to make sense, mostly work.

So to Love to Love, the song I dreaded most here for a couple of reasons. It's one of the most iconic hard rock songs ever recorded, Steve Harris of Iron Maiden calling it the very best of them, and it's not one that should be messed with. That said, the guest vocalist here is Axl Rose and that hardly inspired confidence. I tried to maintain an open mind, because he worked in AC/DC far better than I expected and he does better here than I thought he would too, but not enough. This is Schenker's song with credit to Sherinian again and once more the ending is fantastic. My wife rang during the closing solo and I didn't answer. Some things should be kept sacred.

Talking of sacred, next up is Lights Out with one of the greatest guitar solos ever recorded, so far up the list that it was playing in my head while I was listening to Schenker and John Norum miss it here. Jeff Scott Soto brings the voice and he's too forceful. It's a decent cover but it emphatically isn't the original and I felt that far more on this track than any other. Fortunately it's followed by Rock Bottom, which is eleven minutes long, as it tended to be live, and that has to mean oodles of guitar. Kai Hansen impresses on vocals that are a slightly metallic Mogg, and also has a lot of fun with Schenker on guitar during those extended solos.

Turner and Appice return on Too Hot to Handle, the only guests to appear on more than one track, and they're joined by Adrian Vandenberg. Sadly, what I noted about them both on Doctor Doctor also applies here. Fortunately Let It Roll really rolls; in fact, it gallops. Michael Voss does a strong job with the vocals. Of all people, Stephen Pearcy doesn't do a bad job on Shoot Shoot either, even though he's another strange choice to tackle a Mogg vocal. I can't say it works for me the way that Schenker's guitar does but it's an interesting approach and the grit in his voice oddly works.

And so there are a lot of surprises here. Dee Snider and Biff Byford work wonderfully, even if they shouldn't, while Joe Lynn Turner oddly doesn't, even though he should. Axl Rose is easily the least successful guest but his bandmate Slash is one of my highlights, along with Kai Hansen, who really shocked me with his contribution, not because he's good, because I already knew that, but by how well he fit on a UFO covers album. Lights Out was the least successful cover for me, while Only You Can Rock Me may be the best and This Kid's was the most effectively different. Inherently, though, your mileage may vary.

Eyes - Auto-Magic (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Melodic/Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 6 Sep 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website

This came to me labelled as melodic rock but Soldier of Love opens up the album as clear hard rock with thoughts about crossing that border into heavy metal. Its has a confident barrelling pace and it continues to shift wonderfully throughout its five minutes. Mysterious Ways is slower, moving to melodic rock, but the drums still have quite the punch to them; they're not fast but they're high in the mix. Until the End of Time has some glam to its opening, before it moves back to melodic rock and that's most of the variety we're going to find on this album. Or so I thought after one listen.

I should add that five minutes seems to be an important threshold for Eyes. Almost everything on this album runs between five and five and a half minutes, except Innocent Dreamer that runs ten seconds longer and Don't Stop the Night that's done in only four minutes and change. That's long for melodic rock, where songs tend to be those three golden minutes that radio stations would be happy to play before moving onto something else. These songs are all driven by melody and beat, most obviously through Peter Andersson's voice, but they stretch notably past that sweet spot for radio.

Soldier of Love is my highlight, but it's also the only overt hard rock song here in a sea of melodic rock with a prominent beat. The only other song that shifts like this one is What Money Can't Buy, with a nice slide riff. It's not as heavy, but it's growing on me fast. The guitars, courtesy of Joakim Sandberg, remind of a Deep Purple tone, possibly in part because the keyboards back it so closely. There's some Tank here at points too, though never quite that heavy. Like the opener, this would have played very well on the Friday Rock Show back in the mid-eighties.

I'm not sure who else is in the band, nowadays, because I can't find that information, but on their debut album in 2021, Perfect Vision 20/20, Andersson was the only member who wasn't formerly in Aces High. At least I think so. I'm seeing so many different details that often shuffle names around that I'm not sure who's who any more. Maybe this is Aces High, merely renamed to Eyes for some reason, like maybe they got mistaken for an Iron Maiden tribute band too often. If so, then Aces High released three albums that I'm aware of, going back to the nineties. Eyes have added two to that count.

Whoever's in the band and whatever its history, this album is capable stuff. Soldier of Love caught my attention immediately but nothing else followed suit, so I wondered if I should move on to find a different album to review. I stuck with it, though, and What Money Can't Buy enforced itself on a second listen. Then other songs started to make their presence known too and, the longer I listen, the more I like this album. Sure, I'd have liked it more if more songs had matched those two in use of power, but they're all growers and that's not a bad thing. The title track built next with its sassy riff and then the laid back Sailing Ships Across the Ocean with its tasty guitar solo. And so on.

Maybe one reason why it wasn't more immediate for me is because so much of it is fundamentally simple. Innocent Dreamer has a simple but effective riff. Any Way You Dream has an even simpler riff that's arguably even more effective. On a first listen, there was nothing I hadn't heard before. On a second or a third, they got under my skin because they're just performed so well. There's not a flash moment in their bones. Nobody's showing off. Nobody's stealing the spotlight, even in the guitar solos. That tends to mean that few moments leap out for special attention. I didn't end up with a lot of written notes after a first time through.

What gradually manifests is the realisation that these guys know precisely what they're doing and what they're doing is exactly what they need to be doing at any particular moment in time. All this eventually reminded me of comic book artists, like Will Eisner, who started out as cartoonists. They don't draw a lot of lines, which tends to makes their work seem simplistic, but they're experienced enough and skilled enough to draw exactly the right line in exactly the right place, so the resulting effect is huge. In music, Bad Company would be the epitome of that. All Bad Company have on this band is the fact that I know a lot of their stuff by heart. Eyes are still new on me.

And so I found myself listening again and again and again, each time playing better than the last. After a first listen, I was thinking about a 6/10. After a second, I realised that I should up that to a 7/10. After a third, there was no doubt. After half a dozen times through, I'm singing along with a song like Through the Night that hadn't grabbed me before and so I'm wondering about whether an 8/10 would be warranted. It's not all melodic rock now. It's neat tone in Auto-Magic. It's bounce in Through the Night. It's laid back elegance in Sailing Ships Across the Ocean. It's apparently the gift that keeps on giving. So, yeah, an 8/10 and a magnetic one because I don't want to move on.

Nighthawk - Vampire Blues (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Hard/Glam Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

While I may well have heard something from this album on Chris Franklin's stellar Raised on Rock radio show, I came into it blind labelled as melodic rock and found it quite the hard rock discovery. In fact, the opener is called Hard Rock Fever and it rolls along like Kickstart Your Heart but with a sleazier tone that reminds of earlier Crüe albums and a powerful lead vocal. Given the overt ties to glam metal, I took that vocal to be male but it's quite clearly female on Generation Now, just a raucous voice in the tradition of Stevie Lange or Joanna Dean. It turns out to be Linnea Vikström from Thundermother and Nighthawk is a sort of supergroup.

The original idea belonged to Robert Majd (the bassist in Captain Black Beard, who I've definitely heard on Raised on Rock; he's also on the first Fans of the Dark album), during the COVID-19 pandemic, so that he could play guitar for a change and work with a variety of different musicians. It clearly proved to be such a valuable experience that he's continued it. This is their third album and a fourth is apparently already recorded. Their description of their sound is that these are "fast paced, spontaneous, action rock n roll songs", a far better take on this music than melodic rock. Sure, it's highly melodic, but I'd call this hard rock first and foremost, with melodic rock, glam rock, heavy metal and even punk aspects.

For a start, this is much faster paced than melodic rock tends to be, blistering along with attitude, not only coming from Vikström. They simply aren't hanging around on any of these songs, even on a Sam and Dave cover like Hold It Baby, which is bluesy and soulful. Everything is urgent, as if they have a gun to their collective heads to knock out all ten studio tracks in under half an hour or pay a serious price, like losing their souls or some such. I'm sure the use of "spontaneous" doesn't mean that they just walked into the studio, plugged in and plucked ten songs out of thin air, down to the lyrics, but the urgency of them suggests that we could believe it. And only two are covers.

I've mentioned the Sam and Dave cover, which wraps up the ten, with Danny Hynes from Weapon joining Vikström to perform it as a duet, and it's hinted at by the blues on The Pledge, which slows things down just a little a couple of songs earlier, at least for a while, without losing any urgency. The keyboardist is Richard Hamilton from the band Houston and he delivers plenty of wonderful seventies style organ, not for the first time on this album, though it's not as obvious on the other songs as it could easily have been, perhaps one reason this finds its place in time a little later.

The other cover is S.O.S. (Too Bad), a deep cut from Aerosmith's Get Your Wings album, now fifty years old. It's the most seventies song here, but it fits the Nighthawk style well, and just like Hold It Baby, it's set up by an original song situated before it, which is Living It Up. Introduced by Doc Brown from Back to the Future this time, it's full of Aerosmith style sass, but it seems to me that, their choice of cover aside, Nighthawk are more influenced by the Aerosmith of the eighties than their earlier form in the seventies.

That's echoed by other influences. Save the Love is another stormer, with a Rainbow vibe to it that comes from Graham Bonnet's era rather than Ronnie James Dio's. There's some Lost in Hollywood in this one, though it's in the riffs and flow rather than the vocals, because, of course, Vikström is a long way from both of them in style. She's closer to Kelly Johnson of Girlschool on a few of these songs and the band back her up. There's Girlschool on Turn the Night and The Pledge and even my standout favourite, Burning Ground, which almost feels like a Girlschool cover of a Fleetwood Mac song, given how every aspect just harmonises seamlessly together like something off Rumours.

I had a blast with this album, though I can't see the point of the hidden track at the end of the live version of Just Let Go that wraps it up, even if its manipulations loop nicely back into the opener. What shocks me is how quickly it's over, given that there are ten fully formed tracks before we get to that live bonus, but that's due to the urgency. These are all lean and mean songs that blister in and blister out again and, a bunch of sampled intros from movies aside, they have no intention of outstaying their welcome. Everything is urgent and that's why only Hold It Baby makes it to even the three market mark. The opener is done in under two and a half.

With two previous albums available, Midnight Hunter and Prowler, and that promised fourth just around the corner, I have a feeling it would be very easy indeed to just dive into their music as an energy shot on a regular basis. Sure, the line-up changes because it's less of a band and more of a project, but I have a feeling that won't matter. Or maybe it will. Does the sound vary across these albums? I think I need to find out.

Moggs Motel - Moggs Motel (2024)

Country: UK
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 6 Sep 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Given that Phil Mogg has fronted UFO for over half a century, it isn't surprising to find UFO within the sound of what I thought was his first solo album but may not be. It appears that it's the debut of a new band that he's fronting, Moggs Motel sans the apostrophe. It can't hurt that Neil Carter is the keyboardist and one of a pair of guitarists, a role he's served in a couple of stints with UFO, including now, if they're still officially together. I'm just happy that Mogg is still recording, given that he suffered a 2022 heart attack that prompted the cancellation of the final UFO tour.

He's recognisable here, of course, but he puts a bit more grit into his voice than I'm used to, so he ends up a little bluesier and dirtier and I like that a lot. It works well with the guitar tone and the driving nature of many of these songs. That starts with the opening track, Apple Pie, where he's more emphatic and almost vicious at points. It's not all about melody here, though that's present, of course; it's also about attitude, even when the song shifts into handclaps, when it gets sassier.

He's the only male vocalist here, I believe, but there's certainly a female voice in the background on a few tracks, one that sounds like it was born singing gospel. It's there on Sunny Side of Heaven, which is a driving rocker, but it returns on Princess Bride and especially Tinker Tailor, where things shift more into gospel without ever leaving rock behind, in ways reminiscent of Lynyrd Skynyrd on their 1991 album. It's not there throughout, though, which helps keep the album admirably varied.

The heaviest songs are the driving ones, especially Sunny Side of Heaven, but there's heaviness in the slower songs too, like Weather and Other People's Lives. I like Weather a lot, with its simple but effective riff, flamboyant guitar solo and relished vocal delivery from Mogg. More than anything, I like the sections where it drops out of the riff and does really interesting things. However, my favourite tracks are the ones that fit in between these two approaches and a lot of why comes down to the hooks.

I Thought I Knew You is more AC/DC than UFO in its riffing, but the latter is there in the melodies and the breakdowns. This is the first song that absolutely nails its chorus, Mogg falling into quite the effortless groove. The other one that manages it is Wrong House, which has a bizarre intro in Harry's Place, a minute long interlude that's clearly there to set a scene. It's driven by flute and it's certainly evocative but, as much as I like it, I'm not convinced it works to set up Wrong House. Tony Newton's excellent bassline does that much better.

The more Mogg finds those grooves, the more this reminds of UFO and it's never a long way away. While UFO could rock like nobody else, whether the lead guitarist was Michael Schenker or Vinnie Moore or any number of others in between, they were incredibly good at quiet moments too, not only in outright ballads, and that holds for Moggs Motel. Face of an Angel opens atmospherically in rain. Princess Bride gets elegant towards the end with some wonderful swells, elegance that's happy to roll right into the orchestration in Other People's Lives. Shane starts out with keyboards that are almost trying to mimic a harpsichord.

What's perhaps most telling is that, while I didn't have much trouble picking out some highlights, I Thought I Knew You and Wrong House standing out every time through and Apple Pie an emphatic opener however many times I run through the album, even with the heaviest song following right on its tail, everything else stands up to be counted too. There isn't a duff song here and there isn't an average one either, unless we question why Harry's Place is there. I liked this on the first listen but it didn't knock my socks off. Each further time through, it gets better and better until I really can't justify not including it on my highly recommended list for the year.

And that means an 8/10 rather than than a 9/10, because there are flaws if we look closely enough and, as I mentioned, it still doesn't blow me away. However, it's consistently strong across a dozen tracks, versatile enough for everything to delineate itself immediately and memorable enough to have me humming bars from it when I wander off to grab lunch. And, more than anything, it's the epitome of welcoming when I wander back. I've probably listened through a dozen times now and I haven't once felt the urge to even skip a single track. This is really good stuff and I hope Mogg will be healthy enough to tour in support of it.

Snarm - Till the End (2024)

Country: India
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 Jul 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Here's another submission from India. I'm always happy to see these, given that it's a huge nation with a huge musical heritage, but so little of it ever seems to fit into the rock and metal vein. This particular band are Snarm, from Guwahati in Assam, and they call what they do progressive glam/arena rock. It's especially heartening to see a female drummer, which feels odd to call out in 2024 with so many entirely female bands or female musicians playing every instrument imaginable in a wealth of different genres, but is still pioneering in India. So kudos to Arju Begum; may you break that glass ceiling.

Unfortunately, she's part of the most obvious flaw but it isn't her fault. Every time the first track proper, Someday Somewhere, kicks in, my brain screams at me that the production is too thin. Her drums ought to be much beefier than they are and so should the bass of Anurag Gogoi. However, I do have to acknowledge that I'm listening on YouTube, because I don't have an album download. I have no doubt that there's compression involved so this isn't quite how the album should sound, but I found it relatively easy to adjust anyway. By the time that Sky High arrives at the very heart of the album, I've almost forgotten the thin production and I'm just listening to the music.

Initially, it's the arena rock aspect to their sound that's most obvious. Someday Somewhere plays in radio-friendly territory, even at five minutes in length, with AOR vocals from Tsooraj and a tasty fluid guitar solo from the band's founder, Shihan Bhuyan. Rarest of Pearls follows suit with softer vocals and a seventies rock feel. Till the End is good old fashioned hard rock that doesn't seem to do anything flash but flows really well and seeps into our soul because of that. It's the title track and it's the first obvious highlight the album has to offer. No Rain Can Wash Away is a ballad that shifts from delicate piano and soft orchestration to power ballad midway through. Again, there's some tasty guitarwork when it's time for Bhuyan to solo.

Sure, there's a little of their progressive edge late in Rarest of Pearls and there's definitely some glam rock on Someday Somewhere, but these don't come close to dominating the album, at least until One More Lonely Night shows up as the bonus track. That's pure glam rock with metal edges. It's a slick and commercial single but it doesn't really do anything that any other slick commercial glam rock single does, so it ends up feeling like a single that would surely get airplay but wouldn't be particularly remembered after its moment in the spotlight is up.

Mostly, this plays to me like good old fashioned hard rock, mostly seventies but with touches that are pure eighties, and enough AOR to make it totally viable as arena rock. And, while the first half is pretty solid, the second half ups the ante considerably. While Till the End is excellent and all the more memorable with each further listen, Sky High is easily the album's highlight for me. It starts out like another piano-driven ballad, but kicks in hard after a minute to become a seventies hard rock stomper. Sure, I'd like a beefier sound for the bass and drums on one, but it's a gem anyway, right down to a delightful drop into flamenco guitar with handclaps during the second half. Other than that section, somehow it feels Japanese to me, like Bow Wow covering Iron Maiden.

I didn't identify any particular influence on Till the End or Sky High, though there are elements of a lot of different bands discernible. The overt influences kick in after them. This Rock 'n' Roll Ride opens up with a guitar riff that's surely borrowed from Maiden's Back in the Village, but it has a strong Deep Purple sound otherwise. Rain and Thunder features lots more eighties metal guitar, but then it gets Michael Jackson funky and then shifts into European power metal, just in a hard rock framework. It's like Uli Jon Roth covering Helloween. Then there's Reignite, an interesting ballad that's not only folky because of an overt flute. Its sweep is reminiscent of Rainbow Eyes by Rainbow but with Mark Knopfler guitar and a vocal melody that I know I should recognise.

Oddly, while these three songs are the easiest to locate sources for, they're three of the best that the album has to offer, Sky High and Reignite above Till the End and Rain and Thunder for me and This Rock 'n' Roll Ride and No Rain Can Wash Away behind them. That's a lot of songs to call out on an album that's an intro and eight songs, plus a bonus single, which bodes well for Snarm's future, as they develop their own style and hopefully lead the way for Indian hard rock in the 2020s.

This is an easy album to like and also a comfortable album to listen to a lot. There are albums that sound amazing on a first listen, only to fade away after a few more times through; and albums that don't sound like much at all until we dig into them and realise just how amazing they are. This is an album that sounds good immediately and continues to sound good however many times we listen. I doubt it'll top anyone's lists of the best albums of the year, but it's an album even jaded critics are likely to pull back out every once in a while as a reliable old favourite. Thanks for sending this one over to me, Shihan!

Black Wings - Whispers of Time (2024)

Country: Italy
Style: Melodic Heavy Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Twitter | YouTube

Black Wings are showing on Metal Archives as having split up, after an active spell between 2005 and 2011 resulted in one album, 2008's Sacred Shiver. But hey, here's a 2024 album, of what seems to be entirely new music, performed by two of the same musicians and three new ones. Facebook seems to suggest that it was recorded in 2010 before the band split up and was rescued from the vaults by one of the studios in which it was recorded, Sonika, in the band's home town of Ferrara. Having not heard Black Wings before, I'm very happy to hear them now, though I'm sad they are no longer together.

It seems appropriate to start some catch up at Apocalypse Later after a tough few months dealing with real life issues. They're fourteen years late with this album. I've only been away since June.

The album came to me as melodic heavy metal, which is fair, I guess, but they mostly play a sort of European power metal that veers into melodic rock, hard rock and traditional heavy metal. It also gets epic, with a cinematic intro in Opening the Gates that shifts from demonic spoken word to an enticing, almost bouncy, Danny Elfman-esque theme, and a less successful closer that runs far too long. That's Back to Consciousness and it combines narration, elegant piano and orchestration.

While Strangers to This World (Like You) is emphatically a melodic rock song, driven not by guitars but the keyboards of Alessandro Duò, most of this does give Claudio Pietronik the traditional lead guitar role for heavy metal alongside the powerful vocals of Diego Albini, and not one of the seven other tracks feels comfortable lumped into melodic rock. The opener, Cold is the Wind, is a suitably lively track with good strong vocals and lively riffs, especially after a brief drop to piano midway, those riffs wrapped in effective orchestration. This is a statement of intent and, while that intent is briefly interrupted by Strangers to This World, it holds true for much of the album.

Cold is the Wind is definitely one of my highlights, but there are others. Calling to a Fool ups the power again after Strangers to This World and Albini is especially eager to deliver, but it elevates through a unexpectedly loose and jazzy midsection that kicks the song back into gear through an excellent pair of solos, one on guitar from Pietronik and another on keyboards from Duò. Talking of blistering, the most blistering heavy metal here is the guitarwork during the second half of The Sense of Emotions. It's a powerful song anyway but that guitar is gorgeous. I should also call out The Story Ain't Over, because it finds a particularly strong groove in the second half, both before and after Albini hands over to the instrumentation.

While those are my highlights, the remaining songs don't really let the side down. Another Sun is a capable song with a lot of Iron Maiden to it and even more of the European power metal bands who came into being because of them. It would be a good song on any other album, but I can't say it's as good as the songs around it. Whispers of Time is more generic for a European power metal song, even though it's the title track. It's decent, but it doesn't stand out the way those highlights do. And Waiting in Heaven slows things down considerably, opening like a ballad but powering up in its later stages. It's the least effective of them all for me, if still enjoyable.

The worst song for me is easily the closer, which isn't really a song at all, just a five minute outro that dips back into cinematic territory, as if it's wrapping up a concept album. Maybe it is, but I'd not caught any link between songs otherwise. Its only vocals are narrative and it never manages to find a focus instrumentally for me. Sure, it sets a mood but it's not the mood I wanted from an outro to a power metal album. Even on a third or fourth time through, I never wanted to skip any of these songs, even the partial ballad, but the outro lost me first time around and got more and more annoying with each further listen.

Without an active band behind it, I guess this only has a couple of possibilities to live up to. One is to enhance the reputation of a band who are no longer together, and I'd suggest it succeeds there. I haven't heard Sacred Shiver, so I can't say if this is better or worse or even remotely similar, but it seems like a valid rescue from the archives. The other is to introduce people like me to a band who might, even individually, benefit from fresh attention. Is this good enough to prompt a reunion? It probably isn't, but it's a quality addition to the resumes of everyone involved, whatever they may be doing nowadays.

Praying Mantis - Defiance (2024)

Country: UK
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 19 Apr 2024
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I only review new rock and metal at Apocalypse Later and I've often talked about the main reason why I do that. So many of my fellow fans back in the eighties seem to have fallen prey to the belief that "all new music sucks". They're quite clearly wrong and I'd cite the fifteen hundred albums I've reviewed over the past six years as evidence for that. However, those people are also missing out on the fact that some of the bands who they use as examples of why rock music was so much better back then aren't just still going but are putting out their best material now.

Case in point: Praying Mantis. They formed way back in 1974 when I was toddling around causing a lot of heartache for my parents and they only released a sole album back in the day, Time Tells No Lies in 1981. Sure, it's a good one, but I'd suggest their most recent couple of albums are right up there with it, if not above it. That's Katharsis a couple of years ago and Defiance right now. This is a good one on a first listen, which is always a telling sign, but it grows on a second and cements its stature on a third.

The opening three songs explain why. From the Start is a solid opener, lively if not fast, there to be an attention grabber. Defiance is slower but has a majesty that builds it wonderfully, with an epic feel that makes it surprising to realise that it's over in four minutes and change, making it shorter than the opener. That majesty returns in songs like Forever in My Heart or Never Can Say Goodbye and, after a few listens, seems to pervade pretty much everything. Feelin' Lucky ups the tempo to rock out but with an elegance that reminds of the sort of thing we might expect from Demon.

They make for a strong opening, ably setting the stage for what's to come. Before I tell you that a few later songs are better still, let's dive into the acknowledgement that track four is a cover, the old Joe Lynn Turner-era Rainbow classic, I Surrender. It's an excellent version with another superb vocal performance from John Cuijpers and some sumptuous dual guitar work from Tino Troy and Andy Burgess. However, it initially seems rather redundant because it doesn't add anything to an established classic that we already know.

The point is that there's history here. It was written by Russ Ballard and its first release was on a Head East single in 1980. Praying Mantis recorded a version during the Time Tells No Lies sessions in 1981, but they didn't release it on the grounds that Rainbow had just done that. I presume that led to the selection of a Kinks song instead, All Day and All of the Night, for that album and as the second single from it. And so this is the modern day Praying Mantis re-staking their claim to it as a song that fits their style perfectly, which it does.

What's particularly telling is that other songs here, especially Give It Up, unfold in the same style of emphatic arena rock. This is an original and it's not quite as good as I Surrender, but it deserves to be in the same setlist. Forever in My Heart and One Heart would play wonderfully to arena rock fans too, both starting out like power ballads even if only the former stays there. These just ooze with the majesty I talked about earlier, the second adding an elegant acoustic guitar solo during its second half, power chords maintaining the impact behind it. There's some major sustain on the vocals of John Cuijpers on these, not that he skimps on that elsewhere.

That emphasises how he's a real boon to this band nowadays. He's the most recent arrival, joining in 2013 alongside drummer Hans in't Zandt, their decade plus with Praying Mantis cementing how this is easily the most consistent line-up they've ever had. Both simply fit here, even though both are Dutch and the band is English. The instrumental Nightswim is no less worthy an inclusion here for its lack of vocals, but when Cuijpers rips into the next song, Standing Tall, we see just how much he belongs in this band.

I mentioned that, as strong as the opening three songs are, there are better still to come. While I can't resist Forever in My Heart, even being generally put off by power ballads, but Standing Tall is my easy pick for the best song here and my personal favourite. It starts out like Rush and turns into Demon, with a dash of Survivor in the commerciality of its riffs and, as it builds, one of Golden Earring in its incessant drive. That's a catchy keyboard riff but an excellent guitar solo too and the best thing about it is that it manages to be a faster paced rocker without losing the majesty of the slower songs. But there's also Give It Up and Let's See and Never Can Say Goodbye and... let's just say that this is a damn fine album that ends even better than it begins.

What fascinates me the most is that we appear to be in a heyday of classic bands who predated my discovery of rock and metal in 1984 but who are putting out amazing material right now. It seems bizarre to suggest it, but could I come up with a theoretical tour more enticing to me in 2024 than Praying Mantis, Demon and Diamond Head, this band seeming like the missing link between the two? I don't think so, unless we add Weapon too for good measure. Let's revisit that in a few weeks when I review the new Demon album.

Blue Öyster Cult - Ghost Stories (2024)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 12 Apr 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Nineteen years elapsed between Blue Öyster Cult's thirteenth album, Curse of the Hidden Mirror, and their fourteenth, The Symbol Remains, so we probably shouldn't complain that it took merely four to get to number fifteen. However, this is supposedly their final studio effort, which makes it a little more worrying that it's not made up of new material. Well, it's new to us but it isn't to the band because, with one exception, it's material left off three older albums from the seventies and eighties. That exception is the closer, If I Fell, a Beatles cover, that they recorded in 2016.

The good news is which three albums we're talking about, because they're ones that contain huge songs. The oldest is Spectres from 1977, the home of Godzilla. Then there's 1981's Fire of Unknown Origin, which gave us Burnin' for You. Finally, there's The Revölution by Night, originally released in 1983, which features arguably their most underrated song ever, Shooting Shark. The bad news is that these songs were clearly left off those albums for a reason. They're not bad songs, not really, though some are just there. However, few of them could fairly argue about not being included on those albums, even if BÖC diehards consider them "lost gems", as the press releases suggest.

The best of them to me are almost bookends. Late Night Street Fight is a strong opener that has some real funk to it, not only through the prominent bass of Joe Bouchard, who isn't in the band now but was back then. Don't Come Running to Me almost at the end of the album, with only that Beatles cover still to come. It feels raw but I don't mind that, because there's an edge to it and I'm not certainly averse to BÖC with an edge. It's especially good because the edge isn't just courtesy of the guitars, which deliver some wonderful power chords, but also the drums, presumably from Albert Bouchard. These are the two that live up to the "lost gems" suggestion in my book.

Of course neither Bouchard brother is in the band any more, even if Eric Bloom and Buck Dharma are, and that leads to another odd feeling. We might think that the final album from a legendary band like Blue Öyster Cult ought to showcase their final line-up as a goodbye but this one doesn't, even if Richie Castellano, who's played keyboards and rhythm guitar with them since 2007, stepped in to plug some holes in the partial recordings, just as Joe Bouchard recorded a new lead vocal on So Supernatural, even if he isn't in the band. These weren't all complete songs in the archives. It's likely that most were partial recordings that needed not just remastering but completing.

Three of the songs are covers and they're all decent enough, but none of them does anything new that the originals didn't. Sure, there's a wonderful seventies organ sound on We Gotta Get Out of This Place, the old Animals classic, but Kick Out of the Jams is just there, even if it was a favourite on stage. It's not a patch on the MC5 orignial. The third is that newer take on If I Fell, an odd choice from the Beatles catalogue, from way back in 1964 on their A Hard Day's Night album. It's the shortest song on offer here and it's a studio jam done acoustically that feels a little out of place. It certainly couldn't have been placed anywhere else on the album.

Some of the other songs are worthy of note, even if they don't sit up there with the two highlights. Cherry aches to be commercial from the outset and unfolds in harmonies. It's like the Beach Boys doing old time rock 'n' roll, except there's a jangle to the guitar that they'd never sanction. Shot in the Dark starts out with a minute of intro that's spoken word monologue over piano jazz, as if the band were hanging out in a lounge bar. And talking of lounge, The Only Thing is extra-smooth, like it's a psychedelic disco lounge ballad. I'm not unhappy that I heard these, but I can see why they're not on those old albums.

The rest are just there, not particularly bad but without anything notable to add. They'd all count as filler on a regular album and so didn't make it onto stronger albums. Some of them could have served as B-sides for singles, though Soul Jive seems like an idea that hasn't been developed yet, even with whatever was done in the studio to finish these songs up. The only other song I ought to talk about is So Supernatural, the one with Joe Bouchard's new vocal. It felt weak to me initially, but it builds well and I found myself getting into it more and more as it ran on. Tellingly, listening afresh took me through the same cycle each time. The first minute is just there, but the chorus is decent and it gets better and better until it's almost another highlight.

And so this is Blue Öyster Cult's final studio album. It's not bad. It's interesting. It's no classic. The problem for me comes back to that single word: "final". If the band hadn't mentioned that, then I would bet that fans would welcome this a lot more than they seem to be doing. It's decent and it's a look back at a couple of eras in the band's output that could be seen as heydays. Sure, it's clearly an album for the diehards, but it could have reached further. However, weighing it down with that "final" word means that it's the end of a stellar career that's run over half a century and it's not an emphatic goodbye.