The Night Flight Orchestra - Give Us the Moon (2025)

Country: Sweden
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 31 Jan 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Here's another Night Flight Orchestra album, my first that isn't an Aeromantic release. Is there a new concept here? There are certainly plenty of moments that play into the band taking a journey but, while they're obvious in the intro and in between tracks, I could never focus on lyrics enough to discover if it went deeper than that. Those linking pieces are very obvious, enough that I spent far longer on the thirty second intro, Final Call, than I should.

It's a stewardess asking the eight members of the band to attend their flight. That explains to me that David Andersson and Anna-Mia Bonde are gone from the previous release, Rasmus Ehrborn and Åsa Lundman joining in their stead on guitar and backing vocals respectively. It also reminds me that, even though I'm learning more and more about different languages by dealing with the increasingly international rock and metal genres, I still have more to pick up. I'm not shocked that lead vocalist Björn Strid's surname is pronounced Streed, but apparently that of drummer Jonas Källsbäck is pronounced Shellspeck. I therefore immediately apologise to all Swedes whose names I've inadvertently butchered in the past.

Anyway, the thirty seconds are up and off the band go to Tashkent, which is in Uzbekistan, but via a strange route. By the end of Stratus, they're in orbit. What sort of night flight is this?

Stratus leaps in hard as a bombastic melodic rock opener, with big keyboard power chords and the sort of hooks that Toto would employ. It's a strong song, which doesn't surprise because that's the sort of song that the Night Flight Orchestra churn out on a regular basis. However, it's also rather memorable, which is important because a lot of this material blends together for me. Tracks such as Shooting Velvet are enjoyable while I'm listening to them but, as soon as the next one kicks in, I struggle to remember what they sounded like.

That's only emphasised when the next song is as strong as Like the Beating of a Heart, the most obvious single on this album. Sure, it's almost five minutes long and it's a stadium rock belter that ought out to be done in three, but they're five good minutes. It has a wonderful intro that serves to grab anyone's attention and it stays wonderful throughout. What I find myself doing with Night Flight Orchestra songs is figuring out which ones stand out to that degree and continue to do so a few listens in. The album's inherently likeable and accessible and easy to enjoy. The question has to focus on what will stay in the mind afterwards.

On this album, that's mostly Like the Beating of a Heart and Miraculous. They feel like the purest melodic rock standards, the sort of songs that will be playing not merely in heavy rotation on rock radio stations today but also in heavy rotation on classic rock stations thirty years into the future. Maybe the title track fits with these too. It certainly has a powerful chorus. Maybe it doesn't quite match them.

I'd also add Cosmic Tide to the standout list for a different reason.

This is throwback melodic rock that combines eighties stadium rock with tinges of pop and seventies disco, so keyboards are king. Many of my favourite intros, hooks and other parts of songs revolve around the keyboards, which come courtesy of John Lönnmyr, whose other day job is in Croatian melodeath/groove metal band Act of Denial. He's on top form across this entire album, the intros to Like the Beating of a Heart and A Paris Point of View particularly impressive.

However, he takes a different approach on Cosmic Tide, which is to bolster a jangly guitar line with piano in a way that reminds of something Stevie Wonder might do. This one kicks in with drums, as if every rule in place on this album needs to be tweaked, then the guitar, then the piano, and then a particularly urgent pace. It all combines to tell me that, while this doesn't fit with the textbook melodic rock standouts, it's just as good and perhaps even better. It's easily my favourite song on the album.

I don't have a least favourite, but there are plenty of tracks that sit alongside Shooting Velvet as songs I enjoyed while they were playing but which I forgot again immediately. I've listened to this album a few times and every time through, it's like I'm hearing those tracks for the first time with exactly the same end result. The other songs that stand out are for other reasons, some as stupid as the chorus of Melbourne, May I? unfortunately sounding so much like Mother Mayi, that I found myself remembering Leslie Nielsen in Repossessed. A Paris Point of View finds a fast disco bounce, arguably for the first time on the album and Way to Spend the Night is extra bouncy too.

So take that how you will. The Night Flight Orchestra are very very good at what they do. They aim to fill an odd niche, a sort of New Wave of Stadium Rock with Disco that nobody was asking for but which is somehow inherently uplifting and enjoyable. This is a little more stadium rock than disco but it's more of the same and, if this is your thing, it'll take you to the moon. Even if it's scheduled for Tashkent.

Pilots of the Daydreams - Invented Paradise (2024)

Country: Switzerland
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Sep 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Here's an interesting release from Switzerland that it took me a little while to figure out. It came to me as progressive rock, which isn't unfair. The instrumentality seems to be rooted in prog rock but it often shifts from unusual rhythms and bass lines to a more commercial sound that draws on new wave and goth. The vocals, which are unusually prominent for a singer who's also the band's only guitarist, are often goth too but also dip into prog metal. Songs shift back and forth between these influences, varying the amounts of each until it all starts to feel like a single sound.

The first four tracks alternate between two styles. The title track kicks off like a prog rock band on a Sisters of Mercy kick. There's a drive to the instrumentation but the drums are clearly played by a human being, Biagio Anania, and the sound isn't as reliant on deep groove. It's a sparser sound with the bass reminiscent of Peter Hook's Joy Division years. Marco Predicatori's voice has all the confidence and the presence of Andrew Eldritch and, especially when he deepens it, he even sings similar lyrics. "You're my silent ocean" he sings and makes it sound like three lines.

It's a fascinating voice because it's full of intonation and flourish. He's never just delivering lyrics, he's delivering messages and he's having the sort of fun doing it that lead vocalists aspire to have and guitarists rarely come close to. That he's both in Pilots of the Daydreams means that he's one of those rare creatures who does both well but surely thinks of himself as a vocalist first. I tend to find that the vast majority of people doing both are guitarists who sing not singers who play. Sure, there's a peach of a solo on Perfect Storm that shows he's a very capable guitarist and it isn't the only one, but every single song on the album highlights why he's a magnetic vocalist.

Perfect Storm is similar to Invented Paradise but it turns down the Sisters influence and turns up a prog rock and prog metal side. The rhythms are more unusual. The bassline does more interesting things. The vocals soar more into Queensrÿche territory, Eldritch and Geoff Tate being a surprising pair of influences to mix together, especially if you add some David Bowie to that list. Butterfly in Your Heart returns to the Sisters mindset, but with even more Hook in Walo Bortoletto's bass and a falsetto added to Predicatori's range. Then Euphemia returns to the proggier side once more. It seems like clear alternation.

And then Among Wolves and Sheep changes things up completely, kicking in hard like a classic rock song. In fact it kicks in hard rather like a particular classic rock song because I found myself singing along to Montrose's Space Station #5 every time I repeated it. Bortoletto emphasises Hook style basslines and gets some real moments in the spotlight here to make that clear. He's very audible throughout, partly because the production likes it that way and partly because the guitar takes a back seat surprisingly often. Eventually, the Sisters and Joy Division are trawled in as well, but not at the cost of the classic rock.

And that's the sound of Pilots of the Daydreams, because the first half includes almost everything in various combinations and the second half merely varies it across another five tracks. That may well be one reason why most of my favourites here arrive early, but I dig Sleeping Karma too with even more of a deliberating emoting Geoff Tate in Predicatori's vocals and other moments worthy of a note here. There's more Queensrÿche than just Tate in the opening sequence, there's some Rush in the background and Predicatori even finds some Kate Bush late in the song, which is wild.

There's a track before Sleeping Karma and four more after it, none of which let the side down but none of which seem to enforce their presence on my mind, even after half a dozen times through. I wouldn't call them filler because every one of them is enjoyable, but I also wouldn't call any up to the standard of the first half. I do like the riff in the second half of Set These Dreams on Fire and the jangly build in Close Your Eyes, but I tend to forget them until those song repeats and they're right there again. Hypnotised lives up to its name, I guess, and Everything Has an End must have.

Pilots of the Daydreams are new to me, but I like this album and appreciate its blending of styles I wouldn't have thought would work together. They've been around since 2019 and this is a follow-up to their 2021 debut, Angels are Real, an idea referenced in the lyrics this time out too. I wonder if everything here was birthed there or whether this shows growth.

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.

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.

Rydholm/Säfsund - Kaleidoscope (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Apr 2024
Sites: Facebook | YouTube

For all the wild guitar that opens up Now and Forever and thus the album itself, presumably from Kristian Larsen, who's credited here for guitar solos, this is not heavy music. In fact, this may well be the poppiest album I've reviewed thus far at Apocalypse Later. I've gone with melodic rock as a label, which is fair and is where Rydholm and Säfsund tend to play in bands like Grand Illusion and Work of Art respectively, hence the name of their previous collaboration, Art of Illusion. However, this is a little different from that, I believe, hence the new band name.

I haven't heard Art of Illusion so I can't really speak to why this is different but I believe it's due to it being very firmly at the softer end of melodic rock, veering occasionally into prog rock and jazz but with just as much pop music here as there is rock, much of it funky in nature. Many songs, like the two openers, Now and Forever and Hey You, are often reminiscent of soft rock bands like Toto and the commercial extreme of prog rock like the Alan Parsons Project. I caught moments where commercial era Yes came to mind too, especially in the changes, but Hey You honestly owes just as much to Michael Jackson as any of the names you were more likely expecting to hear.

What that means is that I get to bring up Into the Music for the first time. I've talked in occasional reviews about the Friday Rock Show, a BBC radio radio show which was mandatory listening for any UK fans of rock and metal during the eighties. Well, Tommy Vance, the presenter of that show, did a year of presenting a second show, Into the Music, that focused on the lighter end of rock music. If that was running now, I'd be utterly sure that producer Tony Wilson would dialling Stockholm to see if Rydholm/Säfsund would be in London at any point and, if so, if they'd want to pop over to the Maida Vale studios to record a session.

That's because their core sound is in between those two openers, as highlighted by the next bunch of tracks, if not all of them over the fifty minutes taken up by the remaining ten songs.

What's Not to Love and Seven Signs of Love are bouncy and rooted in melodic rock, but they drift into pop frequently. There are guitar solos here, courtesy of Kristian Larsen on this pair, but with others guesting here and there on later tracks. Some are very tasty and I'm particularly fond of the ones on Seven Signs of Love and 4th of July, the latter performed by Tim Pierce, but crucially they never seem out of place, even with what I'm going to add in the next paragraph.

And that's the horn sections, which are even more obvious on Don't Make Me Do It and 4th of July. There are two here, one introducing this aspect to the band's sound on Now and Forever while the other takes over for the rest of the album. That means that Tom Walsh is a huge part of Rydholm/Säfsund's sound, maybe not as much as Rydholm or Säfsund but easily up there with Larsen. What matters is that he isn't soloing on an electric guitar but delivering lead trumpet and fluegelhorn. I've heard saxophones on extreme metal albums lately, so I won't suggest that the mere presence of fluegelhorn makes this pop music but it kinda helps.

Certainly, songs like The Bet, that sounds like a cross between Toto and Queen, and Sara's Dream and Bucket List, which are more like the former without the latter, would sound even more so, if there was less trumpet and more guitar. At points on the latter two, I started to imagine that this was a Toto covers album performed by Postmodern Jukebox, merely with only one singer in Lars Säfsund rather than a string of different guests. Just to highlight how these halves of the sound work together, Bucket List features both an excellent saxophone solo from Wojtek Goral and an excellent guitar solo from Larsen.

What this all ends up as is something very easy to listen to. It's often the sound of summer, which isn't necessarily a good thing because it makes me want to go outside and I live in Phoenix rather than Stockholm, where the sun is a fiery ball of death in the sky that wants to kill me. I'll settle for sitting in my office feeling happier because of the sheer perkiness of this material. My favourite track is surely Now and Forever, which is also probably the most rock song here, but I'm very fond of The Plains of Marathon, another Toto-esque song in the grand sweep after the openers. All of these do the perky thing, though, and it's a generous album at almost an hour, enough to make anyone happy.

About Us - Take a Piece (2024)

Country: India
Style: Melodic/Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Apr 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram

I reviewed the self-titled debut album from About Us in 2022 and pretty much everything I said in that review holds true here. Most notably, they have a truly bizarre mix of styles that sometimes works really well and sometimes leaves me wondering why. This sort of mix simply isn't done and for good reasons, because the fanbases for some of the different styles on offer here tend to hate the other styles. However, they've doubled down on this sort of thing since that debut, so it must be working for them.

They start us in relatively easy, with an opener in Come to You that's half heavy/power metal and half melodic rock. Their base style remains melodic rock, which is why they're on Frontiers, but it's fair to say that I doubt anyone else on Frontiers sounds like this. There are plenty of bands on that label who play melodic rock and plenty more who play power metal and perhaps a few that sound like both put together. However, I can't name another one who adds nu and alt metal into the mix, as About Us promptly do on Endure.

Come to You is fundamentally a melodic rock song with the sort of melodies we expect built on the sort of structure we expect, but it's bulked up with beefier guitars and notably fast drumming. I'm pretty sure Yanni Ennie is using a double bass approach here, which I don't believe I've ever heard in a melodic rock band before. Sochan Kikon takes on an escalating metal vocal at the very end of the song too. Endure, though, is melodic rock with a Hot Topic filter laid prominently over it like a blanket. Renlamo Lotha and Pona Kikon shift their guitars to rhythmic monotone riffs and djenty chords and both Sochan Kikon and whoever's adding backing vocals go trendy harsh. However, the solos are back to power metal again.

Legion mixes those approaches, building from an elegant power metal intro to djenty verses and back into power metal choruses, the melodic rock not as clear but still there in the structure, and the majority of these tracks continue to mix these approaches in different amounts. Fire with Fire is more melodic rock but with grungier guitars and Sochan Kikon singing clean but with more grit and, at the very end, another metal scream. EVH is bouncy hard rock with much more prominent keyboards from Renbomo Yanthan, so it's AOR with a little crunch. This one could easily be heavy Journey. Beautiful Misery is melodic rock that ramps up to power metal but with those alt metal touches when that sort of middle finger attitude is warranted.

About Us hail from Wokha, which is so far to the northeast of India that it's far closer to Myanmar than the majority of India, so I wonder what their local music scene sounds like. It's not the usual home for a rock band of any description, so maybe rock fans there are more accepting of this sort of wild mix. If Journey and Blind Guardian and Avenged Sevenfold are all simply rock bands there and a notable change from Bollywood soundtracks and traditional Indian music, then a band like About Us makes total sense. Here in the west, where trad metal and alt metal have two separate fanbases, especially outside the US, About Us make us wonder a lot more.

What I can say is that they're highly capable. Sochan Kikon sounds effective whatever style he's adopting at any particular moment. Check out the guitar solos in Reels for Eternity and Hope to see what a double act like Lotha and Pona Kikon can do. Ennie impresses throughout, even if it sometimes feels as if he'd be more comfortable in an extreme metal band. Yanthan rarely takes the spotlight, which holds true for bassist Soren Kikon, a third Kikon in this band, but they both deliver exactly what they need to do to support these songs.

I'm going with another 7/10 here, as I did with the About Us debut. This feels a little heavier over a forty minute stretch but it hasn't lost its melodic rock roots, especially with a thoroughly melodic song like Fortitude wrapping things up, even if Sochan Kikon gets edgy at points and there's a nice slow and heavy section early in the second half. My least favourite songs are the ones that venture deepest into the nu metal approach, Endure and Legion among them, but they stay varied too, so I'm not desperately upset. Later songs, like Hope and Beautiful Misery, strike a better balance for me, mostly unfolding in traditional melodic fashion but with the occasional edgy texture.

What I don't hear yet is something new coming out of this merger. It still sounds like a merger of two very different sounds coexisting on the same album. Maybe, if About Us keep knocking these albums out, they'll find a way to make the two sounds feel like one, at which point they'll certainly have staked out a very new claim within the genre. Best of luck to them!

Reach - Prophecy (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Alternative
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 Mar 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Tiktok | YouTube

Reach have been around since 2012 but I'm not finding a heck of a lot of information about them. They hail from Stockholm and this is their fourth album, following The Promise of a Life in 2021. It came to me labelled as melodic hard rock and their Bandcamp page tags them alternative rock, but, only four songs in, I realised that labels and tags aren't really going to be particular helpful. They're all over the musical map and they're clearly happy about that.

Let me explain. The title track opens up the album as hard rock with a strong nineties alternative edge. It's entirely understandable why they supported H.E.A.T. on a couple of tours, but it's also a little heavy for that gig. However, as if hearing that note, Little Dreams is softer, more of a heavy pop approach that we could stretch to call melodic rock. It has a real bounce to it and the bass is a thing of joy. A Beautiful Life kicks off like a TV theme tune, only to launch into rock with the guitar pretending to be the drums for a while but then adding a grungy edge when it all bulks up.

But wait, as they say, there's more. In the second half of A Beautiful Life, there's a western vibe I might expect from an outlaw country rockabilly band that doesn't quite overwhelm the pop rock elements that could compare to a Cheap Trick. The end is almost steampunk in its look backwards into what could be taken for a harpsichord sound. Save the World kicks off with a playful guitar as if it's aiming to be a dance number and suddenly I'm thinking Stray Cats as a comparison.

It's a huge shift from those verses to the chorus that leaps right back into heavy arena pop, which isn't the end of it either, because then they go symphonic in the second half in a way that's mostly reminiscent of Queen. What does this band not do? Well, Queen could be seen as a key influence, though more for their musical chameleon act as for any particular moments, like that one, as it's a rarity. Perhaps the better general comparison would be The Darkness, acknowledging their own Queen connection, because Reach are clearly more modern than Queen and whoever handles the lead vocals likes dipping up into a falsetto just like Justin Hawkins.

Eventually I changed my tag to alternative for want of something to call this, but that's notably limited and shouldn't be seen as a be all end all to their sound. When I've reviewed the Darkness, I've gone with hard rock and that's just as fair. I could switch those and not mislead. And that's not to forget the funk in a song as hard rock as Psycho Violence, which is different to the Red Hot Chili Peppers funk that kicks off Who Knows. Just don't expect any song to sound like any other and you may really dig this. It'll certainly keep you on your toes. I haven't even got to Grand Finale yet, not the final song but another sonic leap into symphonic rock/metal. It's also another theatrical level above what's already been highly theatrical.

You'll notice that I haven't mentioned any band members yet and that's because I'm not sure who is actually in the band. Bandcamp states the music is credited to Ludvig Turner, Marcus Johansson and Soufian Anane, while Turner also wrote the lyrics, so I'm guessing he's the singer. Discogs has him as guitarist and vocalist, with Johansson on drums and Soufian Ma'Aoui on bass. I presume he is the same Soufiane as Anane. Others have been involved but I couldn't tell you if they're still in the band or if they ever were, so I'll stick to these three for now. More information would be very welcome.

I like this album because it's hard not to like this album. It's entirely schizophrenic, sure, but I'm a particular fan of albums that venture all over the musical map without ever sounding like a band has betrayed their roots or gone a step too far into something that just doesn't fit. Queen's Sheer Heart Attack and Saigon Kick's Water are firmly in my list of most frequently replayed albums and this feels a little more consistent than either. Just tread carefully if you try to label it.

As to highlights, that's a how long is a piece of string question, because it's what I'm listening to at the time you ask. Mama Mama is a stormer of an opening single, so that's potentially the best of many good places to start. I do like A Beautiful Life, Psycho Violence and Grand Finale too, so they should get a special mention too. But, ask me tomorrow, and I might go with three different ones instead.

Neon Rider - Destination Unknown (2024)

Country: Argentina
Style: Melodic/Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 22 Mar 2024
Sites: Facebook

Neon Rider was founded by a couple of guitarists and that's apparent from the title track, which is the intro that opens up the album, a sub-minute long piece told entirely on guitar. We can feel the eagerness in that intro and also as the first track proper, named for the band, kicks in. Sure, Bruno Sangari delivers a strong clean vocal and guitarists Hernan Cattaneo and Marcos Nieva Green add precisely the riffs the song requires, but it's the eagerness that drives it all and I couldn't wait for the solos, because it feels like the performers can't wait for them too. It's a moment of release, as if the musicians have been restrained for a while and can finally just let rip.

Much of the joy here is in that release, because the constant battle in the majority of these songs is between the urge to go wild and jam for an hour and the need to exercise restraint to flesh out this music with verses and choruses and hooks and all that nitty gritty stuff that makes songs. On every song there's restraint but we can feel the energy gradually building until the moment they can simply let loose, mostly through another guitar solo. I can't remember the last studio album I've heard that feels as joyously alive as this one does, especially during its first half. That sort of energy is usually reserved for live albums.

The style is hard rock but with strong roots in melodic rock. Neon Rider and Feel the Magic adopt the latter a bit more than Unleash Your Fire and I Lay My Life in Rock and Roll, because the album builds throughout its first half. Those are the first four tracks and each of them is a touch heavier than the one before it, albeit never losing focus on the melodic rock at the core of them all, even though Cattaneo and Green like to bulk it up with the guitars.

While this is hard rock that will play very well to melodic rock fans, I'm not shocked in the slightest to discover that both Cattaneo and Green also play in a power metal band called Amma, while the former is also in a second power metal band, Edenlord. There's a distinctively metal approach to what they do and, at their heaviest, the result sometimes feels like a hard rock take on Japanese heavy metal bands like Loudness or Bow Wow/Vow Wow. Of course, Neon Rider are nowhere near Tokyo, instead hailing from a different capital, Buenos Aires in Argentina, and it's an interesting approach to music that otherwise owes a lot to the heavier end of Journey.

Those heavier songs are mostly on the first half, with Unleash Your Fire being my favourite in that vein, but there's a return to power at the end of the album because Riders of the Night wraps the show up with some major emphasis. The bulk of the second half, after the edgy guitars of Compass Rose but before that emphatic closer, holds things back more, hearkening back to the openers but taking it a step further. Surreal and Standing by the Edge are a little softer and One and Only is an outright ballad. What's important is that, while the the urgency drops a little, it's still there and I particularly like the guitar solos in Standing by the Edge with their lovely liquid tone.

I'm not a huge fan of ballads, but I have to underline that those liquid guitars elevate this one and a ramp up a minute and a half in doesn't hurt either. It moves from ballad to power ballad, but it's a good one. Other touches that I liked here include the riffs in I Lay My Life in Rock and Roll, which reminded me of Randy Rhoads on early Ozzy albums, and on Riders of the Night, which are vicious by comparison, reminding more of Iron Maiden's Back to the Village. This closer ends up as one of my standout tracks, not merely because of the guitarwork but because of the interesting use of a children's choir, which includes some of the band member's children.

I don't see a lot online about Neon Rider, who only seem to have a Facebook page that's still new enough to not have a friendly url, but I'm guessing that'll change as they establish themselves. It was good to hear them on Chris Franklin's essential melodic rock radio show Raised on Rock and I expect that they'll travel a lot further than that too, with a sound that's rock but nods to metal, a sound that's also polished but also retains an edge, a sound that's clearly well produced but still bursts out of the speakers with sheer energy. I'm presuming this is their debut album and it does a solid job of pointing the way to the next one. Their destination may be unknown but they seem to know where they're going.

Moonpark - Good Spirit (2024)

Country: Czechia
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 28 Mar 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

This is a debut album and, while it sounds like a debut album, the problems I had with it started to go away when I realised some things. Moonpark hail from Czechia instead of an amusement park on the moon, which isn't quite as cool but does give them a good shot at being influenced by bands from both western and eastern Europe, as well as America and whatever travelled. They're relatively new, having formed in 2020 but this mostly sounds like it could have been released on a small record label in the eighties.

Initially, the obvious influences are American AOR bands. Dancing in a Lie opens up like a Survivor classic, with carefully placed power chords against a repetitive keyboard rhythm. Then it launches into the quintessential components of the genre: a simple but strong riff, a good melodic line and a decent guitar solo. Blinding Fire continues in much the same vein, with the addition of effective piano touches to underpin it. It's all mildly aggressive but rooted so carefully in melody that what I mean by aggression is Separate Ways rather than Don't Stop Believin'.

The weak spot for me was immediately the vocals of Michal Kolacek, but I still had a realisation to make and I didn't make that until Together nine tracks in. Because everything is so obviously AOR, I was comparing him to Steve Perry and he was coming off third best. What I eventually realised in Together is that he isn't aiming to be quite that clean. There's some nineties in his voice, whether it's a slight edge in Good Spirit that reminds of Matt Kramer of Saigon Kick, someone starting out the nineties with something a little darker before grunge took over, or a half snarl on Together like Axl Rose once he leaned into his unique voice.

Now, whether that's the right goal for Kolacek, given what everyone else is doing behind him, is up for grabs, but it has to be acknowledged to realise what he's doing. Once I did so, I heard him in a new light, one with less caveats attached to it. He certainly hits some impressive notes on Good Spirit and Blinding Fire. Of course, he's also presumably Czech but singing in English, so kudos for making it sound like he's just as fluent as I am as a native speaker. I couldn't remotely sing songs in Czech, even if I had any sort of vocal talent. He makes a second language seem easy.

After a few times through, I honestly believe that choice has a much larger negative effect on the songwriting than it does on his singing. None of the lyrics here manage to break past the generic and they get rather clichéd on the second side, especially once the ballads show up. There were a few points where I started to mentally keep track of how many eighties song titles I could identify within the lyrics. Did whoever wrote this material learn English from listening to David Coverdale numbers? Inquiring minds want to know.

If I had some issues with the vocals, even if I was able to resolve most of them eventually, I found the instrumentation solid and, lyrics aside, the songwriting does some impressive things. There's a particularly sassy riff in Kiss Me, which may well be my favourite song here. Good Spirit flows as smoothly as a Journey classic, especially once it gets to the bridge. I could even cite Abba here, as there are some effortless pop melodies too, just with that subtle edge to Kolacek's voice. Rock 'n' Roll Train had to get moving quickly with a title like that and it does. It has the fastest pace of any song here, even though it remains firmly within the melodic rock genre.

The songs in between all these are decent too, if a level below the ones I've mentioned. It's when we get to Together that it starts to go wrong for a while. If someone has written a textbook on the way to write a piano driven power ballad, they might just have copy/pasted Together onto a page. I tend to hate piano driver power ballads and I'm not a fan of this one, though I have to admit that it's unexpectedly growing on me a little on further listens. When We Were Young starts out like a piano driven power ballad too, though it does grow beyond that at least a little.

The only song in between those two is a particularly odd one. At points, Summer Night sounds like a fifties pop song. At times it sounds like a fifties pop song as covered by classic era Kiss. Mostly it sounds like a fifties pop song covered by classic era Kiss but then covered in turn by Bryan Adams, which is an odd mixture. There are clichés again, but it's decent enough and I do like its bass line, courtesy of Petr Kolar. And the only song left after them is Dawn, which returns to hard rock Journey and does it pretty well, but it feels a little out of place after the ballads.

And so this is a mixed bag for me. There are some strong melodic rock songs here, most obviously on the first side. I know plenty of people who would love Dancing in a Lie and Blinding Fire and many who would dig Kiss Me and Good Spirit. Jirka Dolezel doesn't bring anything new to melodic rock with his guitarwork, but he was consistently the standout for me; I enjoyed all of his solos to some degree and loved a bunch of them. So there's good here. The bad is mostly constrained to a stylistic choice by Kolacek that may play better for others than it does for me and the clichés that leap out from the lyrics. I wonder if they'd write more substantial lyrics if they did so in Czech, but that wouldn't be as internationally commercial, of course.

Where it ended up for me was a decent debut that sounds like a big break for a small band but an important one. The question now is how they can build on that. They've got their sound out there into the world and now they get to market it. It may be hard to get this sort of quintessentially old style material onto the airwaves but it can be done and there are stages all over Europe. I hope to see a second album in a few years time that's more mature and brings Moonpark into their own. Only time will tell.

Lipz - Changing the Melody (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Glam Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Mar 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

Lipz have been around since 2011 but it took them a while to get an album out, Scaryman not arriving until 2018. I haven't heard that one, but I've heard tracks from this, their follow-up, on Chris Franklin's joyous Raised on Rock radio show. They're on Frontiers now and, for some reason, that label is calling this heavy metal. It isn't close to heavy metal, even if there are hints of Shout at the Devil-era Mötley Crüe on the opener, I'm Going Under, as that buzzsaw riff is straight out of Looks That Kill. This is far closer to the smooth glam rock that Tigertailz played on songs like Livin' without You, shorn of the early punk influence but before they got a little edgier on later albums.

While I'm Going Under is probably my favourite song, it's not a particularly representative one. I would suggest that the title track is far more typical of the rest of the material here, featuring a more subdued guitar and a more obvious melodic rock outlook. Its bombastic chorus seems right out of melodic rock, merely put through a sleaze filter, and that seems to be what Lipz are aiming for with these songs. They want to play melodic rock with strong melodies and huge choruses but to sleaze it up with a glam rock look and feel, so that there's an edge to it all.

There are a few songs that take a slightly different approach. While the focus is always on vocals and huge choruses, for instance, the guitarists do get work to do. There's that underpinning Crüe riff on I'm Going Under and more eighties glam metal guitar throughout I'm Alive, the closest on this album that Lipz get to that heavy metal tag Frontiers is using. Freak could have been a glam metal ballad back in the day, kicking off with a tasty slow blues guitar solo, but it's a heavier song here. The real ballad is I Would Die for You, which dips all the way into tinkling ivories, and it's the song where Alexander Klintberg sounds the most female.

He isn't, because he's one of the twin brothers at the heart of this band, and he sounds like a male glam rock singer across most of the album, but he gets very delicate here. It's worth mentioning to anyone new to the band that, while he was a founding member of Lipz, he never intended to be its lead singer. He's one of those two guitarists, the other being Conny Svärd, and he only took up mike duties when they couldn't find a singer who could do the job they wanted. Fortunately, he did step up and the rest is history, because it's hard to imagine this band with a different singer now.

The rest of the band are capable too, with mention here for Chris Young on bass as the remaining musician I haven't credited yet, but this isn't really about musicianship. Sure, they do the job but the job doesn't call for virtuoso theatrics. It calls for capable, albeit tight playing that underpins the lead vocals and the melodies, and that's what these musicians deliver. And, in turn, what that means is that the best songs here are the ones that stick in our head the most. The good news is that there are earworms all over the album.

The chorus in I'm Going Under is catchy, but the chorus in Changing the Melody is a real earworm and it's far from the last. Bye Bye Beautiful and Monsterz have notable earworm chorus as well, while Stop Talking About Nothing and Secret Lover are earworms right out of the gate. The latter is surely the most Tigertailz influenced song here, enough so that I had to remind myself that the chorus is "(Na Na) Secret Lover" rather than "(Na Na) Nukklear Rokket", with a heck of a lot more than two nas for audiences to get behind. This is a gift for audience participation.

So is this glam rock cleaned up to play in the realm of melodic rock or is it melodic rock with sleazy glam rock elements? Given the look, I'd lean towards the former, but it doesn't really matter. The expected audience might be a little different, but there's a huge overlap and Lipz will meet what fans of either approach would expect in the music, which is where it matters the most, regardless of what melodic rock aficionados are likely to think of their make-up and stage attire. No wonder Chris is playing them.

Myrath - Karma (2024)

Country: Tunisia
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Mar 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Back in May 2019, when I reviewed three 9/10 albums in a month, my album of that month was the fifth album by Tunisian progressive folk metal band Myrath, Shehili. It was my first by them but it utterly blew me away, its merger of technical progressive metal with north African folk melodies and rhythms unique and enticing. It wasn't just me who thought so either, because I saw videos of songs on that album shared out on social media more than once by friends who aren't even metal fans. I was naturally keen to hear their next album, which was due last year but delayed for some reason until March of this year.

The good news is that it's a good album. The bad news is that it's nothing like Shehili, and not just in quality but in style. The former is understandable, because few bands can knock out classics of that album's stature every time out, and as long as they're still doing good work, then it's trivial to forgive. The latter is less understandable, because, while bands often indulge in musical shifts, both good and bad, this one seems to be about stripping away the elements that make them who they are and why they're special but keeping the ones that don't.

I'd call that a terrible idea, but it depends on what their goals are. Given that the ones that don't make them special are highly commercial in nature, this is perhaps a financial decision to aid the conquest of the musical map by Myrath, if not as a progressive folk metal band then as a melodic rock band. After all, there are surely more fans of melodic rock across the globe than there are of progressive folk metal. If that's what they want, then they achieved it here, ending up sounding a lot like a Swedish melodic rock band, while retaining some of the crunch that many would see as a hallmark of metal. Of course, this is their band, so they can do what they want.

Unfortately, it isn't what I want from them and it doesn't seem to be what their existing fans want either. Sure, I like their huge hooks, which are almost as good here as on Shehili, the standout on that front being Candles Cry. However, I can get huge hooks from a lot of other bands. I don't need Myrath for that. What I go to Myrath for is all that ethnic north African flavour, something I can't hear anywhere else on account of there not being many Tunisian metal bands out there and only this one that I'm aware has been doing this sort of thing.

And that flavour just isn't here. There's a little bit of ethnic rhythm in the bookends of the opener, To the Stars, but it mostly vanishes in between, with a little more to be found in the keyboard solo in the midsection. There are some cool violins halfway through Into the Light that are more world than the orchestration around them. There's a north African melody on Words are Failing. There are the tasty bookends to Temple Walls. But that's about it. There's literally more ethnic flavour in Asl, the sixty-nine second intro on Shehili, than there is on this entire album.

To me, that's a real disappointment. To those die hard fans who have followed Myrath from their debut album, Hope, back in 2007, it's a bigger disappointment because they apparently began on this journey shortly after and merely took their final leap away from that world flavour here. Now, I'm relatively new to them, but I've read the suggestion that this may be due to the change from Elyes Bouchoucha, their keyboard player until 2022, to their producer Kévin Codfert, the keyboard player in French symphonic power metal band Adagio. I can't say that Bouchoucha was the origin of their unique sound or the loss of it, but it seems to fly.

All of that goes to explain that Karma is not Shehili and never intended to be. That said, what it is isn't bad at all. These are highly capable musicians, whatever instrument they're playing, and that goes for Codfert as much as anyone else. He and vocalist Zaher Zorgati are most prominent here, with tasty guitar parts from Malek Ben Arbia too. Everyone involved adds neat little touches to songs and gets their own moments to shine and that includes bassist Anis Jouini and drummer Morgan Berthet as well as everyone I've already mentioned. However, few of them get much opportunity to show what they can do. This isn't as intricate music as on Shehili and presumably a lot less than earlier albums. That progressive edge may not have vanished but it's vanishing.

In its place, there's a lot of AOR in the melodic sweeps of songs like Let It Go, some funk on Words are Failing and some Iron Maiden-esque woah woah on To the Stars. Even where there are hints, like the very opening of Words are Failing or at various points on Child of Prophecy, they simplify very quickly into something far less complex. I should see what melodic rock guru Chris Franklin of the Raised on Rock radio show thinks about this. As much as he enjoys originality, he may dig this much more than I do, being more into the progressive, folk and metal elements of what this band used to play, which are most evident here on Child of Prophecy and not much else.

Autumn's Child - Tellus Timeline (2024)

Country: Sweden
Style: Melodic/Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Jan 2024
Sites: Instagram | YouTube

I liked Autumn's Child's 2022 album, Starflower, finding it a little heavier than Mikael Erlandsson's previous band, Last Autumn's Dream, so melodic rock that wants to grow up to be hard rock. I was eager to listen to their next album to see how much into the latter they would move, but, in quite the ironic twist, given that I pointed out in that review that they were likely to be rather prolific, I completely missed the fact that they'd knocked out three before it. This is the next in line, a mere three months later, so it's their fifth in five years, an even greater accomplishment because that period of time spans both sides of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It's sometimes a little heavier than Last Autumn's Dream, but it's not venturing any further into that direction than Starflower, and it just as often veers into pop music. Like that album, though, it's rather varied in which influences the band are happy to display. A Strike of Lightning is a hard rock song rooted in melodic rock, with excellent guitarwork to open it up. Gates of Paradise opens with choral flourishes and ends in even more of a symphonic rock crescendo. And Here Comes the Night is almost pure AOR with a Graham Bonnet era Rainbow riff to kick things off.

These are all good songs. The catch is that they're increasingly familiar, Here Comes the Night so familiar that I can't not have heard this before even though it appears to be completely original. In fact, it's so quintessential that, in that parallel universe where I have indeed heard this before, it was probably called something generic like, say, Here Comes the Night. It's Cheap Trick over all else, but there's Rainbow there too and some seventies glam rock and even hints of Meat Loaf in the phrasing. It's infuriatingly catchy and it's an early highlight, even if it's devoid of originality in every way.

What I like about this album is that, while it's rarely particularly original, it doesn't remotely stay in one place. Those first three tracks are different and most of the rest follow suit, enough so that Autumn's Child keep us guessing at how varied they're going to get here. The influences I cited in the last paragraph mean that the Journey touches on We are Young shouldn't surprise at all and neither should the guitar solo, but the acoustic Latin-inspired guitarwork that's right before it in the midsection might.

The real surprises arrive with Around the World in a Day, because it's Journey via the Beatles, an interesting touch that would be a worthy Eurovision entry, now that they've adopted rock music, if only it wasn't six minutes long. That Beatles touch doubles on Come and Get It! late in the album. This is the Beatles playing a seventies glam rock song with harmonies by the Beach Boys. Closer I Belong to You is everything seventies all wrapped up into one: pop, disco, rock, funk, sappy ballad, all of it put together. None of these are quite as catchy as Here Comes the Night, but some of the better ones come close.

It's odd to listen to something so varied that's somehow always familiar, but maybe that's just an indicator of how many earworms there are here, regardless of how far into pop or rock this gets. There are points where Erlandsson and lead guitarist Pontus Åkesson seem to be rocking out like their lives depend on it, but others where they veer so deeply into pop music that we wonder how we didn't notice them moving out of rock entirely, occasionally into something truly wild like the unaccompanied harmonising section in Come and Get It! that I kept thinking might dip into barbershop quartet territory. I guess we're too busy singing along with these choruses, even on a first time through.

And that's where this ends up. At this point, I'm not sure what Autumn's Child are actually trying to do. They come from melodic rock roots, but sometimes they want to heavy up and go hard rock and other times they want to ditch rock music altogether and play perky pop music. What's telling is that they're consistently good whichever way they go, meaning that this is a very strong bevy of hook-laden songs. I'm just not sure who to recommend it to most. Cheap Trick fans, perhaps?

Ronnie Atkins - Trinity (2023)

Country: Denmark
Style: Melodic/Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 13 Oct 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Wikipedia

It's become clear over the past couple of years that any new album from Ronnie Atkins is likely to be a real highlight and he's keeping up the consistency. I gave a 9/10 to his solo debut, One Shot, as one of my albums of the year. The follow up, Make It Count, and this third album, fall a little short of that masterpiece but not by much. They're still both highly recommended 8/10s from me.

This one starts out like it wants that 9/10 rating. The title track is a very strong opener indeed and Ode to a Madman isn't far behind it. They may well be a little heavier than the previous albums, so firmly hard rock rather than melodic/hard rock, but not by a lot, even with a teasing hint of a harsh voice behind Atkins at the end of the latter song. It's the drive of these songs that makes them the highlights of the album, because they both find a powerful groove and milk it capably for four and a half minutes each.

Just in case he's heavied up a little too much, Paper Tiger reduces the intensity level and includes woah woah sections, so it doesn't have quite the same impact, but it's a good song nonetheless, a delicious level of grit in Atkins's voice on this one. Soul Divine is a ballad and that's all I need to say about that. If you like Ronnie singing ballads, then you'll like this one. That means that we've had a couple of rockers where the band—whoever's in it nowadays—crank up the energy and a couple more where they bring it back a little. Then it gets interesting.

I found it hard to pick a favourite song because the three obvious candidates are so different. That opening title track is one and If You Can Dream It (You Can Do It) is a second, as the most stripped down, back to basics melodic rocker here. It's so obviously single material that it's familiar on the first listen, so immediate that I was singing along on the first chorus. It's highly effective and also very uplifting, as its title suggests, without ever getting cheesy. The third, however, is a different song again. It's Godless, but there's also a highly evocative ninety second intro before it called Via Dolorosa, which was the route through Jerusalem that Jesus walked to be crucified.

If that suggests weightier material than something as simplistic as If You Can Dream It (You Can Do It), then you'd be right. It starts out with a middle eastern vibe in the way that Rainbow often did, but it has a much more contemporary feel to it, almost a hint at industrial during the verses, albeit with all the rough edges filed carefully off because this is rooted in melodic rock. It prowls and stalks and there's some sort of processing done to Atkins's voice during the verses to make it even more memorable. It's an interesting sound and it's an infectious song.

Everything else sits a level behind these highlights, with Ode to a Madman maybe a nudge above as the closest to them. However, nothing lets the side down and there's something to every song that makes it a worthy inclusion, even Shine, which suffers from following Godless. It was always a good song and it has a particularly well crafted bridge, but it struggles to, well, shine, after a gem like Godless that does things differently. However, listen to it in isolation and it has no problem in telling us how good it is. It was here that I realised just how good this album was.

There's a nice bounce to Sister Sinister. Raining Fire has a real swagger to it. Paper Tiger is slick as it gets. The Unwanted feels like commercial Blue Öyster Cult. What If wraps up the album with an overt touch of musical theatre. None of them stand out for me personally but every one of them has something that could make it your favourite. That's the sign of a damn good album, meaning that it's three absolute gems out of three for Ronnie Atkins, who's always been a fantastic singer and songwriter but who is making it look so easy nowadays. Any singer or band playing melodic or hard rock nowadays ought to go to sleep and dream about being this good.

Robby Valentine - Embrace the Unknown (2023)

Country: The Netherlands
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 21 Oct 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

I came to this album knowing nothing except that Robby Valentine is Dutch and he records melodic rock, which I'm always keen to review because I get sent far more metal than rock and I like to keep a balance here. What I quickly found is that melodic rock is both an accurate label and one that doesn't remotely cover it to the degree needed.

He's all over the musical map, in a very deliberate manner that echoes the approach of Queen and it's very difficult not to hear their sound all over his. In fact, if you don't realise how much Queen is in what he does on on the opener, Break the Chain, then Life is a Lesson four tracks in takes care to staple a copy of A Night at the Opera onto your forehead so you can't avoid it. It doesn't shock me, reading up on his career after listening to this album, that he's recorded an array of Queen tribute releases. Any other comparisons I could conjure up, like Jason Bieler, share the same influence, so it really goes back to them.

What's important is that he does this very well indeed. In addition to writing the music and lyrics, he plays all the instruments and sings all the vocals, except a few overlays like the harmony vocals of Johan Willems on Never Fall in Line, a scream on Roll Up Your Sleeves that seems like a sample and a chorus deepening Break the Chain. This is emphatically all his work, not merely as a musician and a performer but as a creator too. He has a singular vision of what he wants to do, which I think likely starts with something small like a phrase, a melody or a rhythm, and builds it into something majestic.

Sometimes, as on Roll Up Your Sleeves, it's all three of those things at exactly the same time. The first thing we hear is a snippet of lyric a capella, but it's chanted in a very particular rhythm using a very particular melody and the instrumentation promptly picks up on that. The drums and guitar then echo it, drop into a solo bass doing the same thing, then the elements combine and we have a song out of nowhere, with Valentine adding details here, harmonies there and escalations to flesh out and polish the piece.

It's definitely a highlight because its hook is so catchy and it never drifts far away from it, but other songs are content to travel much further. The opener, for instance, changes often. Break the Chain starts symphonic, becomes arena rock, gets poppy and then progressive, and shifts on a dime from Journey to Queen to Styx. That chorus of voices adds action and samples underline that, initially a snippet of the Shelley poem The Mask of Anarchy and later brief and surprisingly grounded clips of speeches by conspiracy theory whackjob David Icke. There's a heck of a lot to digest in this one but it's all seamlessly delivered.

Don't Give Up on a Miracle seems overly simple by comparison but it's just a well formed pop song with a catchy hook bolstered by harmonies and orchestration. It's telling that the guitar solo isn't remotely close to the front of the mix, because, if Valentine is effectively playing every member of Queen, Brian May seems to be the one he identifies with the least. There are definitely moments in Break the Chain that sound like a May guitar, but Valentine's guitarwork here generally feels a little more contemporary in style and the most room he reserves for a guitar solo, which is on the closing title track, there's more Dave Gilmour there than May.

Of course, as a vocalist as well as a multi-instrumentalist, Valentine doesn't skimp on his Freddie Mercury. He's everywhere here, perhaps most prominently on Shadowland, but both John Deacon and Roger Taylor are often present too, perhaps both most obviously during Roll Up Your Sleeves. While the influence is so overt that I'm sure he's embraced it by now, this being at least his tenth album of original material, not counting tributes and other covers albums, it also makes for easily his most immediate songs. You can't get more immediate than Roll Up Your Sleeves and others like Don't Give Up on a Miracle, Life is a Lesson and Shadowland aren't far behind.

The catch to that is that his least Queen inspired pieces take more time to grasp. Show the Way is a decent track but it's also a subtle one that takes its time and so it ends up fading in comparison to most of the other tracks. Embrace the Unknown is a tasty closer and it's the longest song here, but it also takes a more subdued and elegant approach, so it doesn't leap out at us the way those with the killer hooks do. Clearly I need to check out more of what Robby Valentine's done over the past forty years or so, because he makes excellent music and he has a serious back catalogue.

Twilight Road - Trapped (2023)

Country: Italy/UK
Style: Melodic/Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 9 Jun 2023
Sites:
Dario: Facebook | Metal Archives | Wikipedia
Carl: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

You probably won't know the name of Twilight Road because this is their debut album, if indeed it isn't a one off project, but you may know the names involved, the primary pair being Dario Mollo, an Italian guitarist, and Carl Sentance, a British vocalist. They have worked together before, on an album by Dario Mollo's Crossbones from 2016 called Rock the Cradle, which was apparently strong enough to generate fans wanting another one, but I haven't heard that.

Mollo is best known for his pairings with famous vocalists: four albums in collaboration with Tony Martin, three more in Voodoo Hill with Glenn Hughes and another in EZoo with Graham Bonnet. I heard him last on the fourth of the Tony Martin albums, Thorns, from last year. Sentance first found fame in Persian Risk, Phil Campbell's old band, but also fronted Krokus for a few years, knocking out an album with them, and has been the lead vocalist in Nazareth since 2015, after Dan McCafferty chose to retire. My last experience of his work was Nazareth's Surviving the Law album, also from last year.

If those sound like diverse bands, you'll have figured out in advance how versatile this album is. In fact, it's almost deliberately set up like a trawl through a lot of the history of rock music. Trapped, for instance, is straightforward guitar-driven hard rock with soft keyboards behind it to open up a door to airplay. Dirty Rock 'n' Roll is harder and grungier and has a Guns n' Roses feel to it in both vocal delivery and structure, but a whole bunch of other names leap out at points, some Steve Vai here, some Def Leppard there, some Alice Cooper here, some Warrant there. Dark Angel travels a little further back in time and delivers a delicious back and forth between guitar and organ.

This sort of changing goals between tracks is so overt that I could imagine the song choice chosen by a randomising machine like they use on talk shows or Whose Line is It Anyway. The next one will be in the style of... *spin wheel*... seventies blues rock. Ah yes, Madonna. Then... *spins wheel* an outtake from Rainbow's Down to Earth album. OK, so Turn It Up. That's not quite the core riff from Since You Been Gone but it's close enough to bring it immediately to mind. Next up? *spins wheel* Bruce Dickinson but less sonically dense than Iron Maiden? I like that idea. So here's Empty Mirror and Warning. Take your pick.

Actually that vocal approach shows up before then, because there are parts of Dark Angel where Sentance channels some Dickinson, but that reaches its peak on Empty Mirror, where he hurls out lines like boomerangs to float in the air and maybe come back to him from the audience. It's not a difficult approach for him, more akin to his Persian Risk days, I'd think, than anything he's doing in Nazareth now, but he's a versatile singer. He's one of the key reasons that Perfect Strangers has a pretty high success rate. And yes, I'm talking about the Deep Purple classic.

This is one of those iconic songs that should be covered with extreme caution, because it's just not likely to work. Either you do it so well that it sounds like the original, in which case why bother, or you don't and it sounds like a poor knock-off, hardly the effect you're going for. I had my doubts in advance but this is a rare exception to those two scenarios, because Sentance sings it firmly in the style of Ian Gillan but not exactly how Gillan sang it, so it feels less like a cheap knock-off and more like a live version by Purple that we haven't heard before.

That holds true for how they treat the song too. It's close for a few minutes, enough so that we're singing along and not only with the words, because after all we know the guitar and organ riffs in this one the way we know a lot of lyrics. However, then it veers off into another direction entirely, into an instrumental workout that echoes what Purple might have done in a live environment, all the way down to a brief Rainbow homage at the end, but doesn't copy what they actually did. I'll say it plainly: I wasn't expecting this to work but it did and that may be the biggest success here.

In short, there's a lot here and while not much of it is particularly original, it's all done well, from the blues rock of Madonna to the prog metal elegance of Mafia, Sentance shifting his voice from a Bruce Dickinson sustain a little closer to a Geoff Tate one. Most of it sits in between in these two, exploring the range of what hard rock has done over a few decades and filtering it into a bunch of new songs. Mollo's excellent, my favourite moment from him being the core riff in God is Red, but Sentance makes the album for me.

Revolution Saints - Eagle Flight (2023)

Country: USA
Style: Melodic/Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 21 Apr 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Wikipedia

If you don't know the name, Revolution Saints are one of a number of supergroups conjured up by the president of Frontiers Records, Serafino Perugino, almost like a fantasy football team that he can actually put together. If you could create a band featuring absolutely anyone from the history of melodic rock, who would be in the line-up? Perugino asks himself that question often, then gets on the phone to see what can actually happen. In this instance, the band was originally made up of Jack Blades of Night Ranger, Deen Castronovo of Journey and Doug Aldrich of Whitesnake, to just cite the most obvious bands on their expansive respective resumes.

Nowadays, on their fourth album, only Castronovo is left from that original line-up, as Aldrich and both Blades left last year, but that's not a problem for Perugino. He just gets back on the phone. With Castronovo still there on lead vocals and drums, he chose to bring in the insanely busy Joel Hoekstra, who replaced Aldrich in Whitesnake and who also released his latest Joel Hoekstra's 13 album in June, on guitar and Jeff Pilson of Dokken on bass, though he appears to be in Foreigner nowadays.

These are all seasoned veterans and they each do good work here, but it's Castronovo's vocals that elevate this beyond the levels we might expect it to occupy. It shouldn't surprise that the songs are all grounded in Journey, but he brings a rasp to the style of soaring melodic vocals that Steve Perry would deliver impeccably clean. While Perry was and is an amazing lead singer, I found that I enjoy that rasp as it grounds this music and makes it a little more real and down to earth. The elegance found in the early songs like the opening title track and Talking Like Strangers is pure Journey but we can hit these notes at karaoke.

I like also that it has a guitarist like Hoekstra to keep everything heavy. If Journey were to tackle a song from this album, any song, it would be softer. It doesn't matter if it's an actual ballad, like I'll Cry for You Tonight, or not. It would inherently be softer with smoother vocals, more overt use of keyboards and a lighter touch on guitar. Hoekstra does tone it down somewhat on that ballad, but, even there, we can feel that he want to rock out and Journey didn't always want to do that. So the default sound here is like the heaviest Journey song ever and that's not a bad thing. Pilson's bass emphasises that too, never doing anything particularly flash but adding that back end efficiently and becoming more obvious the more we look for it.

It's telling, for instance, that I don't tend to be much of a fan of ballads on rock and metal albums, but I'll Cry for You Tonight is a highlight here. It starts soft but it builds and, while it never gets as heavy as the rest of the album, which I should emphasise is still hard rock rather than heavy metal, it gets closer to it than a lot of ballads would. Oh, and there's only one. Some songs may be a little softer than others, but that's just an admirable variation in texture. They're all emphatically hard rock songs and only this one among them truly counts as a ballad.

So far, so good. The core sound here is wonderful, that heavy Journey approach with grittier vocals and livelier guitars. The catch is that it's top heavy. Eagle Flight is a clear highlight at the start and Talking Like Strangers is another right after it. Need Each Other isn't quite as good but it's close, a strong third number. I'll Cry for You Tonight wraps up the first side as the fifth song and it's clearly another highlight. That's four out of five hits and Kids Will Be Kids isn't a miss, just a song that's a little lost in and amongst such stellar company.

However, the best song on the second side is the first one, Crime of the Century, and it's looser and less emphatic than those earlier gems. It's a good one, with particularly solid bass from Pilsen and another excellent vocal from Castronovo, not to forget a neat riff midway from Hoekstra, but it's a step down from the first half. And what's still to come is a step down from that. And that puts me in a similar place to where I was yesterday with Raven.

There's certainly a lot of 8/10 material here, but it initially felt a little generous to go there for the album as a whole. However, I ended up doing that because the stronger songs don't get weaker on repeat listens but the lesser songs get stronger. I'm getting to the point now where it feels wrong odd to call Set Yourself Free a lesser song. I think it's become a highlight and that nudges me over into thinking this is an 8/10 album. If you like the idea of heavy Journey, this is a must for you.

DeVicious - Code Red (2023)

Country: Germany
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 26 May 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

Oh, it's good to hear bass again after the latest Enforcer album—in fact, it begins with a rich bass intro—but the Swedes had me aching for speed and, of course, DeVicious are a melodic hard rock band so that's never going to happen, even if they mysteriously have a Metal Archives page. They continue in the same vein here as on previous albums, which means from a positive side that it's elegant hard rock with a crunch beneath it but hooks on top that get stuck in our brains; and from a negative side that there's yet another new vocalist in place, showing up after five years fronting Ronni Le Tekrø's band TNT in between stints by their most frequent singer, Tony Harnell.

This new name is Baol Bardot Bulsara, that last name auspicious for a singer, and he's the fourth singer across five albums. That's hardly promising, especially given that everyone else has stayed constant, the only other line-up change ever being the departure of Gisbert Royder, their rhythm guitarist on their debut album, in 2018 without a replacement. I don't know what they're looking for in a vocalist, as it's clearly something more than singing ability, which previous singer Antonio Calanna had without a doubt, but I hope they find it soon, whether with Bulsara or whoever ends up singing on their next album.

He shows that he has a fine set of pipes on the opener, Are You Ready for Love, especially with his closing note, but he has a smooth voice so he fades into the music a little, with Radivoj Petrovic's guitar stepping up to challenge for the foreground and Alex Frey's bass not far behind. He sounds not unlike Alex Falk of Fans of the Dark, but he's not as overt, content to stay a little further back in the mix and that makes this a deeper but less immediate album. We have to choose to allow the songs in and explore them. They're not going to kick down the door and impress us like they did on Phase Three a few years ago.

My favourite song is an easy choice and that's House of Cards. I expect catchy hooks from DeVicious and this is the most exquisitely catchy song here. It also wraps up gloriously to cement its position at the top of this particular tree. Next in line is a much harder task, but I might plump for No More Tears. It sets itself up as a ballad from the outset but it kicks into gear nicely and ends up firmly in the vein of Magnum, which is no bad thing for an elegant melodic hard rock band to do. After that I'm stuck, because the album's very consistent.

What remains is the catch to that admirable consistency. I found DeVicions in 2020 with their third album, Phase III, which was an absolute peach and an easy 8/10 from me. I gave it my Album of the Month for June of that year. Black Heart was clearly not up to that standard but it was still a good album, highly enjoyable throughout, and this one follows that closely. I've listened through a few times and never not enjoyed. I don't feel the need to skip any tracks. Nothing drags or lets the side down. There's no filler here. However, there's also nothing that really steps up to challenge those two highlights.

Maybe Madhouse comes close because of its classy opening, yet another rich bass moment. Sorry, Enforcer, I'm going to relish these and there are plenty to choose from. There's another neat one on Raise Your Life, for instance. Walk from the Shadows seemed like a throwaway song to close out the album on my first listen, but it told me off for that assumption unceremoniously on a second. I would put that one up with Madhouse as the best of the rest now, possibly ahead of it. However, if it wasn't for House of Cards, the catchiest song here would be the bonus, Penthouse Floor, which is a re-recording of a track from their debut album. Never Say Never, back in 2018.

And this leaves me in two minds. Are DeVicious trying too hard, given that this is their fifth album in only six years? They've only left 2021 free of a new studio album, probably because of COVID and that's a pace that almost nobody maintains nowadays, even if it was expected back in the eighties. The fact that everything works suggests that they aren't, that they're firmly up to that frequency, but the lack of obvious standouts and the constant turnover of lead vocalist suggest that maybe a slower pace might benefit them. Who knows? I just know that I'm looking forward to number six in hope of another 8/10. This one, like its predecessor, though, is a safe 7/10.