Judas Priest - Invincible Shield (2024)

Country: UK
Style: Heavy Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 8 Mar 2024
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This is an important album for Judas Priest, for a couple of reasons. One is that it's 2024 and their debut album, Rocka Rolla, came out in 1974, so they're being identified as the first metal band to release albums half a century apart. I guess the validity of that depends if you count someone like Deep Purple or not. The other is that, regardless of how long they've been doing this, the previous Priest album, Firepower in 2018, was seen as a high point in their career, winning a whole bunch of end of year awards. How would they follow that up?

Pretty well as it turns out. This doesn't reach the same heights, but it's still a very good album on every front, as epitomised by its opener, Panic Attack and indeed the first three opening tracks. It kicks off very well indeed and we surely can't have got past the title track without wondering if it would match its predecessor in power and impact.

Panic Attack is quintessential Priest, with solid riffs and powerful lead vocals. The guitar solos are gorgeous, one guitarist handing over to the other, then both teaming up for an absolutely joyous joint solo. I couldn't tell you which one is the work of Glenn Tipton and which Richie Faulkner, but I can't fault either of them. They both do wonderful work. Rob Halford hits all the notes he used to hit back in the day, even if, of course, he wasn't on that debut. There's also a some serious pace on Scott Travis's drums during the finalé. And that's everyone except the man who's been with them the longest, bassist Ian Hill, who joined Priest before I was born.

The title track is another highlight, adding an even more traditionally catchy chorus, something a Priest album is never short on, even on their least impactful releases. In between those two, The Serpent and the King is another excellent track. It's not quite up to its bookends but it's so strong that, had we heard it in isolation, we'd still be talking it up as an impeccable new Priest song. Any other spot on this album and it would stand out, but in between those two gems, it's just another highlight.

Devil in Disguise is where it slows down, maintaining the power but ditching the speed. Those first three tracks don't emulate something like Painkiller, but they're all notably up tempo, reminding anyone not paying attention just how much Priest had influenced the birth of speed metal and, in its wake, thrash metal. Devil in Disguise, Gates of Hell and Crown of Horns are all happy to be pure heavy metal, without any need to influence a new genre. They chug along effortlessly and exude a studded leather archetype. Much of the rest of the album follows suit.

Those are all good songs, as indeed are all the others to follow, this running to eleven tracks all told. However, it's the faster tracks that stir up my blood, which generally means those three openers and As God is My Witness, where Halford remains slower than the instruments around him but just as powerful. These faster songs are sonic weapons, while the rest of the tracks epitomise the title, obviously capable of withstanding anything thrown their way but not interested in particularly dealing out any damage of their own unless absolutely necessary.

And so whether this is as strong as Firepower may depend on what you want from a Priest track. I might love a slow Priest classic like Victim of Changes with a passion, but it's The Ripper and Electric Eye and Painkiller I'd throw on to feel invulnerable. There's not as much of that here, those four faster tracks coming closest. The majority of these are a throwback to their more commercial material, such as Breaking the Law and You've Got Another Thing Comin', but with a modern elegant edge to them. The best example here is probably Crown of Horns, a peach of a song that I'm sure the American audience will adore.

For my part, I love that song but I generally prefer those openers, so this album is wonderfully strong for me but doesn't live up to the promise it kicks off with.

Nick Johnston - Child of Bliss (2024)

Country: Canada
Style: Instrumental Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Mar 2024
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I hadn't heard of Nick Johnston before, but I wasn't going to pass up this gorgeous cover art. He's a Canadian guitarist on his seventh album and, for once, I can buy into everything on his Wikipedia page. He claims strong influences from a string of the usual names, like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eddie van Halen, Yngwie J. Malmsteen and Jeff Beck, but he also states that "I sound nothing like those guys" and he doesn't with the sole exception of Beck, whose touches I did catch once in a while. The influence that leapt out here for me was Joe Satriani, who's all over this material like a rash.

This album isn't as adventurous as Satriani's most recent effort, The Elephants of Mars, which has a lot more versatility to it, playing in all sorts of unusual genres. This, on the other hand, is clearly instrumental rock music and it's happy to be instrumental rock music, with maybe a dip into folk in the title track and a hint towards metal on Momento Vivere. However, as content as Johnston is to remain within a relatively limited scope, this is absolutely going to play best to Satch fans, who I'd think would eat this up and ask for seconds.

Now Satriani is well known for being a technical virtuoso and it's clear to me that Johnston is too, but he doesn't flaunt it as much. When he talks about this particular influence, he talks about his sense of melody as an underpinning for everything else that he does and, from this album alone, I can see that that's what drives him. I haven't gone to YouTube to see what he looks like when he's up there on stage, but I firmly imagine him standing in a spotlight he likely doesn't realise is even there because his eyes are closed as he channels the music through his body. I don't picture him at the front of the stage winking at the audience as he nails something outrageously technical that lesser mortals just couldn't do in a month of Sundays.

However, it seems likely that he could do that should he ever choose to do so. To non-musicians like me, he sounds impressive, clearly talented but no showoff, so we focus on those melodies and how he builds them into something more. Put simply, we listen to his music. Most of it seems laid back, albeit not so far as someone like Eric Clapton who gradually gets more entrenched in soft rock as the years pass, outside his occasional ventures into pure roots. However, there are still moments in tracks like Moonflower and late in Voice on the Wind that I seriously doubt are easy to play, but which he makes seem exactly that.

My least favourite track is easily the first one, Black Widow Silk, not because it doesn't sound great but because it's over almost as it's begun and he oddly doesn't play through most of it. He's clearly not a guitarist who counts his worth by the number of notes that he plays, but I don't believe he reaches twenty by the halfway mark of a piece that only just nudges past two minutes. It's an odd choice to start out the album, because it's less an intro to the entire thing as an intro into a song we never hear, because the title track works off a completely different groove.

That title track may be my favourite, even though he once more waits a long while to join the fray. While the obvious draw here is his guitarwork, with Momento Vivere and Through the Golden Forest perhaps the highlights there, I got a real kick out of the backdrops that are conjured up for him to do his thing against and this may be the best. Moonflower comes close and Black Widow Silk too, but Child of Bliss is a piece to stand out both for the backdrop that's built for almost a minute before Johnston joins in and for his guitarwork once he does. Technically speaking, he was there before the guitars, because he's also responsible for the keyboards, which includes the tasty piano here that plays with an unusual drum sound.

While I'm a little late to the table after six albums I completely failed to notice, Nick Johnston is a clear talent who doesn't just know how to play the guitar, he also knows how to create interesting pieces of music. Of course, there's plenty of back catalogue for me to seek out should I wish, but I wonder what he sounds like in a band setting. That's possible too, because he's made two albums with Archival, for which he sings as well as plays guitar and piano. He's definitely a name I'll keep an eye out for in the future.

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?

Omnium Gatherum - Slasher (2023)

Country: Finland
Style: Melodic Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 2 Jun 2023
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Slasher is only a four track EP that runs just shy of twenty minutes, but I was intrigued by Omnium Gatherum's 2021 album, Origin, and wanted to see where they took that sound. I liked that album but I didn't love it and a good part of that was that it felt rather transitional. They'd lost a second guitarist and their melodic death metal sound had upped the melodic but lessened the death, a shift that left Jukka Pelkonen's harsh vocals a little adrift. It felt to me that there was a need for clean vocals, either to replace or enhance the harsh, but nobody was delivering them. So I wanted the next album to see where they went. Maybe this EP would suffice.

What it tells me is that I was partially right but partially wrong. Pelkonen continues to sing harsh here but he—I believe, but possibly someone else—also varies his delivery considerably. There are clean vocals here too, most obviously and tellingly in the opener, Slasher, and the harsh vocals are more varied, shifting into a crackling fireplace mindset on Lovelorn that takes the song into goth territory. So far so good for me as some sort of sonic soothsayer, but I hadn't realised quite where the resulting sound was going, a realisation that came when I realised how well the unlikely cover works here.

There are four songs on offer, three of which are originals. All of them betray Omnium Gatherum's roots but fit firmly into their go forward direction, which I'd compared on Origin to Opeth's shift to prog rock. While the shift might be fair, the direction isn't because this isn't remotely prog rock in the slightest, that cover not of a Yes or Genesis track, let alone a deep cut from one of the obscure seventies crate diver discoveries that Mikael Åkerfeldt loves so much. It's of Maniac, the Michael Sembello song from the movie Flashdance. Oh yeah. And it sounds great!

And suddenly I see Omnium Gatherum in a new light. They're still a melodic death metal band but the three songs that aren't covers of disco/synthpop hits could believably be too. They all have an exquisitely perky feel, either entirely or for the most part, built from poppy melodies and hooks, merely heavied up into harsh vocals and crunchy metal guitars. There are bands whose gimmick is to turn pop music into punk or metal as routine, applying heavy filters onto TV theme tunes or pop hits from decades past. Suddenly I'm imagining a disco group whose sole purpose in life is to turn Omnium Gatherum songs into synthpop. I think they'd sound pretty good.

While the cover of Maniac works shockingly well, I'd suggest that Slasher, which isn't a far cry from it lyrically, is the standout track. I wonder if writing that prompted them to cover Maniac or if the act of covering Maniac flavoured everything else, especially Slasher. Sure, it kind of just ends with the mindset that it has nothing left to say, but it rolls and builds well and it has an excellent guitar solo from either band mainstay Markus Vanhala or new fish Nick Cordle, who's been touring with them for a while but officially joined the line-up in 2022.

Maniac follows, with Sacred after that, another song very much in the same vein, with keyboards delivering the melodies so that Aapo Koivisto leads the way just as much as the guitarists or Jukka Pelkonen's voice, perhaps even more. He's the main reason that these songs sound so poppy and perky. And that leaves Lovelorn, which follows in the same sort of vein again but not quite so much. It's the heaviest song here and the most gothic, not only because of how Pelkonen shifts into dark and rumbling mode.

And that's it, because there are only four tracks on offer. I'm still fascinated by the direction that Omnium Gatherum are taking and I'm still eager to check out their next album, but this suggests that we know roughly what it's going to sound like. It sounds good too, even though reading back everything I've written about this EP suggests that it really shouldn't.

Orchestre Celesti - Cornwall! (2024)

Country: Italy
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Jan 2024
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I have no idea why this album is called Cornwall!, so have to assume from the track titles that it's a concept album, even though it's entirely instrumental. Orchestre Celesti is only one man but he's an orchestra here, either playing all sorts of different instruments or approximating them with a bank of synthesisers. He's Federico Fantacone and he's been releasing music under the banner of Orchestre Celesti since 2007. The name refers to the ancient Chinese art of training doves to fly in specific patterns with flutes attached to their legs, thus creating music together. This is the ninth album to carry that name, plus another collaborative effort with Lisa la Rue, and a bunch in a duo with Enzo Vitagliano as the Round Robins.

The goal of the project appears to have been to combine two very different styles of prog rock: the well known British kind that was so popular in the seventies and the Italian kind that was less well known but massively influential. I don't know if that's changed over the years, but I didn't catch a lot of British prog here. Where there's a British sound, as there clearly is on The Song of Western Men, given that it starts out with bagpipes and progresses into harp, it feels more like soundtrack material than anything Yes, Genesis or King Crimson were doing back in the day. Maybe there's a lot more from the Canterbury scene, but I'm no expert there. It's rather like a travel documentary that takes us round the beautiful sights of the British Isles.

What's more, other pieces of music betray different influences. While most of the soundtrack type material leans towards the orchestral style, as the project's name suggests, with the comparisons being to Hollywood names like James Horner or Hans Zimmer, The Ballad of Elisabeth Raby starts out just like something Vangelis might have conjured up. Sure, that takes us back to Europe but to Greece rather than the UK or Italy, and From Pickaxes to Weapons takes us out again, to Japan, in part because of the early strings, which heavily remind of Japanese folk music, but also a rippling brook of a piano, thoroughly rooted in nature.

While I don't hear a lot of British influence, at least this time out, I do hear a lot of Italian prog, a genre I'm still learning about. The opening track, Cornubia, for example, is a perky and jazzy piano piece until it drops into something clearly prog and very much soundtrack influenced, because it's all about mood. Even when the drums pick up a tempo, there are all sorts of instruments showing up in the background, as if to represent different characters. There are similar hints at a voice but it always remains instrumental, just an odd vocalisation here and there. It might occasionally hint at a more German style, but mostly stays Italian.

Even though that track and much of the album continues to seem like the score to a movie that we haven't seen, it's never far away from prog. There are neat changes and technical sections and all sorts of experimental parts in Cornubia and a whole bunch more in From Pickaxes to Weapons, the longest piece here at almost fifteen minutes. That gives it a huge amount of time to build and it's happy to take advantage. Some sections are very quiet, almost experimentally so, but others are built around quirky rhythms on what I presume is some sort of drum machine.

Ancient Dukes and Mythological Heroes may be the most recognisably prog song here, especially once it reaches the two minute mark and launches into gear. What came before and much of what follows is built off solo piano and veers back to mood soundtrack, an approach that's impossible to ignore. The question really boils down to how successful this is as a soundtrack. Do we ache to see the movie, or movies, that this material imagines that it underpins, meaning that it's incomplete without the visuals, or do we enjoy it on its own merit, as many do with soundtracks that work as a musical achievement as much as accompaniment?

I wish I could come up with an answer to that. I certainly enjoyed this on its own merits, sometimes seeing footage from the nonexistent film a piece conjured up in my mind, most obviously The Song of Western Men, but often not. Mostly, I felt that it sounded like a soundtrack but didn't care what it might accompany; it was fine all on its own. And then there were sections, like that early part in Ancient Dukes and Mythological Heroes and the saxophone section midway through Ritual Dance of Mermaids and Seals, that didn't even feel like soundtrack material at all, just prog rock.

I guess that means that I never ached for the movie, so I'd lean much more towards success here. I certainly enjoyed the music, what it does and how I could fall into it. I also liked that it continued to feel fresh, whether on a first listen or a fifth and across quite a few days. Given that it's a highly generous album, running almost eight minutes over an hour, that's quite the accomplishment. I'd probably benefit from hearing more from Fantacone as Orchestra Celesti, but this was impressive as an introduction to his work.

Voivod - Morgöth Tales (2023)

Country: Canada
Style: Progressive Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 21 Jul 2023
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Voivod have been around for four decades now, though my maths suggests that Synchro Anarchy was their fortieth anniversary album last year. However, it's here where they're celebrating, with an unusual project that works rather well. Only two of the eleven songs on offer are new, the title track and a cover version of Public Image Limited's Home, which sounds like a weird choice until it plays and suddenly it seems entirely natural. The rest are re-recordings of old songs, mostly with the current band but twice featuring a guest former member.

Re-recordings are always a dubious concept, but I like the results here because the track selection follows some interesting rules. For a start, there's nothing here newer than 2014, because the two albums in that timeframe featured the current line-up anyway, so there's no point to redux. There is also nothing newer than 2008, when Chewy joined on guitar to replace the late Piggy. There's no more than one track from any prior album, so this is a carefully curated sampler of older material, and it delves as far back as the band's contribution to the Metal Massacre V compilation.

That's Condemned to the Gallows and it's first, because these tracks are presented in chronological order, so allowing us to join them on a journey through their history as it happened, with consistent 21st century production values. It's also a real highlight that I'm not sure I've ever heard before. Metal Massacre V came out the same year as the band's debut, War and Pain, but this wasn't on it. I remember that album being a muddy mess of fascinatingly raw tracks, so I'm sure this is much cleaner than the original, but it still has a real bite to it. It chugs along quickly too, highlighting that punk attitude that they wore overtly during the early days. I like it a lot, but it doesn't sound a lot like what we tend to think of as Voivod.

There's nothing here from War and Pain but Thrashing Rage was on their follow-up, Rrröööaaarrr. It feels like a progression from Condemned to the Gallows, but it's still only partway to what they would become. It's another up tempo song, in your face but a little more controlled. However, it's only starting to adopt that unusual Voivod tone. It's Killing Technology, the title track of the third Voivod album, where that fully arrives, complete with robot voice and patented jagged guitar, all done in a neatly perky fashion. Snake's voice loses some rawness and melody is bulked up, even if it contrasts with that jagged guitar. It's much more science fiction.

For a while it continues in much the same vein. Macrosolutions to Megaproblems, from Dimension Hatröss, is Killing Technology but more so, with weird rhythms. Pre-Ignition is the closest song on this album to its predecessor, which is interesting to me, because I've always felt that Nothingface was a real shift for Voivod. That doesn't show here, at least on this one. It clearly shows on Nuage Fractal, from Angel Rat. Snake's voice gets cleaner than ever and the jagged guitar is polished in an odd way that makes this sound like Voivod are covering U2 and making the song their own.

Fix My Heart is where these songs become new to me. This one's from The Outer Limits in 1993 and it's a bouncy one with an interesting mix of sounds. There's certainly some Voivod in there, but it's not in the pure form. There's some grunge, some alt rock and some stoner rock in there too. It's an understandable shift for the time but I wasn't expecting it and I wasn't expecting it to go away on the very next song, Rise, which is much more old school, even if it's from 1997's Phobos. After that, I wasn't expecting it to come back for the one after, Rebel Robot, but there's definitely grunge in Snake's vocal here.

I should mention that he doesn't sing Rise, because this is where the guests come in. The vocalist on Rise is Eric Forrest, who sang it originally, because bassist Blacky had left in 1991 and original vocalist Snake followed suit in 1994, leaving E-Force to replace them both. He's older school, much rawer even than Snake revisiting the really early material. By 2003's self-titled album, Snake had returned and Jason Newsted had joined on bass, taking the nom de plume of Jasonic. He returns for this version of Rebel Robot too.

And then there are the new songs. Morgöth Tales is clearly a song about the band and its history and raison d être, dropping quite a few nods to earlier track titles. I like this one a lot because it covers a vast amount of territory. I like the serious ramp up in tempo, with a fast buzzsaw guitar. I like the drift into spacy prog rock. I like the back and forth between those two styles. And I like its prominent guitar solo. It looks back a lot but neatly patches everything Voivod into one new track.

Finally, there's Home, that PiL song, which I hadn't heard before but should, given the line-up the original boasted: John Lydon on vocals, the always interesting Steve Vai on guitar and Bill Laswell on bass, plus jazz musician Tony Williams on drums. I can hear some Lydon in the vocals, especially late on, but the song is an unusual trip and it's a stellar choice for a Voivod cover.

And that's it, unfolding in ruthless chronological order. The die hard Voivod fan will know all these songs, but they sound good with a 21st century production job. I must go back to that debut again to see how awful the production really was on it. I'm a Voivod fan but not that hardcore, so I knew half of this, meaning that the other half is new to me. Both halves are fascinating and it's great to hear this journey through their back catalogue in such consistent fashion. I learned a lot. What I'd have to end up with is that my favourite songs here are a couple of the earliest, Condemned to the Gallows and Killing Technology, and the newest pair. That bodes well for the next studio album.

Scanner - The Cosmic Race (2024)

Country: Germany
Style: Heavy/Power Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Jan 2024
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

I remember Scanner from their excellent debut album, Hypertrace, back in 1988. They're another of many German heavy/power metal bands but they're one of the first, because they started out in 1977 as Reinforce, changing to Lions Breed in 1982—who released one album—and eventually Scanner in 1986. However, this is only their seventh studio album, for reasons I can't fully explain. As far as I can tell, they've never actually split up, though they have completely changed the line-up behind founder guitarist Axel Julius more than once.

They just took long breaks, I think, so this arrives no fewer than nine years after The Judgement, which showed up thirteen years after Scantropolis. I haven't heard those two, but this only seems like a strong release to make up for lost time for a few tracks, perhaps until Warriors of the Light three songs in. After that, it's still decent, but it loses the sort of strength it needed to keep fans happy after so many years.

Initially, it's great. The Earth Song doesn't reach Warp 7 speeds, the track which opened up their debut, but it's an agreeably fast one. I actually remember Scanner being faster than they are, on the basis of tracks like that one. In 1988, thrash metal was my go to genre with speed metal right behind it, so I'd have eaten up songs like Warp 7, even if the rest of the album was a tad slower, in more of a power metal style. I'm all for that pace in 2024 too, but The Earth Song has more going for it than just speed. There's also a tasty guitar opening and a neat chanting section late on.

Just like their debut, things slow down after that but I'm more open to that now than I was then. Face the Fight is a real anthem of a song, high energy power metal with a hook-laden chorus that we're singing along with on our first time through. Warriors of the Light follows suit, maybe a tad less effectively because of a weaker midsection, but still very effective indeed. At this point, I was totally sold on this new Scanner, but they can't quite maintain that sort of stellar opening.

I say this new Scanner, because it's another mostly new line-up. Julius is still there, of course, as he has been throughout. Greek vocalist Efthimios Ionannidis is the only other member who's been in the band long enough to have performed on their prior album, having joined in 2003. Bassist Jörn Bettentrup is six years into his run with the band, but this is his first recording with them. Second guitarist Dominik Rothe and drummer Sascha Kurpanek arrived in 2023, presumably as a package deal, given that they've both played for Marauder and Taskforce Toxicator.

I should add that both those bands play thrash so I'd say that this material must feel slow to Rothe and Kurpanek, even with a few fast sections here and there, like the opener to Scanner's Law. It's fair to say that there are a number of points where the latter is the fastest aspect to the band, on that song particularly. Of course, I wish they'd speed up a bit more in general, but they play power metal well. Nothing quite matches Face the Fight in the anthemic chorus department, but a bunch of other tracks do try, Scanner's Law among them.

Others fall a little short for me. Dance of the Dead has its moments, but it doesn't seem to be too sure about what it wants to be. It starts out with a Dio vibe, before finding another big chorus, but there's some grind in between the verses. Each section works, but they don't all work together. A New Horizon kicks off with some lovely guitar, turning an Outlaws-esque riff into a layered power metal setup, but it falls into routine. It's the song I wanted to speed up the most, even if I liked its slower guitar. I liked the folk vibe midway through closer The Last and First in Line but the rest of the song around it isn't quite as enticing.

The most frustrating song is Space Battalion, again one that moves through a number of sections that all work individually but somehow not together. The reason for the frustration is that it kicks off relying on a rather well known riff that's lifted from Megadeth's Symphony of Destruction. It isn't quite the same, and it's a much busier song around that riff, but it's so recognisable that I'm singing along with Dave Mustaine before I realise that he's not there.

If I'm sounding acutely negative here, I don't mean to. I enjoyed this album and it's great to hear something new from Scanner. I remember Hypertrace and enjoyed its follow-up, Terminal Earth in 1989, but I don't believe I've heard the four albums in between that pair and this one. I should, not least because of the variance in line-ups. It seems that at least one of them had a female vocalist. However, it promises much for three neatly different tracks and the rest of the album simply can't live up to that promise.

Greta van Fleet - Starcatcher (2023)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 21 Jul 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Two thoughts struck me quickly the first time I heard this, the third album from the Frankenmuth, Michigan rockers. One is that it's good and consistently so. The other is that it isn't a patch on its predecessor, The Battle of Garden's Gate. Those two thoughts stayed with me through a second, a third and a fourth listen. Everything sounds good, from the opener, Fate of the Faithful, which is a strong way to start, to Farewell for Now, which is just another song rather than a memorable epic that closes everything out. However, not once did this awe me in the way that the previous album often did.

Fate of the Faithful plays up the Led Zeppelin comparison that has hung over the band's shoulders like an albatross, as if they're leaning into it now instead of trying to fight it. Last time out, I heard a lot of Geddy Lee in the vocals of Josh Kiszka and other influences as unusual as world music from Africa. Here, it's mostly Zep, Kiszka reminding of Robert Plant in more ways than just flow. Sacred the Thread opens up how John Bonham would. Meeting the Master opens up how Page would. It's all there in the details of the songs, not just their sweeps.

On The Battle of Garden's Gate, the most overt influence from Zeppelin was in the maturity of the songwriting, something that still leaps out whenever my local classic rock station plays them and I realise all over again how mature they were, trawling in wildly different sounds to use as they put together a serious body of work in a such a short time. Here, most of this has roots in that body of work, building new songs from its sounds.

What that means is that, while every one of these ten songs does sound like Zep, it doesn't follow that Starcatcher sounds like a Zep album. It doesn't, because it's not remotely as diverse. There's a little folk here in some of Josh or Jake's quiet moments and no discernible world music at all. It seems fair to say that every one of these ten songs works with the same sonic template instead of searching for a new one each time and finding it.

That lack of diversity this time may be why all these songs sound good but none of them stand out in the way that Broken Bells, Tears of Rain or The Weight of Dreams did on the previous album, to name just three. I'd call out Sacred the Thread as my favourite track, as the vocal melodies are so effortless and so effective that the entire band falls into a wonderful groove. Fate of the Faithful is up there too but that's probably my entire favourites list right there in two songs.

That doesn't mean that anything sucks. Drop the needle anywhere on this album, whether at the start of a track or just throw me in halfway and I'm going to be listening through the whole thing again a couple of times, enjoying every single track. In other words, this isn't a bad album; it's just not its predecessor and that's a bigger problem than it perhaps should be. It meant that, while I enjoyed another impressive ten tracks from Greta van Fleet, I couldn't quite lose an abiding sense of disappointment.

Is that fair? I don't have a problem with bands effectively borrowing another band's sound if they create good music out of it. I've reviewed a couple of bands here at Apocalypse Later who started out as tribute bands, but evolved to the point where they released new music that naturally took on the flavour of the covers they'd been playing. Of course, Blind Golem's A Dream of Fantasy has Uriah Heep at its heart. Of course, Fragile sound like Yes. I don't believe that Greta van Fleet were ever a Led Zeppelin tribute band, but it's easy to imagine that they were and they evolved to write their own music in that style. That seems fair to me.

But is it fair to be disappointed by an otherwise excellent album just because it doesn't reach the scarily high bar set by its predecessor? I'm in two minds about that. Had I not heard The Battle of Garden's Gate, I'd surely think more of this one. However, it doesn't do a lot of what made the last album so outstanding and that would hold true even if this was the first thing I'd ever heard from Greta van Fleet. So I'll leave it with that thought. It's good stuff. I enjoyed all ten songs and did so just as much on my fourth time through as my first. I'm giving it a highly recommended 8/10. That said, it's also a step backward for this band, a reminder that not everyone can hit the peaks every time out and that maybe they've lost track of why they're such a great band.