Scardust - Strangers (2020)

Country: Israel
Style: Symphonic Progressive Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 30 Oct 2020
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Wow, did this one take me aback! I only got a few songs in and had to start again just to take stock of what I'd just heard. Scardust are an Israeli band who began life in 2013 as Somnia but changed name a couple of years later. They play symphonic progressive metal, but that doesn't remotely cover all that they do.

For instance, this starts out really operatic, with presumably the entire band providing a choral backing for lead vocalist Noa Gruman. Then the music joins, very technically, with violins and crunchy guitars and who knows what else. Remember the beginning of Yes's Roundabout with all its careful interplay between instruments? Well, Overture for the Estranged is kind of like that. For its entire six minutes. There's a spotlight moment for every member of the band both forwards and backwards and a further one later on at length. It's like a demo reel: everything Scardust can do, all wrapped up in one easy to consume bundle. And that's just track one.

Things settle down a bit from there, but not a lot. This is technical stuff all the way through, with all the band members trading solos often, not just guitarist Yadin Moyal and keyboardist Itai Portugaly. The bass of Yanai Avnet blew me away more than once. It's going to take multiple listens of every song to just to fully grasp what these folk are doing. There are plenty of hints at the versatility of Queen, but each song is like Queen squared. Complexity and technical ability clearly matter here and just as much as melody and groove.

Break the Ice, for instance, shifts quickly through Queen harmonies to purest theatrics. This could be a song from a Broadway musical and Gruman's voice would be up to that on its worst day. She's crystal clear but versatile enough to move from kid-friendly Disney saccharine to soaring Phantom operatic and still wrap up with some serious R&B runs. The musical theatre feel is echoed by the fact that the music seems inherently there to support her on this one, with only the solos excepted. This darts and weaves whenever her voice needs it to, but always at her bidding.

The biggest problem Strangers has is that there's just so much here that it's easy to get overwhelmed. A song like Concrete Cages, for instance, is an obvious highlight with its often dominant hurdy gurdy, it's soaring Robert Plant style vocals and a singalong chorus. But there's so much to unpack from this song that it would be viable to write a review this length about that one song alone.

Focusing only on that one would miss out the way that Scardust can shift from Queen to Therion in a single line. It would miss the fact that not all the vocals here are clean, with Gruman going effectively harsh on Over for a while; given that I think everyone contributes backing vocals, I have no idea who does that in harsh fashion in songs like Tantibus II, but's thoroughly effective. It would only skirt the fact that this whole album is wildly theatrical. While Gruman isn't the most accomplished singer in a harsh style that I've ever heard, it's a rare one that gets so much emotional range out of it and I can't name another one that can shift from harsh growls to soaring opera in a heartbeat.

It would also miss the other genres that are trawled in here. The folk music in Concrete Cages is only one sound there, just as metalcore is only one sound in Over and smooth jazz only one sound in that song's flipside, Under. The backing on the latter sounds like an inner city church choir from a random underdog feelgood movie, which would make the segue into rapped vocals natural, except that these rapped vocals are angry and end up verging on hardcore shouts. Oh yeah, this album is versatile. The choir on Huts sounds like a younger one from a high school but it doesn't turn the song cutesy.

At this point, after a couple of listens, I couldn't even hazard a guess at my favourites here. Overture for the Estranged is a gimme and so's Concrete Cages. I might thow out Addicted as a third, but I can easily imagine every song here waxing or waning in my esteem on further listens. There's just so much to discover within them. One key note would be that I especially adore the interaction of instruments when Noa Gruman takes a well deserved break for a while, but she's arguably the most critical piece in this puzzle and she takes the band in so many directions. It's hard to truly comprehend that the voice on Break the Ice and Mist is the same one on Over and Under.

Quite seriously, the most emphatic negative I can hurl out about is that this album will simply be too much for some potential listeners: too much of everything. They'll get lost and give up. Of course, it's fair to say that the most emphatic positive I can hurl out is exactly the same thing, because this is an album that can be explored for a long, long time without finding all its treasure. I may well up this to a 9/10 but I need more listens. And I need more words.

Motorpsycho - The All is One (2020)

Country: Norway
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 28 Aug 2020
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I may not have delved as far into Norwegian prog rock as I'd hoped but I learned enough last year to jump all over a new Motorpsycho album when it shows up. As is often the case, this is a generous one. It's a double album containing thirteen tracks that last almost eighty-five minutes. Its heart is a song called N.O.X., which runs almost three quarters of an hour on its own across five parts, with most of it instrumental.

While we might expect N.O.X. to cover one disc and everything else another, this breaks down quite a bit differently: four tracks before N.O.X. and four after it, with that dominant track broken up across the two discs. It's unfair generalisation, but the opening four seem a lot more experimental and less soft than the closing four. The album closes on Like Chrome, which is rather like Steely Dan on verses and Steely Dan attempting a Bond theme when it heats up.

Now, there's quiet material at the beginning of the album, but it isn't really soft. One of my favourite pieces here is The Same Old Rock (One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy), which is very much like a Peter Gabriel-era Genesis track. It's quiet until it isn't and it isn't until it is again. One minute it's flute and other little decorations, the next the drums and emphasis kick in suddenly and infectiously. There's a lot of impeccable dynamic play in this one.

One thing I really like about this album, and especially that track because of what it does, is how lo-fi the drums sound. The whole album is carefully and expertly produced, but the drums are simply good old fashioned down to earth one man beating the crap out of the kit drums. There's absolutely no aim of overproduction at all and that makes Tomas Järmyr's work here wildly engaging, often a tribal call to action.

I also really like the first four tracks here. They veer in and out of Genesis, King Crimson and whoever else, delivering intricate guitar, delicate melodies and those thumping drums. I'm less fond of the closing four, though they're decent enough. There isn't a poor song here, let alone a bad one, and which will leap out at you may come down to personal taste as much as quality.

The most obvious track, of course, is N.O.X., in between all of the two minute interludes and eight or nine minute complexities. This is a seriously ambitious song and it's the heart of the album. It's a lot more King Crimson and a lot more Genesis, but with some Mike Oldfield too, I think, to add an emulsion of commerciality to something often psychedelic and experimental.

The first part, Circles Around the Sun, Pt. 1, is the wildest this album gets, which of course means that it has the most overt King Crimson influence, especially in the jazzier sections. There's Hawkwind here too, not least in the vocal distortions and the psychedelic flow of things. Where the earlier violin and what occasionally sounds like a brass section come in, I have no idea, but they fit really nicely. This is a trippy nine minute opening section, catching us up in a maelstrom to keep us captive for the rest.

The fourth part, Night of Pan, is the most commercial, at least in its long instrumental sections, but a lot of the second part, Ouroboros (Strange Loop) works in a similar manner. These are hypnotic pieces that never get old however long they run on (the former for fifteen minutes, the latter for eight). The whole album ought to play really nicely on headphones in the dark, but these instrumental stretches of N.O.X. especially with their hypnotic rhythms and swirling decorations. The third part, Ascension, makes me feel like I'm floating, because the more overt pulsing of the earlier parts calms to a soothing level, before building back up for the rest. I'm keen to see how this plays on headphones.

I gave The Crucible, my Motorpsycho review from last year, a 7/10 as a splitting the difference attempt between two songs I adored and one, twice as long, that I didn't care for as much. This is twice as long an album but it's more consistent and I think I have to split between a bunch of 9/10 songs and some 7/10s, with much of the album in between. I'm going to be playing this one a lot.

Voyage in Solitude - Through the Mist with Courage and Sorrow (2020)

Country: Hong Kong
Style: Post-Black Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 18 Sep 2020
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Voyage in Solitude is a post-black metal project from Hong Kong created by one man, Derrick Lin. He's not just responsible for playing every instrument here, but also for the songwriting, the production, everything it seems except the evocative photo on the cover. I'd joke that he probably kept the kettle boiling, made lunch and switched the lights off at night, but then he did record this album at home.

It's Lin's first studio album under the Voyage in Solitude name, though I see a slew of EPs and singles prior to it. There's such a consistency to the material here that I could easily see this becoming quite a prolific project.

As you might expect for anything featuring post- in front of its genre, it's all about soundscapes and these are dark and lonely ones, windswept and barren and bleak. The project's page on Bandcamp says that Lin aims "to express the loneliness, helplessness, frustration of people in the city I am living in". It depicts those emotions effectively and, while I'm imagining rural weather-beaten soundscapes like the cover art, I rather like the idea of using the blastbeats of black metal as a metaphor for the sheer overwhelming feeling of living in one of the densest populated cities on the planet. This isn't merely about being alone, it's about being alone in a crowd.

The more I thought about that concept, the more I started to see how well this might play when laid over the expressionistic chase scenes in Chungking Express with Christopher Doyle's camera blurring magnificently through the busy marketplace. Presumably that's what Lin wants us to imagine: a zoom in from the city level through the chaos and the bustle all the way to a close up of one single person, at which point the world shuts out and we see how alone they truly are, however many thousands are jostling around them like a giant sized demonstration of Brownian motion.

There are seven tracks on offer here, all of them new, I believe, except for Incoming Transition, which was Lin's contribution to a split release called Sounds of Melancholy last year. Each plays in a similar fashion, with one exception that I'll get to, and that's to conjure up a soundscape from slow, majestic keyboards and rapid-fire blastbeats, with calmer sections to serve as contrasts. Incoming Transition is the longest, at almost ten minutes, but I wouldn't say that it does a particularly different job to Veil of Mist, at under four, other than with its application of depth.

When vocals show up, they're appropriately buried in the mix, as if serving as unheard cries for help. They're mostly black metal shrieks, of course, but there are sections that are spoken and at least one that's an ephemeral, almost disembodied voice. That's in Despair, where the effects on it surely tell a story. I'd be interested in knowing what that story is.

And to that exception, which is the album's closer. In Between does many of the same things as earlier songs, but the tone is completely different. It feels hopeful to me, at least, if not outright happy, with bells to underline that. The keyboards aren't concealing here, hiding someone from the world; they're highlighting like a ray of sunshine beaming down into a crowd to pick out a single person. The vocals here are clean, for the most part, and I couldn't help but hear new wave in this song. It sounds like a Joy Division song to me.

Now, that's a statement in itself! When your song that sounds like Joy Division is the happy one, you know that you have a dark tone indeed to your album. Placing that at the end is telling too. It means that, as deep as this gets into isolation, there's hope and this becomes somehow an uplifting album. I didn't expect that going in, especially given the rumbling bass and patient beat that start out Veil of Mist, but I appreciate it. This is good stuff.

Fates Warning - Long Day Good Night (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 6 Nov 2020
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There are a few bands that I've consistently struggled with for reasons other than their quality, Fates Warning being one. I heard them early, courtesy of Tommy Vance and the Friday Rock Show and rather liked their Night on Bröcken album, even if they were a dollar store Iron Maiden knockoff back then. That was 1984, though, and they grew and expanded their sound, becoming major pioneers in the US prog metal scene, along with Queensrÿche and Dream Theater. I don't know when I stopped listening to Fates Warning or why, but they somehow drifted away from me and stayed elusive any time I tried afresh. They've long been really good at what they do, but I haven't managed to connect with that.

This is their lucky thirteenth album, showing up four years after Theories of Flight and with the same line-up. Guitarist Jim Matheos is a founder member and singer Ray Alder has been at their mike since 1987; he's been on every album except the quick first three. Armored Saint's Joey Vera has played bass for them since 1996 and even new fish Bobby Jarzombek has occupied their drum stool for over twelve years. They clearly know each other well and they complement each other's styles impeccably without thinking.

So, can I get into this album when I struggled with earlier ones? Actually, that seemed likely for quite a while, because it opens pretty well for me. The Destination Onward is ambitious but seemingly easy in this band's hands; at eight minutes, it's one of a pair of long songs here, though long is a relative term when you've released an album containing only one fifty plus minute track. This is a good one, a neat sense of dynamic play keeping it vibrant. Shuttered World and Alone We Walk are shorter but I'd say they succeed in similar ways. I especially like the intricate rhythms on the latter, which ends with a real snap.

Unfortunately, while there are other points to praise, there's little consistency and the album is much too long. It clocks in close to the limit of a CD, but ditching three blah songs, and another better one that would seem out of place without them, would leave it close to fifty minutes. The good one is Now Comes the Rain, an easy on the ear melodic rock song with effective backing vocals, and it deserves to be heard. Maybe it might work alongside When Snow Falls, the soft song here that really works, never failing to be interesting when its fellow soft songs are just bland.

How bland? Well, Under the Sun is mildly elegant, with a lonely violin and cello, but its seems to be a lot more inspired by the Eagles than Iron Maiden. It's nice. And inoffensive. The Last Song is nothing more than, well, the last song. The Way Home is the real turkey though, spending half its time as such a soft ballad that it answers the unasked question of which Fates Warning song we'd choose to play at a widowed parent's second wedding.

Fortunately, much of the rest is far from bland. In fact, when Scars kicks in, we realise just how soft it had all got for well over a quarter of an hour. That was quite the shock. Scars has some soft edges too but it's harder and more vibrant and intricate and it also ends snappily. Begin Again and Liar have some punch to them as well and they show that Fates Warning can still play metal. The Longest Shadow of the Day, at eleven and a half minutes appropriately enough also the longest song, rocks out and well too, even if it starts out as jazz fusion for a few minutes. It has an excellent solo in the middle too.

And, after praising The Sunrise for trawling in a whole slew of different genres, I find that I don't like it when Fates Warning do the same thing. It's not that there's jazz fusion there and yacht rock there, it's that there doesn't seem to be any purpose to it. This works when the band are playing prog metal, whether it's with power and emphasis or with intricacy in quieter moments. It doesn't work when they apparently transform into a completely different band for a while.

And so this is maybe half an hour of an excellent album, with another fifteen minutes of a decent one, but half an hour that I just don't get at all. Fates Warning continue to elude me.

The Sunrise - Brand New Disorder (2020)

Country: Italy
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 4 Sep 2020
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I like how the Sunrise want us to figure out what they do. At first listen, Brand New Disorder hints at prog rock, but 432Hz is just an intro and, even if we think we're about to launch into The Dark Side of the Moon, we move instead into Storm, a melodic rock number with guitars that are initially heavier and then more abrasive than we expect for melodic rock. I guess that puts us in alternative territory but, by the time we start to figure out the band's sound, Storm is over. This isn't a long album, at just a blink over half an hour, but that's a pretty quick opener at a mere two and a half minutes.

Gasoline clearly tells us that the Sunrise are from somewhere in the deepsouth, with its southern rock swagger, alt rock punch and Memphis blues organ. Did they move from Tennessee to Jacksonville or the other way around? Well, if I point out that the patient guitarwork in this old school riff-driven rock comes courtesy of Elia Tommaso and the omnipresent bass is played by Giuriato Giulio, we begin to realise that the Sunrise hail from somewhere rather a long way from the deepsouth, namely Venice, Italy.

The standout song on the album is surely Run, which cements their background on the heavier side of rock music in the seventies, however melodic and alternative they often sound. It's a textbook in how to build a song, starting out soft and calm but adding in a second voice to both contrast with and add texture behind that of Chiereghin Giorgia, then ramping up from almost a capella verse to emphatic chorus. What really elevates this one is that, after a couple of rounds, it builds again with Tommaso's guitar taking over behind Giorgia's voice, soloing wildly.

And, because there's so much here, I find myself wanting to talk about every song. Wake Up is vibrant hard rock but with a soul underlay. This could have been an old Deep Purple song, had the band hired a very different lead singer, and there's a recurrent transition here that sounds eerily familiar. Ghosts is the wildest card on the album, at once the poppiest song with its "woah-woah" intro, the proggiest with a bunch of keyboard swirls from Marchesan Andrea and the punkiest with its "1-2-3-4" call and its incessant beat. Instead of Purple, this could have been a Blondie song.

And there, I think is the key. Once I got Blondie into my head, it was clear that they're everywhere on this album. Sure, it's a melodic rock album. Sure, it's a hard rock album at points too. A band like the Heartless Bastards wouldn't be an unfair comparison, with their ability of infusing melody into every song, whether it's lighter or heavier or whatever. But the overall approach feels just like a Blondie album where that band took music from a whole bunch of different places, sometimes highly surprising ones, and merged those styles into a singular vision of who they are, creating something that's consistent but also ever-changing.

I find that a lot of pop albums are deceptively shallow. They sound fine but they end and we move on. Brand New Disorder felt that way on my first listen. It sounded good but it didn't seem likely to be an album I'd play over and over, especially as Giorgia's voice doesn't leap out as anything special. But I'm fond of listening to albums I review at least twice, so I put this on again and it started to grab me. So I listened to it a third time and a fourth and I kept finding new things in it that I hadn't grasped until then. By this point I was well and truly hooked and, yes, Giorgia's voice is a good part of that. It does precisely what it needs to do, even when, like at the end of Run, the song is screaming at it to change and it stubbornly refuses, to glorious effect.

I don't know how many times I've listened to it now, but I do need to move on. I'll end by saying that, even though Run is my favourite song here, Lady Shame has seeped into my bloodstream. Whatever I've got up to over the last week or so, Lady Shame has kept on popping back into my head when I least expect it. It just won't let me be and I'm kind of happy about that.

Messiah - Fracmont (2020)

Country: Switzerland
Style: Thrash/Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 11 Sep 2020
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The latest arrival in the "out of the woodwork" file are Messiah, a Swiss thrash/death metal outfit who were formed as long ago as 1984 but who haven't put out a studio album since 1994. This is their sixth such and I'm happy that they're back.

They take an odd approach to the genre, which is to combine a roughness in tone and vocal style with real elegance in the songwriting and the guitarwork. Sacrosanctus primitivus kicks off the album as a dark but dense layered soundscape worthy of a film soundtrack. Then it's the title track, reminding to no small degree of old school Celtic Frost: cavernous riffs, demonic but often intelligible vocals and a pace that shifts all over the place. Fracmont is almost ten minutes long and it keeps itself busy for the whole time: mid-pace death, fast paced thrash and even a thoughtful multi-layered breakdown during the midsection that suggests that the gap between Venom's At War with Satan and Lord of the Rings is a lot smaller than we might have previously guessed.

The good news is that this epic title track is reason enough to buy this album. You don't need to hear any more from me. The bad news is that it's easily the best track on offer, though the quality doesn't dip particularly far as we move on. What's more, the styles in play develop nicely, making this quite a varied album.

For instance, Morte al dente features almost a groove metal rhythm for a while and features a pair of harsh voices in duet that I dig quite a lot, even though this is definitely one of those extreme albums where I prefer the music to the singing. There are plenty of points where Andy Kaina's voice plays well with the music behind him, grounding all this in demonic realms. If I ever get to drive the Highway to Hell, I'd expect Messiah, fronted by Kaina, to be the one and only station that the radio will tune into, especially playing faster, more emphatic songs like Singularity.

However, whenever proceedings drift into progressive metal and Brögi's guitar explores a much wider swathe of textures, Kaina doesn't prove as versatile. I think it's partly because his guttural voice is so warm and the bass of Patrick Hersche, aka Frugi, plays so well with it. This means that, whichever song is playing, we're paddling along the lake of fire with the band at the other end of the boat. Maybe it's really Brögi that's the odd man out, because sometimes he jams along with them but, at other times, he takes us to all sorts of other places too. He's just not as confined.

And yeah, I'm getting deeper than I need to get. I like the tone and I like the music. I especially like a lot of the riffs, which are inspired by Iron Maiden as much as Venom or Celtic Frost, with a handful of other, more surprising names occasionally showing up too; for instance, Urbi et orbi feels oddly like a combination of Slayer and Suicidal Tendencies! And I really like when choral and other elements enter the fray to mix things up completely.

Fracmont may be the epitome of that, but I dig the album's closer, with its Ave Maria bookends, a lot too. It's Throne of Diabolic Heretics and it does a heck of a lot in six minutes. Sometimes it's right up there with anything else here in speed and vibrancy but, halfway through, it takes a wild left turn and becomes a doom/death song. It took me a while to get used to that, but it's this one that I go back to. It's surely my favourite song here that isn't named for the album and the second half of it is where I'd suggest Kaina's voice fits the most exactly.

Welcome back, folks. Twenty-six years has been too long.

Orianthi - O (2020)

Country: Australia
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Nov 2020
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Australian guitarist Orianthi is back with a new album, this one a solo effort to follow a collaboration with Richie Sambora known as RSO, and I was eager to see how diverse it got. After all, she jammed on stage with Carlos Santana at eighteen and moved on to work in multiple genres, playing the Grammy Awards with Carrie Underwood, performing in Michael Jackson's This is It show and touring with Alice Cooper for a few years. This ought to be interesting!

And that it is. While it's often heavy, with searing solos over solid riffs, and it features soul, funk, pop and other genres on top of a hard rock base, the overriding feeling I got was alternative rock. In fact, I often got a Sheryl Crow vibe, that stripped down melodic rock mindset from her Tuesday Night Music Club days, but often half buried under a few layers of amped up power and digital programming, like Crow jamming with Lenny Kravitz.

If I'm reading this properly, there are only three musicians involved: Orianthi herself, on both guitar and vocals, plus some of the programming, and a couple of brothers called Evan & Marti Frederiksen. The former handles bass and drums, while the latter plays percussion and handles the programming that Orianthi doesn't do herself. You might imagine quite the electronic album from that, but this is definitely rooted in rock, however jazzed up it might get with decoration.

That decoration may make or break this for a lot of people, of course, but the more open minded will get a blast out of this. Contagious is emphatic, with an incessant rhythm assault, Orianthi in a full on Steve Vai mode and even some Dio-era Rainbow vocal changes. It knows how exactly how to groove.

And this album carries on in reasonably similar vein for a while from there, those effects and rhythms changing, the funk or soul creeping in and out and the odd influences shifting up constantly. Sinners Hymn starts to hint at Hendrix before suddenly taking a left turn into pop territory instead, ahead of the crunch kicking back in. Impulsive is a glam rock anthem. Rescue Me is the most overt Sheryl Crow number, but there's R&B in that voice too, powerfully so. It's clear from the far quieter, Adele-esque song, Crawling Out of the Dark, that Orianthi's mad guitar skills apart, her voice could have made her a name in this industry on its own.

It's weird to listen to a song like Rescue Me, realising that, with a wildly different approach, it could have become a dancefloor hit but instead went for a song that mixes up Adele with Eddie Van Halen. It really is a good weird though, even if I could see someone covering this on a talent show because it allows them to showcase their voice but also go wild with emphasis to win over the audience. Sorry is the same sort of song without quite as much oomph. Moonwalker is clearly a homage to Jackson and it has a quirky beat that it's easy to see him dancing to.

I was looking for diversity in genre and I found that, albeit not to the degree that I expected. What I ended up being surprised by was the way in which Orianthi's guitar is used to such broad effect. Even on the poppier songs, she rocks out at some point with a solo because, as confident she is as a singer, she's a guitarist first and foremost. But it gradually became clear to me that many of the effects that I initially thought were programming tricks are her doing interesting things with her guitar. Steve Vai casts a long shadow over this album and I'm almost more impressed by her textures and effects than I am her excellent solos.

And that makes this a deep album that rewards further listens. Frankly, the people who pick this up in expectation of an Alice Cooper album or a Richie Sambora album are likely to put it back down again pretty quickly. It's the people open to something rooted in decades of genres but very contemporary in its approach who will listen again and again and find new things in the music as they do so. This is going to seriously grow.

AC/DC - Power Up (2020)

Country: Australia
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Nov 2020
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We can't just listen to a new AC/DC album and know how good it is. We have to invite it into our lives and spend time with it to determine if we want it to move in and stay or shift on down the block a way in favour of one its many excellent predecessors. That's partly because their sound is so recognisably theirs and partly because they do what they do so well that even their low bar is still easily listenable. Everything's good, so it comes down to just how good. How are these songs going to fit into a live set and to posterity?

And, on my first listen, this sounded really good. I didn't hear any songs that wowed me from moment one the way that Back in Black, Thunderstruck or pretty much any late Bon Scott song the first time I heard them, but quite a few songs thought about approaching that, clearly elevating this album over the last few. And I'm not just talking about the initial single, Shot in the Dark, which is supposed to be immediate, but Through the Mists of Time and Witch's Spell and others. After a few listens, the big one is Through the Mists of Time. It feels timeless and would have played well even on the biggest of AC/DC's albums.

What's most obvious is that there's a real energy here, as if the band are just aching to make the best tribute to the late Malcolm Young, who's posthumously credited as co-writing every one of the dozen songs on offer with brother Angus, as they can. Brian Johnson swaggers and snarls with more vigour than I remember him having in years, Angus has all the urgency I remember from the early days and I still swear blind that AC/DC has the tightest rhythm section in all of rock 'n' roll.

How tight is Demon Fire, for instance? That one is so thoroughly alive that it feels like it tried to leap out of my speakers to dance and strut on my desk. I found myself grinning at just how on the button this band remains. I have to note here, without attempting to be ageist, that the youngest member of the band, Stevie Young, who's Malcolm's nephew and replacement, is 63 years young, but they seem to have the energy of most twenty year olds. It's obvious that Power Up is a pivotal release to them and, looking at the recent histories of each member of the band, it's easy to see why.

The downside is that the second half, as listenable as it is, feels weaker than the first, though it does grow with each time through. Demon Fire is a great way to start side two but Wild Reputation seems like it's so simple and straightforward that it must be filler. After a few repeats, it starts to become an archetypal AC/DC song, one that many bands would give their second guitarists to have written. That feeling continues until Code Red wraps things up, decent songs that feel worse than they are because they're so quintessentially AC/DC and we've heard so many others like them.

That's made all the more obvious by letting the album repeat on a loop. If Code Red is a step up on a four song set, then Realize, starting the album over, is a step up from Code Red and the album is at its peak a few songs later, with a five song streak from Shot in the Dark back to Demon Fire. Even with the second half getting better, the first half remains better still.

In summary, there's absolutely nothing new here but you fully expected that when you saw the AC/DC logo ahead of this review. However, it's clearly a good album, with the band feeling really good again and infusing that into a new set of songs. The first half is easily up there past anything that they've released since The Razor's Edge thirty years ago. When things open up after COVID, this band will be slaying it live. They're as urgent as they've been in forty years.