Stan Bush - Dare to Dream (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Nov 2020
Sites: Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Stan Bush is so close to the quintessence of AOR that it's impossible to separate the two. In fact, he's managed to take it to whole new markets and promptly own them. Can you name anyone else who has won a daytime Emmy and also been inducted into the Transformers Hall of Fame? If you can find one, which I seriously doubt, have they appeared on a Winnie the Pooh collection, given voice to a pair of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies and recorded an iconic number for Sailor Moon? Stan Bush has done all of these things and provided the backing music for a scary number of commercials too.

As you might imagine, that means that he often walks a fine line between melodic rock earworms full of so much emotion that they'll melt your girlfriend's heart and overly generic songs that are almost parodies of the genre. This album starts with one of each. Born to Fight wasn't featured on Kickboxer or Bloodsport, because those were other Stan Bush songs, but this could easily feature on almost any other film starring the Muscles from Brussels. I can hear the slow motion roundhouse kicks. But then Dare to Dream, as catchy as that riff is, is almost like what an AI would create for a Coke advert, it's so immaculately done but without a single ounce of originality.

However jaded we might be and however unwilling we might be to admit it to our girlfriends, Born to Fight is a catchy damn tune and we might find ourselves hearing it quite a lot because it's backing the latest Netflix campaign to promote a couple of of their anime fighting shows. A Dream of Love is fine stuff, again all the words you know you're going to hear in an AOR song just shuffled into a different order, but shuffled really well and with an excellent melody behind them.

If it wasn't for the modern production values obvious on this album, I could believe that The 80's was written in the frickin' eighties. How this one escapes being a parody, I don't know, given that it's like Def Leppard trying to write a John Parr anthem, but it turns out to be another good song. Now, Live and Breathe has a tougher time, being an emotional ballad. I think it works and it's testament to how good Stan Bush is that I'm not automatically hating this one. A singer with less talent and less overt sincerity singing this would fail horribly, but Bush somehow makes it work.

I wish I had the lyrics to this album, just to throw them into some sort of algorithm and figure out if there are actually more than a couple of dozen across the eleven tracks on offer. The album is entitled Dare to Dream, as is the title track. There are two other songs featuring Dream in their titles (A Dream of Love and Dream Big) and many of the others cover exactly the same territory, such as True Believer and Never Give Up. The word "dream" certainly appears in other songs too, like Live and Breathe.

It would seem that there are only ever three items on Stan Bush's daily to do list: loving, fighting and dreaming. I'm not sure what order they should be in and how much crossover there is between hem, but I think that the only other idea here is the eighties and it's clear even that's only because it was the time when he was loving, fighting and dreaming most effectively. Oh OK, there's also Home, which is the final track, as if hinting that maybe there'll be something else on the next album. Spoiler: there won't be; it'll be about loving, fighting and dreaming, but perhaps in a different order. Just check out the last album, Change the World, with numbers like Born to Win, Never Surrender, The Story of Love, Dare and Live Your Dream.

I joke because it's just too easy to do that. I've reviewed a few albums this year that were emphatically and unashamedly rooted in the clichés that pervaded the eighties. Raven spring quickly to mind. The music was fantastic, but it was often cheesy as all get out and we really have collectively moved on in so many ways. However, this is surely the most unapologetic eighties nostalgia I think I've ever heard. I could swear blind I've heard True Believer on an eighties action flick, except Bush just wrote it. Bush even has the exact right proportion of killer voice and hint of breathiness, as if he'd just fought in the Kumite before stepping up to the mike.

By sheer coincidence, I'm working through a bunch of rips of Into the Music to detail their playlists. This was the soft rock show that Tommy Vance of The Friday Rock Show fame presented for a year from 1984 to 1985. I mention it because, had Stan Bush issued this album in 1985, Tommy would have been all over it like a rash and it would be on every Into the Music I listen to.

And, if you're into that sort of melodic rock, this could be the best album you've ever heard. Every one of these songs could have been a single in 1984 and they'd all have done well on the charts. If not, you're going to hate it. With a passion. I kinda sorta want to be the latter but, in the end, I found that I couldn't resist. Now, I'm going to play it again. Dare to dream, folks.

The Dead Sea - The Ceremony of Marrying a Mummy (2020)

Country: Jordan
Style: Melodic Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Jul 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

Seeking out rock and metal from unexpected countries has yielded many rewards for me, but one key one last year was a one man melodic doom/death metal project from Jordan that goes by the name of the Dead Sea. That man is a busy musician named Azmo Lozmodial and I adored his debut as the Dead Sea, Hypernatremia. I've been eagerly awaiting a second album, but somehow failed to notice that he released one in July called The Ceremony of Marrying a Mummy.

It's another concept album, this time exploring the bizarre case of Carl Tanzler, a radiology technician in Key West who was obsessed by one of his patients, Elena Milagro de Hoyos. Believing her to be the true love shown to him in childhood visions by an ancestor, he pursued her as well as treated her, but, as far as we know, she never reciprocated his love. After she died of tuberculosis in 1933, whilst under his care, he stole her body from its mausoleum and lived with it for seven years, keeping it in his bed. He was caught in 1940 dancing with it in front of an open window.

While the case against him was dropped because of a statute of limitations, he was generally seen as a hopeless and eccentric romantic, but the details are creepy indeed. The corpse rotted, so he preserved it by attaching its bones together with piano wire, replacing its decomposing skin with silk cloth he'd soaked in wax and plaster of paris and filling its chest cavity with rags to maintain its form. Of course, he also used perfume, disinfectant and preserving agents to limit decomposition and mask the smell.

It's a wild story, ripe material indeed for a concept album, albeit a bit more straightforward in nature than the more vague concept that spawned Hypernatremia.

And, like Hypernatremia, this album is an immersive experience that I let wash over me for a couple of listens before being able to focus in on everything it does. The melancholy just drips off the opening track from its quiet outset and it continues to drip when the crunch kicks in. Lozmodial sings cleanly, narrates and then sings harshly. There are a lot of dynamics in play on a Dead Sea album, and this one also features guest female vocals, though not yet. For now, it's Lozmodial and the stylistic alternation works really well to represent the romantic vs. creepy angle, as well as to dramatise it.

This album didn't grab me as strongly as the prior one, but it's good stuff, even if the lyrics are often clumsy. To be fair, the rhyming couplets on A Ring for Decomposed Finger are cheesy but appropriate, given the context. "Your fingers look darker now / but to keep them safe I forever vow" is awkward in the extreme but it's the exactly sort of thing a German scientist in the Victorian era might write to an unrequited love he believed was sent to him by destiny.

A few other songs follow in the same vein, leaving us half melting hearts at how lost in love Tanzler is and half rolling eyes at how awful his poetry is on the subject. "Like a rose, you withered and passed away / Despite all the wishes, the dreams and the prays" is worthy of William McGonagall. There are a few ponderings on sanity here, but an abundance of musing on what might have been and how death can't stop that. While some of this is a theatrical take on concept, mostly it's just a consistent theme.

And much of the success here, beyond the general atmospheric texture, ties to the story. The more we learn about Tanzler, the more it all seems to work. For instance, Tanzler was an organist so the use of an organ on the opener, Dancing with Armless Carcass, which recounts the point at which Tanzler was caught, is especially creepy/romantic. I don't think it follows reality particularly strictly, as Tanzler is not known to have actually attempted to marry his beloved corpse, but it does fit his dreamy musing on a future unaffected by death.

Interestingly, it's all male vocals for the first half of the album, the first five tracks detailing Tanzler preparing the corpse for marriage and getting to the point of "With this ring I thee wed". And, that done, the second half kicks off with a female voice for the first time, the patient soprano of New York opera singer Julia Radosz echoing in space. The feel is very different here, with the presence of violin and serious amounts of echo on Orchestral Burial.

Most of my favourite tracks are on the second half too. I love the combination of organ, violin and a gothic vocal approach on My Withered Admirer and the aching slowness and crushing weight of it all. It's not quite funeral doom pace but it gets close, certainly as close as this album gets. I love the riffs on The Scent of Decayed Face and especially Saline Whispers too. This latter also features guest vocals from Greek singer Katherine Hofmann in duet with Lozmodial, albeit not many of them.

I liked this album a lot. I think it plays with its theme better than Hypernatremia, but doesn't end up as memorable musically. Still, it's recommended and I'll try to do a much better job of looking out for the next Dead Sea album.

Antichrisis - Foxfire (2020)

Country: Germany
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 25 Sep 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Metal Archives | Official Website

I remember Antichrisis, not from the eighties for a change, as they weren't formed until 1995 but from the turn of the millenium. I came in on their second album, A Legacy of Love in 1998, and particularly enjoyed the third, Perfume, in 2001. I used Hole in My Head in a mixtape. Remember them?

Well, Antichrisis were a band back then, even if Moonshadow was clearly in charge. Nowadays they're a duo, Moonshadow renamed to Sid but now contributing all the instrumentation, much of which is electronic, and the male vocals, which take the lead on at least half of the songs here. The other name is Ayuma; Antichrisis used to change the female lead up on every album, but here, if I'm not mistaken, she becomes the first to return for a second, eight years after her first, Not Fade Away in 2012.

Like Not Fade Away, this is a very generous album, with fifteen songs racking up almost 72 minutes, a whisker under the 73 that the prior album ran. The quality is pretty consistent and I wouldn't call any of them filler, though the album as a whole wouldn't have been hurt had a couple been shifted out to become B sides.

After an atmospheric intro, they start very well indeed, with Romeo one of the album's highlights; it's a good old fashioned gothic rock song with a catchy chorus. This album is very much looking back in time, to the early days of goth in the early eighties, when pop music, especially in the UK, got interesting for quite a while and entire genres were born apparently out of whole cloth. There were points here that reminded me of artists and bands as varied as Kate Bush, Beltane Fire and Mike Oldfield.

About the only influence I felt from earlier is David Bowie, and I mean early pre-glam Bowie. It wasn't just the title of Gravity on Mars that brought him to mind. Outside of that one, it's all early eighties and not a lot of bringing anything up to date. It feels like a nostalgic album. Sid has called it a review of his life thus far but, if that's what it is, it's a rather focused slice of that life.

For a while, vocal duties alternate. Sid sings Romeo, but Ayuma sings Gravity on Mars, a dreamy pop song with prominent fiddle and a vocal that floats around my speakers. Sid is back for Last Night, an old school goth song with a perky beat. Then it's Ayuma, with some really inventive, characterful vocals, on No Going Back, the most overtly Kate Bush influenced song. However, after the baton passes back to Sid for a keyboard heavy Is Anybody There?, he keeps it for a while and the album settles down.

I think that first clump of half a dozen tracks are the strongest here, but there's still interesting stuff to be found in the next four. After the War is beat-heavy, presumably deliberately aiming for the army on the march feel; so is St. Materiana, which is more alternative than goth, reminding me rather a lot of Beltane Fire, and Close Hauled, easily the longest song on the album at eight minutes on the dot, plays with that martial beat again at points.

She Lay Waiting is underwhelming at this point on the album, but it sounds good enough and it may well be one of those sleepers that turns out to be a future favourite when the catchier material fades. I was less impressed with Forever and a Day, with some clumsy scansion with the title. My OCD reacts heavily to things like that. The Night is Still Young is decent too, like an alternative single from the early eighties by a band who came out of nowhere, made us notice them, and promptly split up.

Et in Arcadia Ego is the late highlight for me, with another inventive Ayuma vocal. I do like this band a little more when she's singing. Sid sounds good, but he also sounds like a lot of other singers and I don't get that much with Ayuma. She sounds like Ayuma and this song, along with No Going Back and Gravity on Mars, are easily my favourites here, along with Sid's Romeo.

The album ends with yet another return to Goodbye to Jane, not a Slade cover but a new version of a song from their debut album, Cantara Anachoreta, that's shown up elsewhere too. Sid comes back to it a lot. He does so here because there's a new sequel song, Jane's Redemption. This is tough stuff, about a child escaping sexual abuse through suicide, but the sequel tempers it a little by making the ending a bit more about escape and a bit less about suicide. We leave it a bit happier than we used to.

I'm happy I got to hear another Antichrisis album and this tells me that I really should check out Not Fade Away, which I haven't heard. Sid says that the style will change for the next album, whenever that shows up, so I'm intrigued about that too. In the meantime, Ayuma has a solo album from 2018 that I plan to find too, called Unorthodox.

Gama Bomb - Sea Savage (2020)

Country: Ireland
Style: Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 4 Dec 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I like Gama Bomb. They play fast and energetic thrash, with a strong speed metal influence and more than a nod to crossover. They're lean and mean, ten of the twelve tracks on offer here wrapping up in under four minutes and half of those under three. They keep new material coming without overdoing it; this is their seventh studio album in fifteen years, which is a decent output. They also ensured this one happened even after long time drummer Paul Caffrey left earlier in the year; the drums here are handled by Vader's James Stewart on a session basis.

I kind of like and kind of don't like how wacky they are. It's great to see a sense of humour in an often overly serious genre. There aren't a heck of a lot of laughs to be found in the current Evildead album, as just one example, but Gama Bomb aren't raging at society, more at just how seriously we might be taking it. As such, they often feel like a thrash version of Alestorm, entirely separate to the ocean-themed title track, and I sometimes find myself wishing that they would take their art more seriously, while enjoying the fact that they don't. First world problems, huh?

At their best, they blister. This album wraps up with Gone Haywire, a two and a half minute blitzkrieg heavily reminiscent of Overkill. It's not up there with Electric Rattlesnake, but it does much the same job in much the same way and it's highly enjoyable. That's one to get a tired pit back into motion! I'm a big fan of this sort of intricacy at this sort of pace and this sort of energy level. Monsterizer got my head really going and I'm listening at work. It may have a weaker chorus but it has better riffs and the guitars just zip along on this one.

At their worst, they still blister but in a vastly sillier fashion. She's Not My Mother, Todd channels the crossover vibe of Nuclear Assault rather nicely, with punky vocals and slower mosh parts, but I found myself getting caught up in the silly lyrics so much that I couldn't pay as much attention to the solid musicianship on offer. And that's fine, but that happens too often here for my tastes. Sure, the band's response to me will be, "What are you going to do about it, Poindexter?" and my answer would be to just play the whole album again, so I know I'm on shaky ground.

I'm also a victim of my own preferences here. I prefer my thrash fast and angry with clean vocals that are mostly intelligible and that's exactly what Gama Bomb provide. Because I'm English, I can figure out most of the words Philly Byrne sings, and I wonder if I'd like them just a little bit more than I do if they suddenly decided to sing in Gaelic, which I don't speak. I'd still enjoy all their speedy riffs and technical changes, which are good at the worst of times and fantastic at the best, but I wouldn't be as distracted when Byrne comes out with a line like, "What shall we do with the drunken sailor?"

As it is, whenever I listen to Gama Bomb, I tend to think less about which my favourite songs are and more about my favourite intros. For all that the songs tend to be short ones, Byrne doesn't leap in at moment one. Even twenty seconds is enough for an intro to really make its impact felt and the thirty used for the title track are magnificent. I think my favourite intro may be Miami Supercops, because it stretches almost to the minute mark and features a number of neat changes. Electric Pentacle's is a gloriously vicious intro, and even a mere five seconds of bass heavy intro on Lords of the Hellfire Club sounds fantastic.

Of course, Gama Bomb are more than one of the best purveyors of quality intros in thrash metal. The twin guitars of Domo Dixon and John Roche may not weave on the level of a Wishbone Ash or an Iron Maiden, but they churn along amazingly well. Roche may be the new fish in the band, with only eight years tenure thus far, but he's a fantastic rhythm guitarist and he's an ultra-reliable force when Dixon launches into a solo. And when the two combine on rhythm, they're unstoppable.

And I need to stop listening to those guitars and eat or I'll be here all week wasting away and Gama Bomb will write a song about it.

Solstice - Sia (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 23 Nov 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | Prog Archives | Wikipedia

I've heard Solstice before, but less from their 1984 debut album, the sole release of their eighties era in the year I discovered rock music, and more from their 1983 Friday Rock Show session, which I found much later. It was a real surprise because they sounded fantastic but not at all like their many peers in the British neoprog movement and I think that goes double on this album. In its very way, this is up there with the Pendragon from earlier in the year, but the two sit at opposite ends of the prog genre.

For those new to the name, they were founded forty years ago this year by guitarist Andy Glass, who's the band's one constant member and driving force. They split up soon after their 1984 album, but got back together in 1991 with a new line-up, only Glass and violinist Marc Elton returning from the old. A decade or so later and with two more albums to their name, they vanished again, reforming again in 2007. While they've stayed together ever since, it seems fair to suggest that this sixth album is really the start of a fourth phase for the band, because of the prominence of Jess Holland as the band's new lead vocalist.

If I'm reading the story correctly, the core of the band has been Glass and fiddler Jenny Newman for a long time now and those two play the folk festivals in a dance band with Holland on bass. When Glass was working on new material, Jess happened to sing over it and the sheer energy that emerged out of this "kind of turned into a Solstice album".

The overall impression I got immediately and constantly was that this is really nice music and I don't mean that as the insult that it might sound like. Even when it's not up tempo, it's always upbeat, with an inherently pleasant sound. Everything is melodious, whether it's simple and stripped down, like Long Gone, or energetic and busy, like Stand Up. Holland's voice is both innocent and ages old and there's an aura surrounding it. Glass's guitar is liquid and sinuous. He doesn't so much play it as just let it flow through him.

In this, they reminded me of early Wishbone Ash. It's kind of like the opposite feeling to urban music: instead of artificially created sounds to emulate the concrete jungle, this feels like it's been channelled through nature herself. When I walk away from this album, I feel refreshed and somehow purer as if a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. It's a feeling that I often get from albums like Wishbone Ash's Argus and Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece.

As for genre, it isn't just the prominent violin that lends this a folky feel. Solstice have always been a folk prog band, taking as much from the British folk movement as from prog rock, as at home on the Cropredy stage as Reading. However, this new Solstice sound doesn't bear quite as easy comparisons as the old one. There's still Jethro Tull and Fairport Convention, but Solstice don't sound like either, just as they don't sound like Genesis or King Crimson, but occasionally show a lineage from both. Some of the more overt and soaring guitar solos, like the one that wraps up both A New Day and the broader album, remind of David Gilmour, again without actually sounding like him.

Sia is the Gaelic word for six, which shows up a lot here. It's the sixth Solstice album and there are six tracks on it, performed by six musicians. Those songs don't quite come in six minute chunks, but it's a close thing. Half of them run six minutes while the ambitious opener, Shout, runs six minutes twice. I have to admire the comfort level the band must feel to open their first album in six years (and only a sixth in forty) with a twelve minute song that's quintessential folk prog even as it prominently incorporates other diverse elements.

Everything seems effortless, however involved and technical it actually gets. And yes, I would include Holland in that because, while this is her debut with the band, it feels like she's been with them for all their four decades and they've never sounded any different to this. Halfway through Shout, the song calms down for a while. Thus far, it's been solos traded between guitar, violin and keyboards over a funky bass line and with Holland channelling millennial pop chants. Then, five minutes in, it relaxes to soothe us with introspective violin and some gloriously layered vocals. Holland isn't just here, she's as integral as Glass's guitar.

Shout is undeniably a highlight of this album but, quite frankly, so is everything else. I expect to find myself coming back to this album a lot and it wouldn't surprise me to find a new favourite track every time I do. For now, it's Shout, the delightfully pastoral Long Gone and the magnificent build of the final track, A New Day. Tomorrow, it might instead be the perky Love is Coming, with the spotlight it shines on Newman's violin, often a duet partner with Holland's voice, or Stand Up with its darker guitar and gorgeous groove, or Seven Dreams, full of hidden secrets and beckoning vocals. Hey you, sings Jess Holland, and we obey.

This has been a fantastic year for prog. This is up there with the Pendragon, Into the Open and Green Carnation albums, if not above them. Add in Glass Hammer and Kansas and new bands to me like Fren, Illutia, Moura and Ghost Toast and it's clear that prog isn't just doing well, it's thriving and it's more versatile and inventive than ever. It's 2020, the year from hell, and somehow life is good.

Squealer - Insanity (2020)

Country: Germany
Style: Heavy/Power Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 4 Dec 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

Squealer may not be a name you recognise, unless you're reading this from Germany, but they've been around since 1984, without ever splitting up, and this is their ninth studio album, so I felt I should be paying attention.

They play heavy metal and it's often fast, but it leans towards power metal flavour more than thrash. The opener, Into the Flames, may be the fastest song on the album, but it's honest about its melodic power leanings. If we had any doubt, Squealer make it crystal clear with Salvation, which is slower and immediately accessible. I've tried and failed to figure out why I struggle with Into Flames, as I enjoy a lot of its parts, but the song itself somehow leaves me dry. Salvation, on the other hand, I liked from its initial bouncy rhythms and even more once the killer chorus hit.

And, as the album ran on, I liked the whole thing more and more, whether it was fast or slow, thrashy or powerfully melodic. There doesn't seem to be much flow between the different types of song. For a while, there's an alternation between slower/more melodic and faster/more urgent, but it's not quite that simple. It's almost like Squealer don't quite know what style they want to play. There are quite a few different bands wanting to emerge here.

On Bad Tasting Sin, they hint at doom metal, but with power metal melodies overlaid. On Insanity, a faster version of the same thing places them as straightforward heavy metal. Salvation is pure power metal but My Journey moves them right into Teutonic thrash. Hunter of Myself kicks off like melodic death metal, though the vocals never go there, remaining clean and Helloweeny, even if an edge does creep in later. There's even a theatrical power ballad to wrap things up, Black Rain, with a pair of guest singers: Bernhard Weiß from Axxis and Zak Stevens from Savatage and Circle II Circle.

I'm all for variety, but this does feel a little schizophrenic. There are points where I feel like I've put a Helloween album on (former Helloween guitarist Roland Grapow only guests on one song), but others where I wonder if I'd actually slipped on a Kreator album by mistake. Then I blink and I'm listening to Rhapsody or Accept or...

This schizophrenia can even manifest within a single song, such as My Journey, surely the fastest song here outside of Into Flames. It ratchets up the pace and energy substantially while toning down all of the grand melodies, so we find ourselves firmly in Kreator territory, but with a power metal chorus on hyperspeed double bass and that seems a little odd. Maybe the clue was in the album title, because at least some of this is Insanity, indeed.

At the end of the day, however unsure Squealer seem about what they want to play, they play it well. I really enjoyed this and think I need to dip into the band's back catalogue to figure out what I've been missing all this time. Rather disparate parts of this album stayed with me overnight and, while I can't quite explain why I like some of this so much, I know that I do. For instance, one of my favourite songs here is Low-Flying Brains, even though it features a stunningly underwhelming chorus. I wondered if Sebastian Werner had got bored with it within the four and a half minutes it runs, but good grief, it's stuck in my head!

All of which makes me think like I haven't got over any idea of what this album sounds like. How can I when I'm not entirely sure myself? But I like it. If something piques your interest here, I'm sure this is on YouTube somewhere. Check it out and see if they grab you too, even if you can't explain why.

Kataklysm - Unconquered (2020)

Country: Canada
Style: Melodic Death Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 25 Sep 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

I haven't heard Kataklysm in a long while, but Montreal's "northern hyperblast" masters have stayed the course and this is a fourteenth studio album for them. It's also the last for Oliver Beaudoin, who lasted longer than most drummers do in this band, having sat behind the kit for six years, with only Max Duhamel having a longer tenure. It seems odd to me that only the drummers change frequently in this band, given that the crazy fast drums are their signature sound. New fish James Payne counts as Kataklysm's eighth drummer.

Beaudoin's drums appear as I remember here: a barrage of blastbeats that would be more expected in black metal than death, often with a much slower accompanying beat. Maurizio Iacono, who switched from bass to vocals back in 1991, sounds as I remember him too. His harsh growls always seemed a bit closer to the to hardcore shouts than most death metal vocalists would allow, but they've apparently moved a little closer still. It's hardly my favourite vocal style, but he does what he does well, with the effect of sounding angry but also being able to intonate and emphasise.

What's really changed from what I remember are the guitars. I know Kataklysm started out playing a purer form of death metal and moved into melodic death, but the guitarwork feels much more trendy like I might expect from metalcore and nu metal. It's tuned down further, so the guitar often sounds like a bass, and often plays the sort of monotone machine gun riffs that tend to leave me dry. It's not everything here, but it's enough that this album mostly moved on past me.

The key word there is mostly. It seems to me that Kataklysm are on a musical path that's going to take them beyond my personal tastes over the next few albums, but they haven't quite got there yet. There are points throughout this album that I enjoyed and they're littered across most of the songs. I never tuned out because there was always something interesting happening, but the flipside of that is that I would be hard pressed to pick a favourite track because all of them feature aspects I don't like.

For instance, the keyboards on Focused to Destroy You are a really nice touch. They're not particularly prominent but they change the song completely, giving it a different feel. The sirenlike guitar late on The Way Back Home did that as well and the piano on both Icarus Falling and, in a very different way, When It's Over. These little touches really affect the overall quality of the album in a positive way. I'm a fan too of the wildly different tempos here. Defiant just blisters along in a thrashy way, while When It's Over slows down immensely, especially early on, with doomier effect, especially with its low piano note for emphasis.

So I liked a lot of what I heard in these songs without necessarily liking the songs themselves, because of the general approach taken. The musical direction the band's taking seems to be inexorably toward a song like Stitches, which often sounds like a nu metal anthem. It's easy to define this album as X and that album as Y, but when a band is moving from W to Z, we critics often need hindsight to define the X albums and the Y albums. I have a feeling that this is going to fall into the next phase of Kataklysm, even though we can't be sure what that will be until it happens.

Allison - They Never Come Back (2020)

Country: Switzerland
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 13 Nov 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website

I love Chris Franklin's Raised on Rock radio show. He has a much narrower focus than I do but he goes deep from his starting point of melodic rock and it's a rare two hour show that doesn't let me in on a secret knockout band that I've never heard of before. Last week, that was Allison, a Swiss six piece who released a couple of albums during the first half of the nineties and then apparently went on hiatus. Their peak seems to have been opening for Thunder, Van Halen and Bon Jovi in Basel in 1995 in front of 55,000 fans.

That suggests that the Swiss rock scene was vibrant back then, so I wonder why it took this long for a band of this obvious quality to either get back together or to get back into the studio. Whatever the reasons, I'm just happy that things fell back into place and three founder members—Janet La Rose on vocals, Jonny Stutz on guitar and Pierce Baltino on bass—put a new line-up together and got a third album in the can. It may be titled They Never Come Back but I'm thankful that they did indeed do just that. Now, let's not go away again.

Chris played the opening track, The River, and I can't fault him on that choice at all, because it's a real stormer and it made me fall immediately in love with Janet La Rose's voice. She sings in English, with a notable accent and an even more notable snarl. Everything that comes out of her mouth is melodic, hard rock in the traditional style bedded in the blues, but even the softest line is delivered with overt power and attitude and we just know that, however emphatic she gets, she has another gear available should she need it. Or two.

What's odd is the way in which she imposes that emphasis. Usually singers just get louder and so steal more focus from the rest of the band. La Rose does some of that, but I don't buy into her coming close to the peak of her power here. Instead, she controls her emphasis through the level of snarl that she's allowing into her mix. Whatever "it" is, she has it in spades. I haven't heard a female rock voice that's got this much under my skin since Lauren Smoken and that was thirty plus years ago. She never opens up fully here and I wish she would, because, my goodness, I bet she can roar! Someone have Allison do a cover of Rock a Bye Baby.

She's always the focal point for me, because it's difficult to listen to anything else when her voice is in motion. However, the band isn't just there behind her, as much as it might seem like that for a while. I think they do see their job as fundamentally one of supporting her voice, and they do that incredibly well, weaving together two guitars, bass, keyboards and drums into a texture to sit behind her, but I'd have liked them to take some moments in the spotlight themselves. There are guitar solos, albeit not particularly long ones and not particularly flash ones. Even when soloing, these folks never lose track of that texture and they don't step outside that, with one notable exception.

That's Hang Tough, because it features a delightful opening that feels like a spotlight in a packed but silent room turned on one of the guitarists, so either Jonny Stutz or Robi Würgler, before it grows to the song proper. It's a more laid back song that screams for a video to be made for it, a western with a lot of slow motion. However, Edge of Golden Days features a loose guitar that's so visual that I bet it's low slung and a prominent mouth harp that takes the song in a particularly jaunty direction.

If that makes Allison sound like they're from Switzerland by way of the American deepsouth, that's an entirely fair assumption. This isn't blues rock but there's always at least a foot in the blues here, with a whole leg at points. The bluesiest the band get is on Blackbird, with a neat slide guitar early on. The sound isn't just blues though, as Can You Hear Me ably highlights. That starts out so much like a Deep Purple song that I was surprised that Dani Feusi's keyboards didn't turn more into Hammond organ.

This is a real steam train of a band. Every song is confined by the particular rails its on but nothing is going to stop it once it's in motion except Janet La Rose shouting, "Stop!" And, when she does that, a little way into Crank It Up, the whole band stops on a frickin' dime. They may not do anything flash in these songs, but Allison are as tight as they come and this album just keeps on growing in my mind. I can't call out a lot of specific highlights, beyond The River, because everything here is quality, but it's the highlight of December for me thus far.

And now, I have two earlier Allison albums to track down. I see that La Rose continued on in a band by the name of Angelheart, with another album there to find too. Thanks, Chris!