Cheap Trick - In Another World (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Pop Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 9 Apr 2021
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I'll be reviewing a few albums over the next few weeks that I never expected to see. This is one of them because I'd assumed Cheap Trick had ceased to be years ago, not through a split or any sort of musical differences but through retirement. They're close to the epitome of the band who show up in rotation on classic rock radio stations and you think to yourself, "I wonder whatever happened to them" as you can't name a single song by them that wasn't recorded well over thirty years ago.

Well, it seems that Cheap Trick have never gone away, maintaining a consistent line-up for almost half a century. Sure, lead vocalist Robin Zander didn't actually show up until 1974, making him the new fish in the same way that Dave Gilmour is the new fish in Pink Floyd. Rick Nielsen and Bun E. Carlos were in place from from moment one in 1973, playing lead guitar and drums respectively, and they never left. Tom Petersson was also the founding bassist, but he did take a break in 1980, so causing the only line-up changes outside Zander replacing Randy Hogan at the mike when I was three.

Now, I should add that while Carlos is still the band's official drummer, that's only for legal reasons, as he's retired and he's the official drummer in the same way that James Patterson is the official author of all those books he farms out to others to write nowadays. Daxx Nielsen, son of Rick, is effectively their drummer and it's him playing drums here, whatever the legal paperwork says.

Wikipedia tells me that they've been recording a lot of albums too. I don't think I've heard anything of theirs since Lap of Luxury in 1988, which was their tenth studio release and their most successful after Dream Police in 1979. However, this is their twentieth, even though it's not particularly likely that I'd want to venture anywhere near it's predecessor, Christmas Christmas, which is exactly what you think it is. Yes, it's Cheap Trick covering all the rock Christmas classics, from Slade and Wizzard to the Kinks and the Ramones and, er, a Saturday Night Live skit co-written by Jimmy Fallon.

The good news is that this doesn't come anywhere near to how bad I expect that album to sound like. The bad news is that this doesn't live up to its beginning. I might disagree with them singing The Summer Looks Good on You because I'm a pasty Englishman living in the boiler room of Hell (Phoenix, AZ), but I like the song. It's a classic Cheap Trick song in that it's bubbly and vibrant and is never far away from a fresh hook but it keeps enough bite in the guitar for it to feel as much like an edgy rocker as the soft pop song it is under that leather jacket.

From there, however, it gets poppier and poppier. Quit Waking Me Up sounds good but it also sounds like it could be the backing for a cereal commercial. You just know that everyone involved in making it wore a big American smile as they did so. Boys & Girls & Rock n Roll is what the Faces would have been if they ditched all the debauchery and wrote theme songs for sitcoms instead. So It Goes starts out like a Harry Nilsson song and gradually morphs into a Beatles cover of a Harry Nilsson song. I don't think I can describe I'll See You Again better than as a lullabye.

And, while I can't write the album off for doing all that, because it's slick and pretty and commercial, I can't necessarily recommend it to Cheap Trick fans who want to rock out as much as they want to hear catchy hooks. Listen to the recent Jason Bieler album instead; he's mastered that Cheap Trick, er, trick of making singalong songs that still kick ass. However, there are moments.

Final Days boasts a decent riff, almost something Ritchie Blackmore might have written when he was in Deep Purple, and the song broods along nicely. Here's Looking at You is a little soft but it still does everything that we expect any Cheap Trick song to do. And Light Up the Fire is exactly what I want in a Cheap Trick album released in 2021. It's catchy as hell but it's also a guitar song, not just when the solo shows up but inherently throughout. It's the third single and I'm wondering if it should have been the first.

In other words, while this isn't close to being their best work and it would look uncomfortable next to Dream Police or At Budokan, it's not that bad an album. There are some real highlights and even the softer material isn't awful. It turns out that Cheap Trick aren't that bad at being the Beatles, or even, on Another World (Reprise), a rebellious David Bowie. I enjoyed it, though I doubt I'll ever come back to it again and, perhaps more importantly, I doubt it'll prompt me to check out any of the other eight non-Christmas albums they've released since I heard them last.

Gynoid - The Hunger Artist Show (2021)

Country: Greece
Style: Sludge Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Apr 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Here's something interesting from Greece. How many times have I said that over the last few years? I should thank Gynoid guitarist/vocalist Sypros Tsalouchidis as much for underlining once more just how vibrant the scene in Greece seems to be at the moment as for sending over his band's debut album for review, but I'm thankful for both. They describe what they do as both noise rock and sludge metal and that seems fair, even if it sometimes seems like the two genres are battling each other for supremacy in the Gynoid sound, albeit never to the death.

The Collar, which is the opening track proper, shows their commitment to metal, with strong riffs that are inspired, almost inevitably, by the Black Sabbath playbook. These musicians can definitely be tight when they want to be, which they are in the metal sections of The Collar and especially in Scissorman, which feels like a garage punk band covering Voivod. It's intricate and tricky and it's very tight except when it doesn't want to be tight at all. Sometimes Gynoid want to be really loose.

This is epitomised in breakdowns that sound like everything might fall apart but never does, because the band always know where they're going next and they're just keeping us on the hook. Usually these points are pause moments in songs when my imagination tells me the mobile musicians are prowling around, stirring up the pit by almost creating one themselves on stage. This works really well, but it's less effective when it's a whole song, like Garbageman (Apeman). In the briefer pauses, we know this is the calm before the storm and, sure enough, that storm promptly arrives all the more effective for the buildup. It never arrives on Garbageman.

The loose aspect is also epitomised in the vocals, which couldn't be any further from *insert favourite Sabbath vocalist here*. They're equal parts Serj Tankian, Jello Biafra and Fred Schneider of the B-52's, with perhaps a side of Blaine from the Accüsed, which boils down to very alternative and very punk. It fascinated me to see how the tight metal aspect found a way to co-exist here with the loose punk one, and I have to say it that way around because the punk side of this band's sound clearly couldn't give a monkey's about the metal side in the slightest. It drives Gynoid wherever the hell it wants, leaving the metal side to figure out ways to support it.

Sometimes they're so loose that the sound goes to very strange places indeed. My Mirror, My Master wraps up the album in a way that sometimes feels like that same garage punk band who was covering Voivod earlier is now taking on Crimson Glory but ending up more in Jandek territory instead, which is not remotely what I expect when I throw on a sludge metal album. I'm not sure if I like this song or not but Gynoid are never conventional or predictable and I know that I like that.

While it wasn't hard for me to identify favourite songs—Scissorman and Mannequin are my highlights with My Pet Worms and The Collar not too far behind—it was a heck of a lot harder to figure out what I liked about them most.

I like the fact that they're a trio, because it makes for a sparse sound with an incredibly obvious bass playing an important role, occasionally taking the lead. Panos Dedis often reminded me of Tony Sales, who was the utterly reliable bassist behind Iggy Pop when that singer was at his most unpredictable. I like the guitars on My Pet Worms a lot but I love the parts where the bass takes the lead. I like when Tsalouchidis riffs. I like the more unusual rhythms that Nikos Dimitriou finds on The Collar. But that's me.

In the end, I think whether you'll like this band or not will come down to whether you like the vocals. I can't say which are Tsalouchidis and which are Dimitriou, but they're wild and they're unrestrained. If you like the idea of sludge metal played by a punk trio with vocals that could go absolutely anywhere at all at the drop of a hat, so keeping you totally on the hop, then Gynoid might be the favourite band you haven't heard of yet.

Cannibal Corpse - Violence Unimagined (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 16 Apr 2021
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Cannibal Corpse have to be the hardest band to review in 2021. I mean, they are what they are and it's pretty much all you need to know. They're called Cannibal Corpse. You can see the cover art above. If you've never heard them before, that's pretty much all you need to know. Their brand of death metal is just as over the top and as uncompromising as their name and their art and they've been doing this for a very long time now, long enough that I believe this is their fourteenth studio album. While they weren't the first and they aren't the best, Cannibal Corpse really are the very definition of American death metal nowadays. Look it up in the OED. It'll have a picture of this album.

For those actually wanting a review from me here, what that means to me is that they play fast, heavy music with technical precision and an attitude of utter non-compromise turned up to eleven. They also do this really well. The musicians are incredibly tight and vocalist George Fischer has exactly the right shade of deep shouty growl for the material, guttural but inherently rhythmic because he never aims for intonation or storytelling. Maybe he raises pitch at the end of a verse for emphasis, but that's it. It isn't meant to be anything more than it advertises. It's music to immerse yourself in and shut out the world, because the world doesn't want to know. This album is a forty-three minute primal scream.

The downside for me is that I moved on from this sort of death metal about forty years ago. It was an extreme twist after thrash metal and I loved my time seeing bands like Autopsy and Obituary live, but that was 1990. It ceased to be extreme for me and I moved on to more inventive music. Now, if I was in a club right now and Cannibal Corpse got on stage, I'd head down the front to police the pit and revel in the raw and primal purge of the experience. But I'd probably buy the support band's album instead of this, because they were more interesting. I've listened to this album three times now and I couldn't tell any of the songs apart. They all do the same thing in much the same way. They do it well, but they also do it over and over again. I might have been listening to the same song for two hours.

My problem is that the last paragraph seems to tell you that I think this sucks and it doesn't. This band is very good at what it does and, if you're into this particular brand of death metal, you're going to be happy to hear this album. It won't disappoint you in the slightest. But remember, while it plays exactly like what it advertises, it's only what it advertises and absolutely nothing else. If you want a subtlety in your death metal, you won't find it here. If you like your death on the progressive side, with variety and unusual and interesting passages of music, this isn't just not it, it will never be it.

I'll happily give this a 7/10. It's impressive technically. It's ruthlessly uncompromising. And somehow it never gets boring, even though it refuses to shift an iota from its formula. It's a good album for what it is. But the only surprise you'll find is me telling you that the band save up quarters as they tour the country so that George Fisher, who goes by Corpsegrinder, can win soft toys out of every claw machine he can find and give them to children's charities. And that's the gospel truth. Respect.

Soulkick - No Turning Back (2021)

Country: Argentina
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Apr 2021
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Many thanks to Pablo Zuccalá, the lead vocalist for Soulkick, for sending me their debut album to look at for review. It underlines something I've been discovering for a few years now, namely that there's a vibrant rock/metal scene in South America nowadays that runs all the way across the genres. This is one more album from one more band from down there that's worth checking out and I'm certain that I haven't even scratched the surface yet.

Soulkick hail from Buenos Aires in Argentina and they play a form of hard rock that occasionally thinks about venturing into heavy metal but never quite does. It reminded me a lot of the British bands that grew up everywhere in the mid eighties after the pioneers of the NWOBHM era had shown that there was a serious audience for rock music. Much of what I hear on this album comes from that particular era of British hard rock: the riffs on songs like No Turning Back and Hands of Time; the melodies on No Shelter and The Walls; and even the Whitesnake-esque bluesy swagger of Dagger.

However, there are newer sounds too and the other one I caught often was nineties alternative rock. It's a dominant aspect on Would, which closes out the album, but there's a grunginess that's obvious in songs like Mirror Eyes and The Circle as well. It's kind of like Elixir got crossed with Pearl Jam with some Sammy Hagar era Van Halen added to the mix too. What they don't sound like, at all, are any of the other bands that the musicians play for, like Therion and the Eric Martin Band, two very different outfits indeed that are just are different from Soulkick.

Guitarist Christian Vidal has been with Therion since 2010 and there's absolutely nothing here of that band's sound. The rhythm section of Charlie Giardiana and Pablo Garrocho both play with Eric Martin, or have done (I'm not seeing a current line-up) and, while there's a little of that sound here, it's only a little. This band definitely chose to go their own way, perhaps to play with a style that they're not used to playing otherwise.

Everyone in the band is good at what they do and everyone in the band gets the opportunity to shine, even though nobody feels the need to show off. They're all aided by the mix, which is excellent. I could hear Giardina's bass throughout, without it ever becoming bass heavy. Sure, it helps that there's only one guitarist in the band so, while Vidal is soloing, that's obviously Giardina keeping the riffs alive in the background, but a song like Would is almost a showcase for the bass, as well as a showcase for the unusual rhythms of Garrocho. This one really gets under the skin.

I'm not sure I could tell you my favourite song. Initially it was the riffier ones, no question. No Turning Back barrels along joyously, while When the Lights are Gone does much the same thing about half the speed. Hands of Time deepens the riffing very effectively, but hands off to Zuccalá who finds a way to both sound urgent and soar at the same time, which is a neat trick. I love the way he sustains melody across a tempo shift forty seconds in. That was when I stopped paying attention to the guitars quite as much. There's a lot more here than that and it's not just what's in Would.

This is obviously a good album from the outset but it's one that gets better with repeat listens, as we discover what else the band are doing beyond what we thought they were doing to start with. All that may be missing, I think, is the killer single. No Turning Back tries to be that and does a pretty good job at it too, but the overall effect definitely trumps any individual song. What that means is, while I may not be waking up with any of these songs playing in my head tomorrow morning, I know I'd love to see this band live and I want to hear a second album in a year or two to see how they develop.

Greta van Fleet - The Battle at Garden's Gate (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 16 Apr 2021
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Yeah, yeah, Led Zeppelin, derivative, ripoff, moan, moan. That's what you're looking for from a Greta van Fleet review, right? Well, with the acknowledgement that there's definitely a lot of Led Zeppelin in their sound across all four band members, I'll ignore all that because this is an outstanding album and, amazingly, still only their second. The greatest aspect they've taken from Zeppelin to my way of thinking isn't their sound, but their ability to hit the ground running more mature and accomplished than any band truly has any right to be at this point in their career.

To be fair, Led Zeppelin isn't the band I heard first here, though it was certainly the band I heard last, because the nine minute epic closer, The Weight of Dreams, is as close to a hard rock song to sit in the company of Kashmir, Ramble On or No Quarter as I've heard in a long time, especially during its last four minutes. For a while, I heard a good deal more Rush than Zep, because of Josh Kiszka's vocal style. He's pitched right up there with Geddy Lee and Burke Shelley and, while he doesn't usually deliver in the same way, he doesn't always deliver in Robert Plant's way either. That said, there are certainly moments where he borrows from each.

The first Zeppelin moment I couldn't ignore was during Broken Bells, which is three songs in and is the first overt highlight. It runs shy of six minutes, so it's not an epic in the truest sense, but it surely feels like one from its very first note. It builds nicely, Kiszka finding quite the snarl as he adds emphasis and the style evolving, from Budgie into Pink Floyd around the halfway mark and eventually Led Zeppelin for the last couple of minutes. Josh Kiszka's twin brother Jake on guitar channels Jimmy Page here in no uncertain terms, but it's magical to hear. It's just as magical to hear the band behind him help that build throughout his solo and then ease into a natural wrap up.

Everything here is excellent but there are songs like Broken Bells that stand out from the crowd. It's a generous album at over an hour, but I wonder if it would have benefitted by a judicial cropping of a few of the lesser songs to be shifted out to be B sides for fans to track down. For instance, Heat Above and My Way, Soon aren't bad songs at all to kick off the album but Broken Bells instantly wipes them from memory. I've listened through in entirety a few times now and I just can't remember what they sound like, because my brain is all about Broken Bells. Built by Nations, on the other hand, works as a bridge to Age of Machine, the second overt highlight, so ought to stay.

Age of Machine is an odd song. It leaps out for attention from moment one but, even at seven minutes, it doesn't feel as epic as Broken Bells. It often feels to me like an extended 12" single version of a shorter song, a song with roots not in the blues that built rock music but world music. I'm still trying to figure out why but I'll persevere. It's deep in the vibe of the song but there's African music in the way this one moves. That continues into Tears of Rain, where I couldn't help but feel that they could perform it with a very different singer like Gigi Shibabaw and her Ethiopian band with very different instrumentation.

I wonder if some of this is due to Josh Kiszka's vocal approach, because he doesn't just sing, but snarls and coos and soars in turn, a song like Stardust Chords highlighting all these and more, because there is a vocal break like a yodel throughout too. Sure, there are points where he commands like Jagger or Joe Cocker, as if the audience is utterly in the palm of his hands, but he vocalises on this one far more than he actually sings and that's just not a rock approach. This may be my favourite song and for that reason, even if Broken Bells and The Weight of Dreams are deeper and more accomplished.

And talking of that closer, there are a lot more songs for you to discover and explore here, because it really is a deep album that will reward anyone leaving it on repeat or even shuffle. However, it's sure that it's always going to come back to The Weight of Dreams, which is the epic any album of this sheer quality frankly demands. I remember last time all these Led Zeppelin ripoff moans found themselves hauled out, but I don't remember Kingdom Come recording anything this epic. I should go back to see.

Paysage d'Hiver - Geister (2021)

Country: Switzerland
Style: Black Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 23 Apr 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

I'm not sure I've ever heard an album that sounds so much like its cover image. Paysage d'Hiver are a Swiss band who play black metal in a raw and uncompromising fashion, even for black metal, which is a notoriously raw and uncompromising genre. Actually, they're not really a band, because there's only a single member, who goes by Wintherr, perhaps to underline how Paysage d'Hiver translates from the French to "winter landscape". The winter landscape I hear here is blizzard.

It's the vocals that really make this unique. The music behind them is relatively traditional, even with drums that slow down more often than I expected. It's wall of sound stuff and it's underproduced, as it has little of the crunch most modern metal has. It's a very thin sound, but one that howls like the wind even before the vocals layer on top like added bite. This icestorm of an album would be felt through an Icelandic parka but these vocals would strip you the skin right off your bones.

They really are outrageous vocals and, quite frankly, they're going to be the primary reason why this is either going to be something for you or not. Black metal diehards often look for the bleakest sound in the most abysmal production. This is certainly bleak and thinly produced but I don't think I've heard a shriek quite like this one before. I often had to concentrate to see if what I was hearing came from the throat of a human being or whether it was just some sort of bizarre feedback at the top end that had my speakers in a tizzy.

This is clearly not just noise, because the musical backdrop chugs along like a Hawkwind album playing in the background but the focal point is always the hurricane that's raging around it. Maybe there's a little more deep crunch to Undä. Likely Äschä is the fastest song. Certainly Geischtr is an ambient haven at the end of whatever journey took us through this hellish storm. But, with that sole exception wrapping up the album, there's precious little variety to be found.

I have to admire Wintherr's dedication to his art, because he's found a sound that feels extreme to me even in 2021, which really doesn't happen often. During the ambient sections, which I'm not convinced aren't the same ambient section kicking off every song, he sounds like an angry dalek. As the ferocity of any one of the eleven squalls which comprise this album kicks in, he sounds like a human wind chill factor. I wonder how he keeps his throat healthy. I also wonder if he records his shrieks in one system, plays them through another at the opposite end of a field and re-records them in a third using a very sensitive microphone, finally amplifying the results to match the music.

I really can't pick highlights because everything is so utterly consistent. This is less like an album with eleven tracks and more like one song that's merely broken up into eleven sections, with ambient bits here and there to break it all up. If you like one, you'll like the album, because it somehow never gets samey, even though it sounds pretty much the same throughout. It's almost like a ritual performance, lulling us into a hypnotic state and doing something to our brain in the meantime. But if you don't like one, there's really no point continuing. It's surely one of the most polarising albums I've ever heard.

At least it can't be accused of false advertising. It sounds like its cover image.

Agent Steel - No Other Godz Before Me (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Speed Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 19 Mar 2021
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I have to say that I've been looking forward to this album possibly more than any other this year. I was absolutely blown away by the debut Agent Steel album, Skeptics Apocalypse, in 1985 and I've never let it drift too far from my playlist ever since. They were a speed metal band based in Los Angeles and the album was blisteringly fast with no end of glorious riffs and the unusually high vocals of John Cyriis, a man who may have been batshit insane, given everything I've read about him and what he wrote in his lyrics, which are all about alien conspiracy theories, but was undeniably talented. His first album with Agent Steel in thirty-four years is something I want to hear! So what's it like?

Half of me loves it, though it's not Skeptics Apocalypse or even Unstoppable Force. The band are tight and forty minutes of their speed metal is glorious. Nikolay Atanasov and Vinicius Carvalho provide a glorious twin guitar assault and the rhythm section is solid as a rock, even if Rasmus Kjær galloping along like there's no tomorrow is a lot more obvious than Shuichi Oni, who's a bit low in the mix, though he does get some moments on Outer Space Connection. The riffs are great. The solos are great. The urgency of the drumming is great. This is why I love speed metal so much.

The other half of me realises that there are some major problems here and Cyriis is most of them. His voice has always been high but he used to sing at a lower pitch and go up when needed. His screams on songs like 144,000 Gone or Bleed for the Godz are legendary and they still sound amazing today, but he spends most of this album in the stratosphere, leading us to wonder if he's actually singing on helium. What's more, there are so many points where he adds more flourishes behind his voice, so effectively duetting with himself, that he ends up all over this album like a rash and with much the same effect.

So how do I quantify this? This could have been great stuff and it still is in many ways, but it needed to have John Cyriis singing on it. And I mean the John Cyriis from 1985 not this Stepford Wife pod person John Cyriis from 2021. This John Cyriis is too much and too often. Quite honestly, he spoils much of this album and he does it quickly enough that I got tired of him even during my first listen. That feels odd to admit, given that it's Cyriis's presence here that makes this Agent Steel and it's his return I was so looking forward to. Now I find myself hoping for an instrumental version.

The musicians joined up over a couple of years, after Cyriis put the band back together in 2018, and I'd be remiss in pointing out that they're from all over the globe. Guitarist Nikolay Atsanov is Bulgarian, though he lives in Denmark, where he also plays with Prophecy. He duels with Vinicius Carvalho, who's Brazilian and also has other bands down there, like A Red Nightmare. Bassist Shuichi Ono is Japanese, though he performed in a Dutch band called Stellar Seed with one Max A. Havlock, who turns out to be John Cyriis, who I believe is actually Brazilian himself, even if his origins are weirdly obscured; we still can't be sure of his real name. That leaves Rasmus Kjær on drums, who's from Denmark and also plays with Disintegrated. Oddly, that means that this pioneering American band doesn't actually contain a single American any more.

So where am I at? Frankly, I could listen to this just as background music and be happier at the end of a day than when I started it. Songs like Carousel of Vagrant Souls and the title track kick in with so much glorious style and power that I found myself in speed metal heaven. These are the best instrumental intros I've heard since the last Gama Bomb album. However, I'm really disappointed in Cyriis. I think I have to go with an 8/10 for the music but then drop not one but two points for what he does on top of it. That saddens me.

Infinite & Divine - Infinite & Divine (2021)

Country: Sweden
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 9 Apr 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

Infinite & Divine are a duo, with Jan Åkesson playing all the instruments and Tezzi Persson adding her voice, so I can only expect that he's the infinite and she's the divine. It makes sense, of course, for the obvious reasons, but it's 2021 and I don't want to assume. Maybe their name refers to the versatility of Persson's voice and the crystal clean sound of Åkesson's guitar. Who knows. I can certainly read it a number of ways, all of which work.

This is their first album together, though Åkesson leads his own band, Jan Åkesson's Shadow Rain and has performed in a number of others, most obviously the melodic heavy metal band StoneLake. What leaps out to me from his career is that some of his bands have pages on Metal Archives but others do not. This one does and I have no argument with that, especially given how metallic his guitar tends to sound, but it's fundamentally melodic rock that's just a bit heavier than normal. I'd call it hard rock as often as I'd call it heavy metal.

For a reference point, the second song, that's named for the band, plays very much to me like an early Bon Jovi song. It's smooth and commercial and radio friendly, but it still has a little edge, like Åkesson had done a stint in Ozzy Osbourne's solo band somewhere between Randy Rhoads and Jake E. Lee. It's inherently focused on the melodic too, without any real metal crunch but with many squealing guitar moments to heavy it up a bit and many keyboard moments to lighten it back up again. Not Too Late is a great example of both, starting out with a riff that's rare here in how overt it is but then adding an all-encompassing layer of keyboards over it.

The result is classy and elegant. Even if it seems like it's constantly walking the line between the twin genres of hard rock and heavy metal, it's very comfortable where it is and I like this balance, any song going in a melodic pop direction one moment and then returning to a metal guitar solo the next. The reason it works so well, I think, is Persson's vocal, which effortlessly moves through whatever might be needed by any particular song. She can sing pop in a Bangles style, shift up to the female fronted soft rock norm in a heartbeat, shift up again to go full hard rock and finally hit top gear with powerful belt like she's an eighties metal queen. She does all that in Wasteland in a couple of lines.

My favourite song here may be We are One, which gets a little poppy at points, even including a sung/spoken duet in the Pat Benatar style, but it never becomes a ballad. That's the one song where I think everything Infinite & Divine does comes together most naturally and effectively, but there are a host of other easy standouts. Persson turns up the sass dial on Keep On Moving, gets all emotional on Off the End of the World and plays sultry on I Feel Alive. Åkesson slides in decent guitar solos all over the place. None of these songs lets the album down.

If there's a flaw, it's that, while Persson is doing one thing and Åkesson at least five, it often seems as if he's there to support her and that seems contrary. He's most obvious here as a guitarist, a role he's more than able to fill. He's also obvious as a keyboardist, especially on the softer numbers (which are not particularly soft, just softer). He also played bass, sang backing vocals and programmed the drum tracks too, so he's a busy man here who shines in each of those tasks, unsurprisingly given that it's he who's the member of the band with most experience. However, Persson is so naturally comfortable in her voice and the versatility of that voice that she dominates without ever trying to. She's definitely a name to follow.

In the meantime, here's a classy beginning to her recording career that's effortlessly good. If you're into European melodic rock, this is another must buy for 2021.