Little Feat - Sam's Place (2024)

Country: USA
Style: Blues
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 17 May 2024
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The latest in a long string of bands who I had no idea were still together and releasing new music are Little Feat, who were founded back in 1969 in Los Angeles by alumni of Frank Zappa's band like Lowell George. They were talked up often by people whose voices I trusted, like Tommy Vance and Ian Gillan, both of whom played tracks by them on the Friday Rock Show, like Skin It Back and Dixie Chicken, but I could have sworn that they'd gone away before I found rock music in 1984 and they'd done that, splitting up in 1979, shortly before George died. What I missed was that the surviving members reformed in 1987 and they've been together ever since.

Back then, that meant five musicians, but time has whittled them down to three and Sam Clayton takes the mike throughout this album for the first time. The other two are Kenny Gradney on bass and Bill Payne on keyboards. Fred Tackett joined the band at the point of reformation in 1987 and guitarist Scott Sharrard and drummer Tony Leone are recent arrivals. The other reason that I have been blissfully unaware that Little Feat kept on rolling is that they haven't put out a studio album since 2012's Rooster Rag. As that featured songs by Mississippi John Hurt and Willie Dixon, maybe it pointed the way to this being fundamentally a blues album, albeit one that rocks.

Milkman is pure blues with a lovely groove. Clayton's vocals are delightfully characterful and the guitar solo is absolutely gorgeous. However, that's immediately outshone by my favourite track on the album, You'll Be Mine, which simply barrels along with punctuating horns, a lovely slide guitar and another quality guitar solo at the end. Third up is a stalker of a song, Long Distance Call, with a guest vocal appearance by Bonnie Raitt, a sleepy harmonica-driven vibe and old school country guitarwork. That's three different blues styles in three songs and they're all excellent. Little Feat have my attention.

They play with the tempo for a while, up for You'll Be Mine, down for Long Distance Call, up again for the rocking blues Don't Go No Further, down once more for Can't Be Satisfied and down again for Last Night. However, everything that follows goes back to Can't Be Satisfied to work in a more consistent style. There's a real bounce to Can't Be Satisfied that guarantees to make us move. The vocals are sassy, the harmonica follows suit and so does the rest of the album, in Why People Like That and especially Mellow Down Easy, which features two fantastic solos, one on harmonica and the other on guitar.

Nothing tops You'll Be Mine in my book, but Why People Like That comes close. It's a message song with a spectacularly simple message, pointing out that people do bad things and wondering why. The title is a question, even if it's shorn of punctuation, and we can't answer that question by the end of the song any more than Clayton can. Both are lively songs and, while this is studio work all the way through to the bonus track, a live rendition of the Muddy Waters standard Got My Mojo Working, it always has that live feel to it as if the band are just jamming in the studio. That's most obvious on the bouncy songs, of course, but there are two other reasons.

One is that Clayton's voice is gorgeous but deliberately unpolished. He's trying to sound dirty not clean and he manages it. We imagine that he's even older than his seventy-eight years, singing to us from a rocking chair on his porch. It's perfect for this material. The other is the solos, which just keep on coming. None of these songs are long, Last Night a breath shy of five minutes and the rest shorter, down to the sub-three minutes of Don't Go No Further, but they all have solos, often more than one. Everyone seems to get in on that action too, so it's not just the guitars; the harmonica gets a few and so do do the keyboards, Bill Payne especially rocking out on Last Night.

This is a joyous album. It may be that, over time, a slow song like Last Night might seem a little in the way amongst all the lively material, but I'm still loving every single track three times through and I'll be diving straight into a fourth. Now I need to check back to see what else Little Feat have been up to since their 1987 reformation. I see a huge amount of albums, but most of them are live. I'll have to figure out which are studio and see how they changed their sound across that span. But not yet. I'm listening to this again.

By the way, the album's called Sam's Place because it was recorded at Sam Phillips Recording, one of the most legendary studios in Memphis. The songs are mostly standards, even if a few were new to me, with Milkman the only original. You'll Be Mine and Mellow Down Easy are two of three that were written by Willie Dixon, so I should clearly dig deeper into his catalogue than I have thus far. Why People Like That is a Bobby Charles song, a white musician who pioneered swamp pop. I don't know his work well, though I have heard some of his more famous compositions, like See You Later, Alligator and (I Don't Know Why) But I Do.

Enchanted Steel - Might and Magic (2025)

Country: Poland
Style: Symphonic Power Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 2 Jan 2025
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I hadn't heard of Enchanted Steel before, but they're a one man band from Poland, that one man being Arion Galadriel, or Mikołaj Kowalik, as he's known when he does the same thing in one man symphonic black metal band Yog-Sothoth. This is symphonic too but power metal and it's obviously designed to bring colourful fantasy landscapes to mind, just like the cover art, and in just as bright a fashion. Everything's upbeat and comradely, even when the lyrics hint at darkness. This is a clean fantasy world when heroes will always vanquish their foes and the only time it rains is to show the fortitude of those heroes as they struggle through it regardless.

I don't know precisely what Kowalik plays here, other than everything, and I mention that because it feels fundamentally keyboard-driven, even when instruments could be something else. I wonder if he's playing a drumkit or programming a drum machine. I wonder if he's blistering through some sort of DragonForce-esque guitar solo or using a guitar filter on a synthesiser. The only thing that I didn't wonder was about his voice, which is fine in frantic sections but shows its limitations in more mellow parts. That's a real and honest voice, even if it isn't the typical lead singer's voice.

DragonForce are one side of the sound and a frequent one, but it's not the only one. The Flame of Warrior's Might is much slower and softer and more reminiscent of European power metal bands, as well as Manowar, who are apparent in some of the epic vocal structures and also the fact that I can't quite tell how serious Kowalik is. Everything here's played straight, at least until the bizarre bonus track, called No Cock Like Horse Cock, which is clearly not meant to be taken seriously in the slightest, not only because of its lyrics, which are roughly what you might expect from its title, but also because it's a pop punk song wrapping up a symphonic power metal album for no reason that I can fathom.

However, how seriously are we supposed to take Keeper of the Seven Beers, which is ironically over in under three minutes, given how Helloween can sprawl instrumentally, but then it owes more to Alestorm than the German pioneers. And what about Quest for the Battle of Battle, with its lyrics that are so redundant and generic that they veer deep into parody. The chorus, for instance, kicks off with "We're on a quest for the battle of battle, on a quest for the battle of fight", so ridiculous that it could win awards. Kowalik's command of the English language isn't problematic elsewhere, so either these are old lyrics he couldn't be bothered to rewrite or he has his tongue firmly placed within his cheek. Then again, it is another song fuelled by an barrelling Alestorm approach.

What's frustrating is that there's some serious talent in here, both in songwriting structure and in the guitar solos. The latter may not be particularly complex but they're damn fast and they sound highly impressive. It isn't trivial to sound like Herman Li at the best of times, but it's not trivial to shift over to André Olbrich of Blind Guardian on the next track and make it seem natural. Kowalik can clearly play, whether he's actually playing a guitar or mimicking one on a synth. Check out the beginning of The Greatest Warriors and see what you think on that front. My favourite solos show up on Keeper of the Seven Beers and We'll Fight.

I'd like to know more about Kowalik. I googled around and discovered that he's a nineteen year old student who clearly loves metal and wants to make it himself. Right now, he's doing that entirely on his own in an undisclosed part of Poland and throwing it up onto Bandcamp to see how folk will respond to it. I don't think this is entirely successful for a number of reasons, but there's talent on show that I hope finds a better outlet in a real band with other members who can do this on stage as well as in the studio.

It doesn't help that my favourite songs are probably Keeper of the Seven Beers and Quest for the Battle of Battle, even though my brain screams at me that they can't be taken seriously. However, they just rock. They blister along with emphasis and the hooks are powerful. I respond to them on every listen. Quest for the Elven Blade is another song that I find irresistible and, once again, it's Alestorm-influenced. Maybe that's the band he can mimic best. The worst song for me is one that doesn't come close to Alestorm, namely The Flame of Warrior's Might. It relies on vocals far more than the instruments and he just doesn't have the chops to make it work.

So this is a real mixed bag, fascinating but problematic, impressive but with serious caveats. For me, it asks a lot of questions and doesn't answer any of them.

David Gilmour - Luck and Strange (2024)

Country: UK
Style: Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Sep 2024
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The second half of 2024 was a nightmare for me trying to get anything done, so I missed out on the fifth studio album from Pink Floyd main man Dave Gilmour in September, his first in the nine years since Rattle That Lock in 2015. However, I did hear a couple of tracks from it. Between Two Points, a song featuring his daughter Romany on harp and lead vocals, got good press and I listened online, then Alice Cooper played it and another track I don't recall on his radio show. I remember thinking that it sounded interesting but lost a lot of its impact through a car radio, so wanted to seek it out at home and never got the chance until now.

I've heard a lot of praise for this album but I find it a little inconsistent. The good side is wonderful but some of the other songs are predictable or, worse, just there. I've only listened through three times so maybe some of it will grow on me with future listens, but I've found that threshold to be a pretty safe one on the whole.

Black Cat is just there, opening up the album, but it's only a brief reminder of the Gilmour guitar tone to set things in motion. Luck and Strange is much better but it sounds exactly like the sort of song we'd expect on a David Gilmour solo album. He plays that fluid guitar with all the sparsity he is renowned for, delivering only the few notes that he feels the track needs but every one of them perfect in every way. He also sings in a voice that's almost as recognisable nowadays as his guitar tone. Given that the piano and organ come courtesy of Pink Floyd's Richard Wright, who recorded his parts in 2007, a year before his death, it's not unfair to think of it as a latter day Floyd song.

The Piper's Call is where things start to change and that's a good thing. It's an introspective piece from the outset, but it gets interesting musically around the minute mark and continues to build for another four. It starts getting heavy three and a half minutes in, Gilmour getting delightfully jagged and bluesy. Steve Gadd's drums grow too and there's a real emphasis by the time its done. This last minute and a half may be my favourite part of the whole album, matched only by another rock out in the second half of Dark and Velvet Nights. The longer The Piper's Call runs, the more I like it.

Gilmour turns down the emphasis on A Single Spark but the drums, this time by Adam Betts, make it feel commanding. It's never particularly fast or heavy but it demands our attention, especially when some percussion that sounds rather like corporal punishment arrives a couple of minutes in. Dark and Velvet Nights carries that command forward before it rocks out, but it's also jaunty in a way I didn't expect from Gilmour. It's almost reggae in structure, if not tone, and moves back into more traditional blues rock jam territory as it goes.

In between those two songs is Vita Brevis, a palate cleansing sub sixty second interlude to set the stage for the highlight song, which is Between Two Points. This is an unusual song for two reasons. For one, it's not a Dave Gilmour original, because it's a cover of a Montgolfier Brother song. I had no idea who they were and imagined them to be a deep cut psych band from the late sixties. They turn out instead to be a British dream pop duo and this track was on their 1999 debut album. Also, Gilmour doesn't sing it, handing the mike over to his daughter Romany, who was only twenty-two at the time. She makes it haunting, the sort of song that can pass right by us but also never leave us alone.

She does a fantastic job, her lead vocal as much a highlight as her dad's guitar solo. It may be easy to look past her contribution on harp but it becomes more obvious with each listen, adding a Kate Bush touch that isn't there in the vocals. She takes a straightforward approach there, refusing to do anything flash and making all the more impact because of that decision. I can't be the only one listening who wishes that they collaborate more often. She sings backup on a few other songs but I couldn't isolate where. She also sings on Yes, I Have Ghosts, a bonus track on some editions, but in duet with her father's warm voice.

It's almost surprising after these more interesting songs for the album to drift into conventional territory as it wraps up. Sings and Scattered aren't bad at all, but they feel unimaginative in this company. They're both soft songs that intend to showcase Gilmour's voice against keyboard swells and growing backgrounds. There are interesting moments, like when Scattered suddenly finds an experimental urge around the three minute mark, but mostly they're just there and that's an odd way to wrap up an album that took Gilmour onto new and generally successful musical ground.

They mean that, while I was leaning towards an 8/10 for Luck and Strange, I think I have to lower it to a 7/10. Had it ended after Dark and Velvet Nights, it would have felt a bit short at a breath over half an hour but it would have been stronger and I'd have been happy to stay with that 8/10. Add in the folky Yes, I Have Ghosts as a closer, with its violins and hints at Leonard Cohen, and that would be a surety.

Ravencrown - Relive the Imagination (2025)

Country: Finland
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Jan 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

What better to kick off a new year than a Finnish gothic metal band that I haven't heard before? In fact, I don't believe I've heard anything by main man Markus Jussila before, either from Mournful Lines or Kituma. This may be a sort of continuation of the former, playing as often in rock territory as metal, but I won't know for sure without checking out that band, who apparently split in 2024. It just seems clear to me that this is driven by its keyboard melodies, even though it often chunks up with some guitar crunch. The vocals are clean and higher than I tend to expect for a male voice in a gothic band. Overall, I think it sits on the metal side of that ever tenuous boundary with rock but it wouldn't take much to shift it to the other side.

That foundation in melody is obvious immediately on the opener, From the Moment, and it rarely ceases to be the focus, remaining whatever else the band is doing. I say band, but it's Jussila doing everything except whatever guitarwork his Mournful Lines colleague Juha Tervo contributes. The final three songs play a little heavier, Will You? especially getting epic and My Sweet Serpentine a more traditional goth song with an unknown deeper voice joining in duet, but they're still built on melody. Dreams & Hearts opens like a pop song, down to some diva crooning from Jussila, but it's still built on melody. Even Loveless Pyre, which veers firmly into prog rock, is still built on melody.

That introduces two of my favourite angles to this album, but not the third, which is an unexpected steampunk flavour. I have no reason to believe that Jussila intended that specifically, especially as it isn't echoed in lyrics, but it's there rather often. It's there in Loveless Pyre when the keyboards mimic violins and bells that sound like clockwork. It's there in the filters on In Autumn's Embrace's intro which throw everything back to a previous era. And it's there in the opening to Sorrow, which sounds like a harpsichord. Of course, steampunk is more of an aesthetic in music than a genre and that isn't apparent, so take this paragraph how you will.

The first is that prog element in Loveless Pyre. It's the longest song on this album by far, six and a half minutes running a couple more than anything else here, most of the tracks done and dusted in a radio friendly three minutes or so. That allows it to have the longest and most substantial break into an instrumental section and that in turn allows it to get more versatile and inventive. Oddly, I wasn't convinced at all on a first listen, not being sure if I even liked half of it but loving the other half anyway. It does a heck of a lot and it keeps changing as it goes. A couple more listens and this one was my clear favourite.

The songs that sit behind it all show up late, maybe starting with Hollow Anyway but certainly with Zero. Hollow Anyway is slower and more sedate but it finds a strong groove and milks it well. Zero follows suit, adding an epic heaviness that Will You? matches. These two play like symphonic gothic metal and would benefit only from a full orchestra over Jussila's keyboard orchestrations, which I expect wasn't in the budget. They sound great to me and it's hard not to imagine them washing to shore like the waves on the cover art.

The closer is the most traditional gothic rock song on the album, My Sweet Serpentine, and I'd love to know who the guest voice is. Whoever it is sounds great but also sounds deep in the way that we tend to expect any goth rock frontman to sound when singing clean. It isn't merely the deep voice that plays traditionally, the whole drive of the song follows suit. It wouldn't stretch imagination to hear other Finnish gothic rock bands like HIM or the 69 Eyes covering this and it fitting in their set.

There are five or six songs in between Loveless Pyre and the driving songs at the end of the album but they're all worthwhile to varying degrees. I'm not much of a fan of the crooning on Dreams & Hearts but the hook is particularly strong and the guitar solo builds off it very well indeed. I only wish that solo had been longer. I Feel the Emptiness adds a Latin guitar feel, enough that Jussila could have sung it in Spanish and it would have felt natural. It features another effortless melody on the keyboards.

My biggest query about these songs in the middle is why Sorrow was given the single treatment, given that it was the only one and it's hardly the strongest song here. While I'd call out Loveless Pyre as the best song, it's clear to me that My Sweet Serpentine is the single. The only reason that I'm seeing why it wasn't chosen is that it may actually be an old Mournful Lines song redone here, so not new music in the strictest sense.

Whether it is or it isn't, Ravencrown are a decent new band to me for the new year, one to deepen the already deep pool of talent in Finland and add to their thriving gothic rock/metal scene. I will take all the good I can find in 2025 and I'm thankful it started out with my first album review of the year.

Wind Rose - Trollslayer (2024)

Country: Italy
Style: Folk/Power Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 4 Oct 2024
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I had a feeling this would be the case, so I very deliberately avoided reading my review of the prior Wind Rose album, 2022's Warfront, before listening to this new one a bunch of times and taking all my notes. Sure enough, though, most of what I jotted down echoes what I said last time, meaning that this review could mostly be reduced to the single word "Ditto".

Now it's not quite that simple. This isn't as good as its predecessor, but I still enjoyed myself on my first time through and I find that I'm still enjoying myself in much the same way half a dozen more listens in. It's notably shorter, mostly because its songs are shorter. Intro aside, Warfront had only two of nine tracks lasting fewer than five minutes. On Trollslayer, that's five of eight with a further two exceeding that mark by no more than five seconds. The exception is the closer and, while it's a departure from everything else, as indeed Tomorrow Has Come was last time out, the two songs are very different otherwise.

So they're not quite the same album for a few reasons but fundamentally they sound very similar. This band know their sound and they stick to it ruthlessly. The line-up remains unchanged, as it has been since 2018 when drummer Federico Gatti, added as a touring member a year earlier after the departure of Daniele Visconti, joined officially, and their approach is exactly the same. As before, the weakest aspect is that every song works in exactly the same way and sounds very similar. Try a song, any song (OK, maybe not No More Sorrow). If you like that song, you're going to like all the other songs too. If you don't like that first one, nothing else is going to change your mind. Extend that suggestion to cover both albums and it would hold true.

That style is consistent power metal with copious folk elements and a fundamental welcome in its sound. The lead vocals of Francesco Cavalieri are deep and resonant and they constantly invite us to join in. Behind him is Tommaso Corvaja who serves as a choir. Much of the time, while there's a single vocal line, it feels like there's more than one voice and that holds even when there really is only one voice. That adds to the sense that Wind Rose are the jukebox in Valhalla and everyone in the vast room sings along. Of course, chests are ample so microphones are replaced by huge mugs of ale.

It primarily works at two tempos, one of which tends to bulk up to the other. That means that it's a tough call to identify standout tracks because what makes a song our favourite is going to fall to a personal connection to a hook or a melody. Mine are probably The Great Feast Underground and To Be a Dwarf. I happen to like the melody in the former and I also dig the softer midsection where most of the instrumentation falls away for the vocals to continue over what sounds very much like a harpsichord. The hooks on the latter are irresistible and there's also a glorious keyboard riff to kick things off.

I could imagine a lot of people plumping for Rock and Stone, which is a real stomper of a song, an audience participation number in an album full of audience participation numbers. It's catchy and it absolutely knows it, which is why it's one of the few songs to stay at the slower tempo for most of the song. It simply doesn't need to speed up to feel powerful and so we don't move as fast, here in our chairs. Every song here makes us move, even if it's just to sway back and forth as if we're on a bench with a thousand of our brothers in arms singing and swaying in unison.

All that said, there's something to be said for all these tracks. Dance of the Axes maybe increases the tempo just a little bit more to add a sense of speed and urgency. Trollslayer features a lovely instrumental section during its intro. Legacy of the Forge plays up the choral approach even more, with whole sections ditching words and relying entirely on vocalisations. Then there's the closer, No More Sorrow, which changes almost everything.

It's a good song, but being the only one of nine to really attempt something different means that it feels a little out of place. Cavalieri does the same job, as do the various other musicians when it picks up power, but the mood is totally different. There's a second voice that seems pleading and sad, two words that don't apply to anything else on this album. That's especially apparent during the softer section that wraps up the song, a nod back to that harpsichord midsection in The Great Feast Underground. There are hints at harsh voices too, albeit mostly behind clean ones. And, of course, it runs on for seven and a half minutes when nothing else gets its claws past five.

All in all, this is a good old friend of an album, as Warfront was, but it's not quite as successful. On that one, I felt safe with an 8/10 and pondered a 9/10. This is a solid and utterly reliable 7/10.

Pilots of the Daydreams - Invented Paradise (2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D-A-D - Speed of Darkness (2024)

Country: Denmark
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 4 Oct 2024
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | YouTube

I remember D-A-D from way back in the day, starting when they were still called Disneyland After Dark. They put out some excellent albums, though the one I played the most is the one you might expect, their 1989 breakthrough album, No Fuel Left for the Pilgrims. I never forgot where they throw the best damn parties and trawled Rim of Hell out to be played when I joined Chris Franklin in the Raised on Rock studios a couple of years ago. I completely failed to notice that, unlike most bands from the eighties, they never split up and only ever changed line-up once, swapping drummers in 1999. This is their thirteenth studio album.

It starts out how I might expect, with some real Aerosmith swagger on God Prays to Man and 1st, 2nd & 3rd. There's more of that to come, not least on Live by Fire, with a Mama Kin feel to it, and Waiting is the Way, which is angry Aerosmith with some pop punk in the chorus, but there's much more here than just one influence, even if it's an expected one.

I'll skip over The Ghost for now, because it stands alone on this album, both in style and quality, as the song that both impressed me most on a first listen and yet continued to grow with subsequent listens. I'll jump forward to Speed of Darkness instead, which sets a few other influences in play. It kicks off with a grungy riff, like Nirvana covering Black Sabbath, but then shifts into a mellow Red Hot Chili Peppers vibe. Before long, it does both at once, with is interesting to say the very least. There's a gorgeous guitar solo here, from one of the Binzer brothers, probably Jacob, and it isn't the last of those. There's another on I'm Still Here that puts him even more in the spotlight as he plays.

I'm Still Here takes the same mellow Chili Peppers approach and so does Head Over Heels, which adds some of the country that they used to play back in their earliest days. Then again, I recently watched The Charismatic Voice pointing out that Under the Bridge was almost a country song in vocal style, so maybe it came with the territory and muscle memory kicked in. That means that we now have sassy glam-infused hard rock, grungy stoner rock, mellow alt rock and country, all mixed together in ways that sound entirely natural for this band.

Strange Terrain relies on that grungy stoner country vibe. In My Hands does the same thing, with a touch more grunge and distortion for good measure. Jesper Binzer's voice is surely manipulated in post-production for effect. Everything is Gone Now ditches the country and makes the stoner rock more commercial to become a bouncy grunge song. Automatic Survival cuts back on the distortion and plays up that bounce to remind of the glam rock that started out the album. This one became my second highlight because it's more thoughtful than God Prays to Man or 1st, 2nd & 3rd and, like The Ghost, it's a real grower, getting better on every listen.

And, speaking of The Ghost, I'll jump back to that now that you have a strong idea of the flavours that pervade this album. I initially got a new wave vibe out of it, albeit played entirely with rock instrumentation rather than electronica, but it got more alternative as I listened to it again and again. I find the guitarwork especially fascinating, given that it sounds more and more like early U2 covering the Sisters of Mercy. It's a haunting piece that, like Automatic Survival, just keeps on getting better with every listen.

There are other songs here too, because most of them aren't long and they just keep on coming. I actually started to wonder on my first listen, before I took many notes, whether I'd left the album on repeat by accident and I hadn't paid enough attention to remember the tracks that were on a second time through. It turns out that I was only fifty minutes in, partway through the final song, so I'd effectively told myself that it feels like a longer album than it is. In reality, there are merely a lot of songs, fourteen in all, most ranging from just shy of three minutes to not much over four, the one exception being Automatic Survival, which milks its groove until five and change.

It looks like the band are talking up the album as their best in a while and, for once, they might be right and not just spinning their latest record as best they can to the press. I've heard that line on far too many occasions from bands who have completely lost the plot to take it as read. The single reason I can't back them up is that I haven't heard their previous few albums to compare. What I'd be happy to add is that this sounds like the D-A-D I remember but matured by a few decades to be wary of being pigeonholed. They take each of these songs where they feel they should go and, for the most part, I'm not going to argue with their decisions, with a little punk here, a little country there and even a bit of surf for good measure.

Here's where I'd say welcome back, but D-A-D have never been away, so instead I'll say well caught up to myself. I may well have missed some good stuff over the past couple of decades. I hope that you haven't.

Andy Gillion - Exilium (2024)

Country: UK
Style: Symphonic Melodic Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 11 Oct 2024
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Andy Gillion is a former lead guitarist for Finnish melodic death metal band Mors Principium Est, with whom he spent a decade, so it shouldn't surprise that this third solo album from him sounds rather like them. Given that he was also their principal songwriter during that time and handled orchestrations on top of his guitar duties, even playing bass on their 2020 album Seven, a record released three months after he was fired, it would be more surprising to find that it didn't sound like them. The more telling question is whether the next original Mors Principium Est album will sound like Mors Principium Est, with only vocalist Ville Viljanen remaining.

To be fair, after checking out Seven, I'd say that this sounds like that but more so. Sure, it remains melodic death metal with a symphonic edge to the songwriting, but it's more epic, more lively and wildly more energetic. Part of that is the furious pace set by Dave Haley, an Australian drummer known for a whole slew of bands, including Psycroptic, but a lot of that is in the guitars too and the urgency of the vocals. Prophecy, the opening track, barrels along nicely, but so does The Haunting and the second half of As the Kingdom Burns absolutely blisters.

I have to call out As the Kingdom Burns as the highlight of the album, partly because of how that second half blisters but also partly because guest vocalist Brittney Slayes of Unleash the Archers is a welcome addition. I don't dislike Gillion's vocals at all, whether he's singing harsh, as he does on most of the songs, or clean, as he does in duet on this track, but Slayes adds an extra power metal level to this music and it works very nicely, especially when she launches that glorious second half with an escalating scream. The album could have done with more of the pitches she hits here.

However, other than a single moment on A New Path where I could swear I heard her again, she's only on that one track and the album shifts firmly back to Gillion's harsh male vocals. Fortunately, he finds an agreeable balance between intelligibility and growl that's also raucous enough to kick the metalcore crowd into action. I like it, even if that moment of Slayes (if indeed that's who that was almost three and a half minutes in) reminds that it could have been more. There's enough of the epic here to suggest that any female vocalist like Slayes or a male vocalist who sings clean and soars in the range of a Bruce Dickinson would emphasise that element better than anyone singing harsh.

But enough of me reviewing what isn't here. Let's get back to what is. Gillion's vocals are good but his guitarwork is excellent. There's an especially strong solo in The Haunting and another on the closer, Acceptance, and there are furious barrages of melody all over the album, including A New Path, Avenging the Fallen and Call to Arms. Sometimes, like on Avenging the Fallen, they're given a repetitious approach that makes our conditioned ears think of them like riffs. It's fair to say that they are, but they're there to be melodies and they work well in that vein, providing the element that a higher pitched clean vocalist would bring to the band.

Matching the epic nature of the music is the symphonic nature of the music. There are no soaring sopranos here, but the songwriting is clearly done with that sort of structure firmly in mind. Most obvious on Avenging the Fallen, which starts out with a keyboard duelling a guitar, drops entirely into a keyboard swell midway and ends with a surprising prog rock-esque drop, the symphonic side is there throughout the album. Sure, we hear it most in the intros, especially when Gillion delivers them on piano like Acceptance, but that keyboard layer is rarely there just to deepen the sound; it tends to adding another layer that wouldn't be there otherwise. If we could listen to Call to Arms without the keyboards, it would be a very different song indeed.

At the end of the day, I like this album a lot. Whatever Mors Principium Est get up to in the future, it's clear that the songwriting approach that defined their sound over the last decade will be live and well in the hands of their principal songwriter, Andy Gillion. That songwriting may be the best aspect of this album, but his guitarwork, especially in conjunction with Dave Haley's drums, is very happy to fight it for that title. His vocals aren't in the same class, but they're still good and, when this reaches its most symphonic, like in the chorus on Call to Arms, they sound even better. Thanks for sending this one over, Andy, and all the best for the future.