record label pressure for
another album that same year
and a toned-down sound the
year after to render them
extinct by 1983. Since
re-forming the band in 2000,
founding guitarist Robb Weir
has stabilised an enduring line-
up which has clawed its way
back to enjoy a second wind,
with Ritual’s self-titled 2016
predecessor selling an
impressive 10,000 copies.
Sounding keen to continue
their hard-won comeback, the
band come out fighting with
Worlds Apart in a flurry of
scything riffs and resounding
power chords, bolstered by
a cast-iron chorus hook line
delivered with aplomb by
vocalist Jacopo Meille, a fixture
since 2004. Aided by a heavy,
contemporary production,
tracks like Destiny, Rescue Me
and White Lines offer a hot-
wired take on the Tygers’
vintage-era blend of melody
and aggression.
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Rich Davenport
Nick Cave & The
Bad Seeds
Ghosteen GHOSTEEN
A visionary double album
drenched in grief and loss.
People react to
grief in strange,
remarkable
ways. Nick
Cave’s latter-
day transformation from
perennially scowling gloomlord
to euphoric arena rocker and
warmly empathetic online
agony uncle seems to have
been at least partly sparked by
the tragic death of his teenage
son Arthur in 2015. It is no
surprise that spectral lost
children figure heavily in
Ghosteen, a luminous double
album set in a kind of
hallucinatory fairy-tale
netherworld, full of free-form
ambient soundscapes which
owe more to Cave’s film score
collaborations with stalwart
sideman Warren Ellis than to
vintage Bad Seeds albums.
A hovering miasma of
beatless, analogue drones lend
an Eno-esque radiance to
weightless dream-ballads like
Bright Horses and Galleon Ship,
the bereft piano lullaby Waiting
For You and the fragile falsetto
hymnal Sun Forest. Cave’s
impressionistic lyrical
monologues, half sung and half
spoken, reach a kind of sublime
peak in the climactic Hollywood,
an apocalyptic epic that feels like
a Cormac McCarthy novel
condensed into a 14-minute
mini-symphony.
A richly imagined widescreen
masterpiece that grows deeper
and more emotive with each
listen, Ghosteen may well prove to
be the most ambitious, achingly
beautiful, boldly experimental
album of Cave’s career.
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Stephen DaltonRob Halford
With Family
& Friends
Celestial SONY
Get thee behind me, Santa.
Given their
mutual
tendency
towards camp
pageantry,
Christmas-themed heavy metal
albums are surprisingly rare. But
Judas Priest frontman Rob
Halford clearly harbours special
warm feelings for the festive
season, having already released
a solo collection of Yuletide
standards, Winter Songs, in 2009.
The rebooted hymns and
carols on Celestial cover the full
festive spectrum, from
a demented metal-punk
demolition of Hark The Herald
Angels Sing and an ungainly rock-
opera stampede though Good
King Wenceslas, to a respectfully
restrained Little Town Of
Bethlehem and a curiously
brooding, bluesy reworking of
Away In A Manger. Among the
handful of original compositions,
Donner Und Blitzen is an
enjoyably preposterous reindeer
rampage, and Morning Star
a sweet soft-rock love ballad. But
the best of the new material is
Protected By The Light, an
emotionally raw toast to family
bonds and absent friends: ‘Those
that have departed us still live on in
our hearts.’
Crucially, Halford tackles even
the most tinselly baubles witha straight face and sincere
attitude. The overall package is
mostly good fun, and certainly
less kitsch or bombastic than
most Priest albums.
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Stephen DaltonWilliam Duvall
One Alone DVL
Debut solo album finds Alice
In Chains frontman in
confessional mood.
The overriding
sense when
listening to
William
Duvall’s first
solo album is that it’s not for us.
Stripped back to just his voice
and an acoustic guitar, it is so
very intimate that it gives the
impression of existing just for
him and the loved and lost
ones he’s singing about. Self-
flagellating opener Til The
Light Guides Me Home in
particular is clearly a heartfelt
apology to someone he has
wronged badly, his regret
palpable. The melody of The
3 Wishes, meanwhile, sounds
like it’s been beamed in straight
from the soundtrack to 90s
grunge romcom Singles, so
beloved by the plaid generation.
Duvall’s voice is a marvel,
clear, emotional and full of the
innate power that made him the
right choice to fill the gigantic
shoes of Layne Staley in Alice In
Chains. And while this album
might become somewhatrepetitive fairly quickly, it’s
clearly something he needed to
make, giving the world a glimpse
of his self-prescribed catharsis.
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Emma JohnstonLife Of Agony
The Sound Of Scars NAPALM
Alt.metallers’ belated sequel
to their 1993 debut.
Sequels belong
in the movies,
but Life Of
Agony always
bucked
expectation. The New Yorkers’
1993 debut album River Runs Red
was a square peg in the round
hole of the uber-macho hardcore
scene that spawned them;
a bleak internal dialogue that
tackled depression, abuse and
suicide long before they became
hot-button topics.
The Sound Of Scars finds the
four-piece picking up the
narrative a quarter-century on.
The years have taken the blunt
edges off the sound, but not by
much – the 40-somethings who
recorded Black Hearts and Scars
might be more refined than their
20-something counterparts, but
they still beat with a CBGB heart.
But the real emotional power
comes from singer and trans
icon Mina Caputo, who pours
a lifetime of turmoil into it all.
Not always an easy listen, but
never less than a powerful one.
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Dave EverleyWork Of Art: a bloody
great set of super-
memorable tunes.ROUND-UP: MELODIC ROCK By Dave Ling
Pretty Maids
Undress Your Madness
FRONTIERS
Known more as a heavy
metal band since their
inception in the early
1980s, for the past
decade these Danes
have chosen to place the focus a little more
upon their melodic rock side. Undress Your
Madness, their sixteenth studio set, drips
with hooklines, enhanced by a wonderfully
sympathetic production from Jacob
Hansen of Volbeat fame.
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Hear Now ESCAPE MUSIC
Probably best known as
the frontman of Seven,
Zimbabwe-born Devine
teams up with much
travelled guitarist Steve
Morris (Export, Heartland, Ian Gillan Band,
Lonerider) for this pleasant solo debut.
Songs such as Standing In The Middle, Live
Forever and Home are based on stout,
bluesy frameworks, though despatched
with a fluency and keenness to defy any
hint of stodginess.
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Roxstars AOR BLVD
The re-emergence of Rox
with a freshly recorded
three-tracker was an
unlikely highlight of- Now the fabled
Mancunian trio have released a full-length
treat comprised of a mix of newly written
and re-reworked tunes. Guaranteed to
leave devotees of Angel, Legs Diamond,
Starz and New England drooling on the
carpet, Roxstars is music from a whole
other lifetime ago.
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Work Of Art
Exhibits FRONTIERS
A metaphorical fag
paper separates the
cream of November’s
melodic crop. While
those Swedish magpies
Degreed are busy pushing the boundaries
of melodic hard rock, fellow countrymen
Work Of Art have an entirely different
agenda. Rather than seeking to reinvent
the wheel, they pursue perfection within an
existing set of parameters – indeed, talking
to Classic Rock, guitarist Robert Säll once
referred to their Holy Grail of “purity”.
Back after an absence of five years, the
trio’s fourth album will find favour with
those who seek nothing more challenging
than their Journey, Survivor and Giant LPs.
After all, this is a band who, with tongue
firmly in cheek, once listed their influences
as “Toto, Toto and Toto”. And sticking to
what you know and love is fine.
What matters most is that Exhibits is
a bloody great set of keyboard-drenched
yet highly propulsive and super-memorable
tunes. Aeons ago a record full of songs like
If I Could Fly, Be The Believer, Misguided
Love and Scars To Prove It would have been
described as ‘radio-friendly’. Now the
phrase ‘work of art’ is entirely appropriate.
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Lost Generation GAIN/SONY MUSIC
This outstanding
Stockholm-based four-
piece have spent almost
15 years taking baby
steps in the journey
towards this, their boldest statement yet.
Album number five deftly mixes modern
melodic hard rock with pop, dance, metal
and even electronic sounds to craft
a hummable, Technicolor collection that
will keep the listener on their toes – and
grinning – from start to finish.
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