Label: Frontiers Music Srl.
Release date: October 11, 2019
Production: Magnus Karlsson
Album length: 51.36 min
Genre: heavy metal / melodic (hard) rock
Rating: 9.0 / 10
The Ferrymen are yet another killer rock trio, put together by the Italian label Frontiers Music Srl. as part of its string of music projects, thanks to its agility and ambition. In mid-June 2017 the trio released their debut studio album. With all the commitments that follow the members of this trio around, it seemed unlikely that The Ferrymen would last long enough to make a second record.
And now here we are with the album “A New Evil”, a very fitting title for the times we live in! Behind the look and sound of the new record stand three razor-sharp musicians, each a master of their trade. First up is the highly esteemed Chilean-born vocalist Ronnie Romero, for whom Leo Leoni would have put both hands in the fire had he met him at least a decade earlier. As it is, Ronnie now sings at least in Leoni’s CoreLeoni, where he conjures up an incredible punch and a resemblance to the voice of the late Gotthard vocalist Steve Lee. Romero wasn’t picked for the vocalist spot in vain, not even when Richie Blackmore revived Rainbow. A singer who is exceptional in every way and one of the best-defined voices in hard rock and heavy metal of his generation. The second giant of this trio is Magnus Karlsson (Primal Fear), one of the best-known studio legionnaires and an incredibly capable composer. The dedicated Swedish musician and the very embodiment of perfectionism in his craft, he is also a multi-instrumentalist and a producer, and above all an exceptional machine-gun guitarist. His songwriting style is a primary-school textbook of neo-classical walking along the seemingly thin dividing line between the doctrine of heavy metal (power metal) and the infectiousness of melodic hard rock, drawing inspiration also from the days when AOR was shaking things up on the charts in the eighties. And that is exactly what the album “A New Evil” is like! The third mountain man of this trio is Vision Divine’s current drummer Mike Terrana, whose marathon career logs so many collaborations with different artists and bands that a person can lose their compass pretty quickly. Let’s mention at least Axel Rudi Pell, plus Rage and Tarja Turunen.
In short, if you know all three musicians, you know what to expect from “A New Evil”. Yes! Eleven new tracks that deliver incredible musical infectiousness and execution with an approach of sheer explosive force. The compositions develop at a constantly high-octane energy and serve up the desired compositional variety, and it’s downright amazing how Karlsson always manages to play a winning poker ace in this craft, since he usually trades on a thoroughly proven songwriting recipe, which he nevertheless always skillfully repackages, recycles and serves up to the listener again and again so that the (freshened-up) material hits full-blooded every single time. In this sense, The Ferrymen can be seen as a kind of compensation for Karlsson’s former Allen / Lande project. “A New Evil” is stylistically quite similar to that project, especially when you add Romero’s vocal contribution, a successful blend of Ronnie James Dio and Jon Bon Jovi. Interestingly, this time Terrana doesn’t step into the center of the action with his drumming even once. His drumming is fairly conventional (power metal style) and, in the nature of the production, very well balanced with the other building blocks of the sonic picture.
“A New Evil” is an album that lovers of infectious, bombastic melodies, fortified with a hard-hitting (power) metal production by Jacob Hansen (yes, it’s similar to the latest Pretty Maids albums), will welcome with open arms. In terms of the high quality at which “A New Evil” rides through its entire running time, with no compositional “filler” to be found, this is an extremely detailed and polished product. Alongside all its “chirping, rustling” bombast, “A New Evil” also carries the requisite gloom, a touch of the occult and doom, and fortunately there’s no saccharine balladry on it that would (potentially) “weigh down” the musical substance. A record, then, that takes your breath away. In 2019 it doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, but as said. A true album brewed up according to the “a la Magnus Karlsson recipe”, delivering the best we can expect from Magnus. This time Romero and Terrana are in the role of executors of Karlsson’s ideas, and that is the key element which, together with Karlsson’s flawless compositional rhetoric, gives the record its high quality and, last but not least, gives The Ferrymen a kind of distinctive art stamp (especially thanks to the out-of-the-ordinary Romero).
author: Aleš Pobrežnik
Track list:
1. Don’t Stand In My Way
2. Bring Me Home
3. A New Evil
4. The Night People Rise
5. Save Your Prayers
6. Heartbeat
7. Our Own Heroes
8. No Matter How Hard We Fall
9. My Dearest Fear
10. You Against The World
11. All We Got
Line-up:
Ronnie Romero – vocals
Magnus Karlsson – guitar, keyboards, bass
Mike Terrana – drums
