Label: Massacre Records
Release date: 27. 11. 2020
Production: Jaded Heart
Album length; 52.14 min
Genre: Hard Rock/Heavy Metal
Rating: 8.0/10
These days Jaded Heart are a kind of cult, overlooked hard rock royalty, doomed to rule the clubs forever. This is a band with more than 30 years under its belt. Things looked very promising right at the start of their career, but they turned out differently, and the band has been through rough patches more than once. The albums kept coming anyway, and the band kept defying the odds. They never managed to earn the recognition and attention that their body of work, their persistence and, above all, their enviable musical quality deserve. They’re the textbook case of how you can bite your nails down to the bone and still get nothing that would lead to a breakthrough.
Over the years the band’s style has gradually changed quite a bit. They started out as a group that got plenty of attention from the domestic (German) music media right from the beginning of their career, playing a version of hard rock heavily inspired by Def Leppard and other findings of AOR. Over time, Jaded Heart have grown harder and harder. Since 2013 they’ve operated as a five-piece. No keyboards, two guitars. The production has become especially sharp, and the sound as destructive as it gets. The vocals of Swedish singer Johan Fahlberg are likewise getting more and more aggressive. Jaded Heart have also stripped the pomp out of the arrangements. It’s now noticeable only in the melodic chorus hooks, which is where the lead vocals get backed up with backing vocals here and there.
So the band isn’t losing steam. A new album every two years has been a fixture of the group’s biorhythm for years, and apparently enough usable musical ideas pile up in that time. “Stand Your Ground” is once again an extremely aggressive effort, following in the footsteps of its predecessors “Devils’ Gift” (2018), “Guilty by Design” (2016) and “Fight The System” (2014). On those records (and the new one is no different in this respect) Jaded Heart pushed their writing and playing of phrases into some serious flirting with heavy metal. The band’s image today is even closer to the likes of Dream Evil or Primal Fear than to the artistry of the group from 15 and more years ago.
There’s a good 52 minutes of music, twelve new songs in total, and the band shows nothing that would cause seismic shocks of musical self-provocation. They hold on to the reins that keep them comfortably inside the recipe they know best, and so they stay irrevocably loyal to it with “Stand Your Ground” too. The performance stays top-notch. Split, venomously salted guitar solos, and the authoritative, piercing singing of Johan Fahlberg, who doesn’t let up in explosiveness on the new album either. The hellishly cranked-up production keeps the feeling of liveliness and welcome fury, along with a theatrical dose of obscurity, melancholy and doom. The band digs in hard and holds absolutely nothing back in performing the new material. All of this guarantees the quality of the new release, which won’t leave fans of this sound, or of the band’s earlier work, in the lurch. But because all the minutes are “packaged” in a tried-and-tested songwriting recipe, the album feels a bit stretched out, since the songs don’t all reach the same grabby intensity, and it could have been shorter by at least two tracks. So it’s a nice, very solid piece of work, just what you always rightly expect from such experienced and seasoned veterans. Exactly what its title says: standing your ground and staying on your feet. But nothing more than that.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Inception
2. Stand Your Ground
3. One Last Time
4. Reap What You Sow
5. Break Free
6. Hero to Zero
7. Kill Your Masters
8. Embrace a Demon
9. Hopelessly Addicted
10. Self Destruction
11. Stay
12. Lost in Confusion
13. Inside a Hurricane
Line-up:
Johan Fahlberg – vocals
Peter Östros – guitar
Masa Eto – guitar
Michael Müller – bass
Bodo Stricker – drums
