Label: Cleopatra Records
Release date: 04.10.2019
Production: Punky Meadows & Frank DiMino
Album length: 74.36 min
Genre: glam rock / AOR / hard rock
Rating: 9.5 / 10
If the last four RockLine reviews, published a day or two ago, were all tied to the turn of the seventies into the eighties, this time we’re going on a slightly longer trip back in time. To the first half of the seventies. After 20 years, a new Angel album has landed, titled “Risen”. That wouldn’t even be worth a mention if the album weren’t, plain and simple, excellent. In every respect. The reactivated Angel’s lineup keeps the two main pillars: guitarist Punky Meadows and vocalist Frank DiMino. Of course, the question always sneaks into your head at this point: where the hell is Gregg Giuffria? He’s long gone from the Angel camp (he became a successful businessman and casino owner), but the keyboard element, which has always been an obligatory, ever-present and essential building block of the sound of this cult (glam) rock band of the seventies, has been remedied remarkably skillfully on the new album. But more on that later.
But who the hell are Angel anyway? The band was discovered in a nightclub by Chaim Witz, the notorious and hugely successful businessman of Jewish descent known across the galaxy as Gene Simmons, the “most loudmouthed” part of Kiss. So Angel signed with the same label as Kiss, and unlike the demonic black getups worn by the face-painted Kiss at the time, they played their shows dressed in all-white satin outfits. Angel never managed to achieve a commercial breakthrough throughout their career, even though they had a good setup for it. The band stopped operating in the early eighties, but with their presence in the seventies and five cult albums, they still managed to leave a mark that, especially on American soil, had an important influence on the later boom of glam metal, as well as the AOR genre throughout the eighties.
How is it even possible that an album by the same band, released in 2019, can be confidently compared to its cult seventies classics, the ones that wrote Angel into rock history? Simple. The Meadows-DiMino duo is integral here to achieving those feelings and vibes of pure-blooded nostalgia. The production of “Risen” is phenomenal in itself, as it tries as hard as it can to imitate the old sound culture of seventies recordings. The album sounds organic, warm, alive, “dense” and very “analog”.
DiMino and Meadows started laying the groundwork for the takeoff of “Risen” three years ago, when Meadows released his first solo studio album, the very bold and very good “Fallen Angel”. DiMino guests on it, and in many ways it was the real foundation for the later reactivation of Angel (with Meadows in the lineup, of course). A joint DiMino and Meadows tour followed, billed as “Angel featuring Frank DiMino and Punky Meadows”, and from there on it was only a matter of time before the new lineup shortened its name to Angel.
Plain and simple: it’s as if the band had hopped into a time machine and jumped 45 years into the future. Just take the chorus melody of Shot of Your Love, or the verse of Slow Down. Two new Angel songs from “Risen”. Their vibe is so close to the legendary Boston, their peers, that even a perfectionist like Tom Scholz wouldn’t have been ashamed to put them on the first or second Boston album. An outstanding mix of rock’n’roll and ultra-musical catchiness, which is almost always embodied by a singalong chorus. Something old, really old, rustic, retro-sounding, which only a generation that lived and breathed the seventies knows how to recreate. And “Risen” caught it and put it on record in a remarkably successful and convincing way. As Angel sing on what’s probably the peak of the new album, the song 1975: “….1975, the spirit’s still alive,…” It doesn’t get more fitting than that. Everything. From the guitar sound and the signature, charismatic guitar phrases, to the instantly recognizable coloring of the songs with nothing but the pure substance of Frank DiMino’s striking vocals. Even the synths sound truly rustic. The band actually brought gear into the studio that, to caricature a bit, came straight from the nearest technology museum. And the result is genuinely, fascinatingly gripping. There’s a ton of music here. Add the freshly re-recorded progressive-rustling classic The Tower and it runs past 74 minutes, which is a red flag, because you can instantly doubt the consistency of the album’s quality, or, plain and simple, you rightly expect some planted “time stinkers”, which “Risen”, luckily, doesn’t know. Fifteen new songs, all of them wildly dynamic in ideas and varied in structure, with the clear premise of seeking the ideal balance between elements of classic rock’n’roll, AOR catchiness and noticeable detours toward seventies progressive rock. It’s all in one! A finished package! Essential and one of a kind, carved out of the unique Angel recipe. Yes. It’s possible. Even in 2019. By the way, the phrasing of the song Locked, Cocked And Ready To Rock draws unmistakable inspiration from the AC/DC classic Back In Black.
Let the previous sentences serve as a guide to what you can expect from the musical substance of this extremely successful album, which, lost in time and space and made by rock’n’roll dinosaurs, keeps surprising and thrilling. Because it’s simply one of a kind. Unique. In itself one of the peaks of melodic rock this year, an album that links up with ease, chemically and energetically, to the golden seventies of this cult, often unjustly overlooked band, whom critics loved to make fun of for their stage look, including the “resident exorcist of rock’s lipstick brigade” Frank Zappa, who mocked their feminine appearance, which also gave rise to the song Punky’s Whips, something that at the end of the seventies brought the band, if anything, extra publicity (Meadows even appeared on stage as a special guest at one of Zappa’s concerts, during a performance of that song).
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
01. ‘Angel Theme’
02. ‘Under The Gun’
03. ‘Shot Of Your Love’
04. ‘Slow Down’
05. ‘Over My Head’
06. ‘We Were The Wild’
07. ‘Desire’
08. ‘1975’
09. ‘Don’t Want You To Go’
10. ‘(Punky’s Couch Blues) Locked Cocked Ready To Rock’
11. ‘Tell Me Why’
12. ‘I.O.U’
13. ‘Turn Around’
14. ‘Our Revolution’
15. ‘My Sanctuary’
16. ‘Stand Up’
17. ‘Tower (2019)’
Lineup:
Frank DiMino – vocals
Punky Meadows – guitar
Charlie Calv – keyboards
Danny Farrow – guitar
Steve Ojane – bass guitar
Billy Orrico – drums
