Label: Escape Music
Release date: June 21, 2024
Production: Atlantic
Album length: 50.24 min
Genre: AOR
Rating: 8.0/10
Atlantic are an old AOR ‘memory.’ The band released exactly one studio album, in 1994, called “Power.” By then the genre had already been steamrolled around the turn of the decade, and in 1994 bands that favored melody and big, pompous chorus hooks were being ‘hunted down with fire and sword.’ So in the reign of the grunge scene and ever more aggressive offshoots of heavy metal, “Power” is a real gem, and its quality still rates very high among AOR fans today. It was a time when bands clung to harder sounds in the production, and even the pompous musical approach that ruled the eighties didn’t escape that. Add the band’s leader and instigator, who is basically a guitarist – Simon Harrison – and the picture gets a lot clearer. This whole first paragraph revolves around an album that stood the test of time but was also Atlantic’s only one. Until 2024.
And here we are. Atlantic have put out a new album. It’s called “Another World.” Obviously, with a musical direction like the one Atlantic embody, you had no business in the nineties unless you’d built a solid reputation in the eighties. And on top of that, Atlantic were absolute newcomers. After years of writing lyrics for other people and playing in bands like Strange and Whisht, Simon Harrison met Mark Grimmett in the nineties, and the two started writing songs together, but those compositions never saw the light of day. The demo recordings sat in the archives until 2021. That’s when the MGB lineup first came together, eventually taking the name Atlantic, with Simon Harrison the only member who ties “Antoher World” back to the debut “Power.”
Don’t expect miracles. “Power” is “Power.” It’s one of those gorgeous albums lost in time and space, part of the British approach to writing AOR, led by bands that had already carved out a rocky chunk of the scene back then (some still active today), such as FM, Dare, Bad English, Strangeways and Heartland, among others. In that respect, “Another World” is hard to compare to the debut. A good 30 years have passed between the two releases, and times have changed a lot in the meantime.
Clearly, “Another World” in 2024, with an approach firmly leaning on archaic genre rules, is a record lost in time and space. When you try to tie it back to the debut, the nice surprise is above all how skillfully it brings out the key production elements that mattered for the ‘giant sound’ of eighties production. The contrasts are pronounced. You can feel the kick drum pulsing, the snare has depth and reverb, the guitars grab in their phrases, the synths hang a strongly contrasting curtain across the spectrum of the sound, and, most importantly, the big vocal harmonies in the choruses are here (led by the distinctly likable vocal tone of singer Mark Grimmett). In short, a really lovely album stuffed with exuberant bombast, with some serious guitar solo seasoning in the mid-eight passages guaranteed, too. Proper AOR. But let’s not forget to repeat that the framework for the songs on “Another World” comes from demo recordings made more than 20 years ago. The opening Ready Or Not grabs you instantly, and the album doesn’t lose its charge with the excellent ballad Without Love, which follows the opener. Further on, too, the variety of ideas and the execution are seductive and thoroughly convincing. Albums like this are rare today. Especially when they’ve been put together by the ‘old guard’ (with the old philosophy of going after the grabby effects AOR pomp demands). The studio ‘cosmetics’ are certainly freshened up, but they don’t overdo the implanting of ‘novelties’ (it keeps that ‘analog’ feel), which makes it that much easier to call the album an excellent, more than successful link to the classic AOR days of the eighties.
For the few surviving fans of this strictly archaic genre today – which is otherwise full of revitalization by new generations of musicians (and that’s great) – “Another World” will bring one of this year’s highlights. So the goal has been more than successfully achieved for Harrison and the crew. It’s hard to say what comes next or whether there are any ‘unfired rounds’ left in the magazine, but even if it stops at “Another World,” it’ll be, one way or another, a more than satisfying move by the ‘old tomcats,’ who can still effectively spoil their chosen audience (mostly ‘old aunts and uncles’).
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Ready Or Not
2. Without Love
3. Hold On
4. I’ll Be Waiting
5. If This Is Goodbye
6. Whole Lot Of Love
7. Loving Arms
8. Nothing More I Can Say
9. Missing You
10. Dream About You
11. This Ain’t Love
Lineup:
Mark Grimmett – vocals
Nick Burr – guitar
Simon Harrison – guitar, keyboards, bass guitar
Tim Bristow – keyboards
Julian D. Hill – bass guitar
Mark Pullin – drums, backing vocals
Guest musicians:
Andy Margrett – additional guitar solos
Mark Pullin – additional guitar solos
Gareth David Noon – keyboards
