Label: Blaze Bayley Recordings
Release date: April 9, 2021
Production: Blaze Bayley & Chris Appleton
Album length: 42.01 min
Genre: Heavy Metal
Rating: 8.5/10
Blaze Bayley – a name that needs no thunderous fanfare of bells to introduce it. He’s the guy who sang with Wolfsbane and Iron Maiden, then went solo and has stuck to it since 1999, when the fascinating debut “Sillicon Messiah” (2000) came out, and he’s a man who has poured his heart and soul into metal.
The years rolled on. Blaze Bayley grinded it out with his band on the club circuit, something he was used to from his Wolfsbane days too, while teaming up with various musicians to make some very good albums. Still, the last one that was truly great, “Promise And Terror” (2010), came out in 2010. Eleven years ago. That same year, on May Day, May 1, 2010, to be exact, he played the Kompleks club in Ravne na Koroškem, in a show organized by Tilen Hudrap, today a world-renowned Slovenian musician and the bassist of the legendary German heavy metallers U.D.O. Ahhhh, those sweet memories.
Let’s fast-forward. In the meantime, Blaze Bayley put out four rather mediocre albums. One of them, “King Of Metal” (2012), was even below average, and then came the “Infinite Entanglement” trilogy. A concept story in three parts, it was an ambitious, sweeping undertaking, but each of the three albums left you with the feeling that plenty of unused dynamite and ammo was still sitting in the warehouse.
Well, three years after “The Redemption of William Black – Infinite Entanglement Part III”, here we have the singer’s tenth album overall – counting the five that came out under the Blaze and Blaze Bayley Band names. Blaze Bayley is clearly at his strongest when he’s wrestling with his inner demons, which the lyrics of the fastest, most abrasive track, the title song of the new album, hint at. This time, though, Bayley wrote the lyrics as several self-contained album stories, even dedicating two of the songs to Nikola Tesla and Stephen Hawking. The new album was actually recorded with the crew of musicians who’ve made the last three albums with Bayley and played more gigs with him than any previous Bayley lineup. These are the members of Absolva, led by the excellent guitarist and composer Chris Appleton. And the result is another excellent album.
“War Within Me” is packed with anthemic assaults. There are exactly ten of them, and the album runs a mere 42 minutes. So the songs rip through their acts with no beating around the bush. The flow of the album is top-notch. Slaps of finely honed heavy metal wreckers, which grab you with epic bombast and piercing riff punch, follow one after another and are a genuine pleasure to listen to. The album really gets stuck in your player. And Bayley hasn’t delivered that feeling since “Promise And Terror”. This is a new, classically built heavy metal album that is, of course, close in substance to the N.W.O.B.H.M. and, naturally, Iron Maiden. At the same time, it’s interesting to discover that “War Within Me” flirts with elements of power metal, which is a singular surprise in the career of the legendary singer. Perhaps it’s precisely thanks to all those epic embellishments that Appleton and company use in the song structures, plus the combination of incredibly ravenous and catchy choruses, which make it easy to picture every club encounter with the legendary singer and his backing crew, including that unforgettable one in Ravne na Koroškem.
With this album, Blaze Bayley is back at the songwriting level of “Man Who Would Not Die” (2008) and “Promise And Terror”. That means that with “War Within Me” he has also reconnected with the first three classics of his discography. Vocally, too, Bayley is once again in superb form. He’s dropped his trademark dull, hollow, mid-to-low-pitched voice into the songs far more fittingly and with more inspiration than on the last few albums. Production-wise, too, the tracks on “War Within Me” breathe with an incredibly piercing, vehement swing. Quality-wise, the songs stand completely level with one another. Bayley doesn’t bring anything we haven’t heard before, but after a long time he does deliver an album that’s, in one piece, an incredibly compact and convincing manifesto of newfound inspiration, one the backing musicians, led by the fascinating Chris Appleton, have finally cashed in on to the fullest as well.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. War Within Me
2. 303
3. Warrior
4. Pull Yourself Up
5. Witches Night
6. 18 Flights
7. The Dream of Alan Turing
8. The Power of Nikola Tesla
9. The Unstoppable Stephen Hawking
10. Every Storm Ends
Line-up:
Blaze Bayley – vocals
Chris Appleton – guitar, backing vocals
Karl Schramm – bass, backing vocals
Martin McNee – drums
