Label: Frontiers Music Srl.
Release date: 03/22/2019
Production: Doug Aldrich & Keith St. John
Album length: 49.38 min
Genre: Hard Rock
Rating: 9.0 / 10
You just can’t believe it. With all the obligations and a jam-packed schedule! Burning Rain and their fourth album. A band founded in 1998 that immediately put out two hard rock albums, namely the self-titled debut in 1990 and, a year later, the second one, “Pleasure To Burn”, while for the third, which had already been announced, there wasn’t enough time left, since the band’s two main men, Doug Aldrich and Keith St. John, thanks to their exceptional talents, were quickly snapped up by acts with a far more resonant reputation and name. Aldrich went off to Dio, St. John to Montrose. The rest is history. Aldrich, like a comet, shot up among the brightest guitarists of his generation in the (blues) hard rock field and gave a few of his years, as a full-time member, to the legendary Whitesnake too, and today, surrounded by nothing but aces of the trade, he’s serving time in the notorious The Dead Daisies and Revolution Saints. So there’s always too little time for Burning Rain, or almost none. In 2013 the third album came out, the splendid “Epic Obsession”, but the question of what would happen to the band next was left hanging. Luckily, after six years a new, superb hard rock album has turned up, seasoned with all the goodies the band had already spoiled us with on the previous three.
Expectations are always high when the brilliant guitarist Doug Aldrich and the no less dazzling vocalist Keith St. John take the lead roles in the story of rock’n’roll. “Face The Music” is another superb achievement, with no time-wasters. Compact, hard-hitting and clean as a whistle, delivered in the true faith of hard rock, which likes to take its cues from the gems of classic blues rhetoric (even roots blues moves), southern rock, and also hefty doses of epic, bombastic, musical catchiness. On “Face The Music” too, you can feel the core influences of Whitesnake (right from the opener Revolution, and the title track of the album,…) and Led Zeppelin. As for the latter. Even though St. John doesn’t strain toward Plant’s heights quite as noticeably this time as we’re used to, once you tackle Since I’m Loving You, you know who is (when needed) one of the best Plant replicas on the planet right now. And some of the tracks could just as well serve as an excellent blueprint for the catchiness of glam metal/rock hair-and-makeup sleaze.
Burning Rain shook up the lineup for the new album. Doug and Keith are of course the constants, while bassist Sean McNabb (Dokken, House Of Lords, Great White, Quiet Riot,….) and drummer Matt Starr (Mr. Big) have been replaced by Brad Lang (ex-Y&T) and Blas Elias (Slaughter). Despite the shuffle, the machine still works, grinding and digging on at full steam.
With their fourth studio album, Burning Rain remain a crossbreed of everything listed in the second paragraph of this review, and so a rock ‘n’ roll story of their own kind. They keep up the rhetoric of the revivalists of hard rock’s golden age, and what separates them from the legendary bands of rock pioneering by a mile is a recognizable (constant) plasma of exceptional technical polish and refined virtuosity, something the self-taught players of the legendary bands of the seventies could only dream of. Doug Aldrich is an extraordinary combination of a classic sixties blues rock guitarist and hellish, razor-sharp virtuosity, peaking in ultrasonic, breathtaking soloing excesses that astound again and again. This time St. John doesn’t “imitate” Robert Plant quite so theatrically, but he often stays in the mid-range, where he also develops, when needed, an extremely juicy growl that he adds to his otherwise explosive and authoritative voice. Clearly the chemistry between the two musicians never died out, and the new album embodies that too, full of extremely charismatic solutions in the delivery of the lead phrases and songwriting of exceptional compactness. These phrases draw inspiration from the old days when hard rock was young, and today they bare themselves in the packaging of new times, like fresh crispy bread rolls. You know the trick was sold once, over and over again, yet it’s served with such punch and conviction that you simply can’t resist it.
“Face the Music” easily picks up where the first three albums left off and keeps all the excellence of the quartet, who, with expectations sky-high, have delivered exactly what they had to! An all-round exceptionally strong piece of work, with top-notch hard rock energy, full of nostalgia and virtuoso indulgence, from a sensual quartet forever boiling over with passion. So we’re still eagerly waiting for the dates of the European tour!
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Revolution
2. Lorelei
3. Nasty Hustle
4. Midnight Train
5. Shelter
6. Face The Music
7. Beautiful Road
8. Hit And Run
9. If It’s Love
10. Hideaway
11. Since I’m Loving You
Lineup:
Keith St. John – vocals
Doug Aldrich – guitar
Brad Lang – bass guitar
Blas Elias – drums
