Label: Frontiers Music Srl.
Release date: July 12, 2018
Album length: 46.46 min.
Production: Mike Slamer
Genre: AOR / Melodic Rock
Here’s another release worth mentioning from the melodic rock world, dropped in the middle of last year and packaged as an album called “Devil’s Hand”. It’s a self-titled project fronted by English musician Mike Slamer and American singer Andrew Freeman (Last In Line). The spark that brought the two together can, once again, be traced back to the busy hands at Frontiers Music Srl.
Mike Slamer is an extremely respected and highly regarded name on the scene among everyone who has been drawn to AOR since the eighties, right up to today. The seasoned Slamer was already active in the seventies, when he worked with City Boy. In the eighties he teamed up with Kansas singer Steve Walsh for the project Streets, put out two superb albums with Steelhouse Lane, and at the start of the new millennium launched Seventh Key with Kansas bassist Billy Greer, a band that has so far racked up four seriously high-quality melodic rock releases. Slamer is a much-sought-after, highly valued studio musician on the scene. Especially as a producer and arranger, whose skill and talent always guarantee top quality.
The material on the Devil’s Hand debut must surely be a leftover stash of songwriting for a possible new Seveth Key album, which has been nowhere to be seen for ages now, years in fact. Greer has plunged back into work with the cult American prog heroes Kansas, who are promising a new studio album this year too, so it’s more than obvious that Slamer simply used this material for “Devil’s Hand”. It has plenty of parallels with what the Seventh Key albums offer, and the chorus hook of the opener We Come Alive points that out right from the start, as does Rise Above It All in the second half of the album.
Mike Slamer is an Englishman with an American passport, by the way. He’s lived in the US for years, and his musical vision fits extremely well with what we call the “west coast” AOR style. So the stylistic and energetic parallels with the American approach to AOR come as no surprise, but what’s interesting is that Devil’s Hand is energetically closest to the days when Kansas were dipping their toes into AOR in the mid-eighties, and later John Elefante’s band Mastedon. “Devil’s Hand” also carries some classic pre-AOR era, or let’s say proto-AOR touches, which paved the way in the seventies for the shaping of the genre and its commercial explosion in the eighties. All that sentiment, embodied in some classic riffs leaning closer to hard rock, like the one in One More Time, is proof that Mike Slamer, as the album’s main songwriter, has been around the scene for a very long time and is a true old rock’n’roll soul.
So. Devil’s Hand is everything you’d expect from the multilayered Mike Slamer, first and foremost a guitarist, arranger and producer, and everything he’s spoiled us with through his polish and quality on past releases. With his decisive vocal character, the excellent Andrew Freeman brings this record much-needed expressive twists, so the whole thing doesn’t too obviously come across as pure self-recycling of the ideas Slamer already presented in the past.
A consistent album, then. In every respect. Production-wise and songwriting-wise. It doesn’t take long to conclude that “Devil’s Hand” is tailor-made for all fans of the earlier musical ventures the remarkable Mike Slamer has walked through on his musical path.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 8.5 / 10
Track list:
1. We Come Alive
2. Falling In
3. One More Time
4. Another Way To Fly
5. Drive Away
6. Justified
7. Rise Above It All
8. Devils Hand
9. Unified
10. Heartbeat Away
11. Push Comes To Shove
Lineup:
Andrew Freeman – vocals, backing vocals
Mike Slamer – guitar, bass guitar, keyboards
Chet Wynd – drums
