Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Great White
Label: Frontiers Records
Release date: 20.04.2012
Running time: 60:25
Rating: 4/5
After every storm, no matter how mercilessly it rages, the sun comes out. You’d be hard pressed to find a better motto for the new Great White album. Those of you who follow what’s going on in the hard rock and melodic rock scene will surely know about the recent drama over who has the right to use the Great White name, after singer Jack Russell was let go from the band. To refresh your memory, White had been at a crossroads with Russell for a long time, thanks to his shaky health and a character that always brought a touch of uncertainty and unpleasantness into the Great White ranks, in the sense of an element of surprise (the bad kind) when it came to meeting his obligations to the band.
So Great White went looking for help in replacing Jack Russell. At first it was only temporary, so they could keep playing gigs normally. That’s how former XYZ vocalist Terry Ilous jumped in. While Russell was out of the picture, Great White played over 100 shows with Ilous on vocals. The chemistry between Ilous and the band members clearly caught fire. So why change a good thing? Because when it comes to the specific relationship between Jack Russell and the rest of today’s Great White, the gaps had been growing for a long time. Alibi or no alibi, Russell actually had plenty of time, too much of it, in fact, to get completely clean of drugs and shake his overly cozy relationship with the bottle, which were the band’s preconditions for him staying on. Despite a successful rehab, the other members bolted the door on Russell, and Jack almost simultaneously formed his own Great White. So today there are two Great White bands on the scene.
Let’s give the rightful succession to the Great White that no longer has Russell, even though he has a legitimate right to use the name and play all the Great White songs released up to the album “Elation”. The key question, then, is whether “Elation” hasn’t washed the great white shark up onto the reef of a Pacific atoll.
Not only does it at least hold the level of the album “Rising”. It does even more. It sounds more inspired, more infectious and more biting, with an erogenous, flirtatious riff-and-rhythm edge that puts it on par in quality with the comeback record “Back To The Rhythm” from 2007. “Elation” is a downright fascinating reaction from a “wounded” killing machine (read: a great white shark). Illous proved to be a brilliant solution for the band in this situation, when it was forced to find a guy with a near-identical vocal approach who could fill Jack Russell’s big shoes. Ilous had already shown in XYZ that his voice can be that of a naughty boy, with a mildly arrogant edge that lures you into temptation, sweet-talks with a twist and blows into the soul of the fairer sex, exactly what the “dirty” edge of real hard rock needs. At the same time, Ilous can just as clearly bring out the deeply felt emotion expressed in each verse, which logically comes to the surface especially in the album’s calmer moments, such as the song Hard To Say Goodbye, the especially intimate Love Is Enough, or the verses of Promised Land (which even doesn’t hide a touch of mildly Southern sentiment). It’s in these songs that the departures from the dynamics of Jack Russell’s vocal delivery and the very color of his voice are greatest. Otherwise, Ilous’s resemblance to Russell is at moments downright unbelievable, and in this respect the new Great White songs with Ilous work extremely convincingly overall. The arrangements bind brilliantly to Terry’s vocals, and of course the reverse is true as well. The comparison, of course, takes into account the state of mind in the camp from the comeback album “Back To The Rhythm” onward, when after the well-known catastrophe in 2003 nobody believed anymore that Great White would ever play together again.
However, longtime fans in particular have to take one important fact about the new Great White on board. A fact that can turn the whole situation slightly on its head. The fact of “acceptability”. This may bother the band’s old fans. Because Great White play differently today. Musically they sound much more mature in their arrangements, and these days they basically focus on laying bare the presence of rock n’ roll charm, which hits the listener’s feelings with real intensity. “Elation” demonstrates yet another shift toward blues rhetoric, so strong that we can say Great White today play laid-back blues rock rather than hard rock, with only the more or less prominent charm of the blues component holding onto the arrangements. That’s a fact that has stuck to Great White ever since “Back To The Rhythm”, and you have to accept it, otherwise you’ll never fully come to terms with “Elation” either. The song Love Train at moments, with a retro vibe, even lands on something that Whitesnake from the first half of the eighties could have used in their vocabulary, that “real Moody/Marsden” Whitesnake. The lead phrase of the opener (I’ve Got) Something For You is one maestro Alvin Lee would gladly have borrowed in the early eighties for one of his solo studio efforts. Especially if he’d had today’s recording technology at hand back then. A flirtatiously seductive rock n’ roll rhythm that pumps adrenaline into your blood, along with sincere sentiment, instantly hooks the listener on the album. It’s all here. The right stand-in for what we look for in Jack Russell’s hard-to-replace voice, which Terry Illous delivers masterfully with his vocal charisma, plus the band’s familiar arrangement framework for the new millennium.
Great White are thus weighed down with blues more than ever before in their career. Its generous presence is felt at every step of the band’s arrangement of their rock heritage. The new album also has that excellent live, unpretentious production, built on a stripped-down, organic-sounding landscape of rock authenticity. The guitar riffs don’t ride a heavily distorted track; at most they wear a light “crunchy” garnish, which sits perfectly alongside the band’s stripped-down, mature expression, built on putting the given emotion front and center. That’s why it burrows under the listener’s skin slyly and unnoticed, and you won’t shake its infectiousness for a good while. Thanks to this stripped-down rhetoric, the new album also brings contrasting curveballs that sonically like to recall the good old farts of The Rolling Stones, such as the “honky tonk” piano in the closing Complicated, and that sentiment lightly clings to Shotgun Willie’s as well. Otherwise, Great White shake out the required variety in lining up their lead riffs, so the album never gives the feeling that a lack of inspiration might be lurking behind it. The genuinely biting core of real riff-driven hunger is clearly on display and fires up especially effectively in songs like Feeling So Much Better, Heart Of A Man or Resolution. Crowned throughout with just the right dose of melodic payoff that brings in an element of melancholy.
So with “Elation”, Great White have stayed afloat! With a new album and without Jack Russell in the lineup, they’ve kept all their credibility. Terry Ilous proves he’s the ideal solution for the present state of mind in the Great White camp, as well as for the live interpretation of the band’s cult classics, which once elevated them among the most prominent hard rock acts of our time and place. A band that has been through many highs and lows in its career has clearly toughened its hide by now. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger! If you’re a fan of the albums “Back To The Rhythm” and “Rising” and of the old school of rock that shamelessly keeps tickling nostalgia with blues rhetoric, then “Elation” will undoubtedly fit you like a glove!
Lineup
Terry Ilous – vocals
Mark Kendall – guitar
Michael Lardie – guitar, keyboards, percussion
Sean McNabb – bass guitar
Audie Desbrow – drums
Production
Michael Lardie
Track list
01. (I’ve Got) Something For You
02. Feelin’ So Much Better
03. Love Train
04. Heart Of A Man
05. Hard To Say Goodbye
06. Resolution
07. Shotgun Willie’s
08. Promise Land
09. Lowdown (Bonus Track)
10. Just For Tonight
11. Love Is Enough
12. Complicated
