Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Seventh Key
Label: Frontiers Records
Release: 2013
Length: 53:21
Rating: 5/5
If you’re wondering what a perfect melodic rock album looks like, or, to put it straight, a hard rock album, check out the latest release from Seventh Key, called I Will Survive. This is an album where every single element lands on the point of absolute creative brilliance. Hard to go any further. Both in songwriting and in production. This album has it all.
The partnership between American Billy Greer and Brit Mike Slamer goes back a long way, to the days of the band Streets. The early eighties, that is. Throughout his years in Kansas, Billy Greer was personally something like the band’s hidden »seventh key«. He always showed outstanding arranging chops. The studio debut »Seventh Key« from 2001 proves it, since Greer put half the songs on it that were originally meant for his main band. Kansas. Billy has been tied to the members of Kansas the whole time. Still is, because he’s part of the band, and his Kansas buddies regularly guest on Seventh Key records too. Since the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Seventh Key records are full of arrangement and atmospheric parallels with the character and work of Kansas. The new Seventh Key album »I Will Survive« is no exception.
Slamer is a musician who’s a true studio wizard. He and Greer click brilliantly. Greer has the perfect voice for melodic rock. A voice whose choral harmonizing reaches straight into the kind of pomp you know from the chorus melodies of Kansas and/or Styx. Mention those two bands and it’s clear that the musical legacy of the new Seventh Key record rises, in artistic value, very, very high above the average release in modern-day hard rock. And Slamer is a man who knows exactly how to find his way around a studio! He knows exactly what to do to make an arrangement’s melodic payoff catch fire instantly. From the very first spin of any original song. The man showed off his great skills in the hard rock outfit Steelhouse Lane too. He’s a brilliant guitarist who knows how to bring the right guitar riff to a tune, and also has an exceptional feel for brilliant guitar improvisation. Every note, every move connected in any way to the making of this album found its right place on it. That’s why it’s a masterpiece in every sense.
Nine years have passed since the predecessor »The Raging Fire« (2004). A solid nine years. And that’s long enough a gap that, with the exceptional talent and experience Greer and Slamer have, ideas can ripen into absolute perfection, coming together in the compact, catchy melodies of the songs.
The new Seventh Key album is far more varied than its two studio predecessors. Both in terms of the main ideas that build the individual compositions, and in the sense that the album works as a whole with a touch of the progressive. You run into that noticeable departure right at the opening, with the title track I Will Survive. Sonically, the new album continues down the path of both predecessors. Compositionally, though, it’s a hugely positive and pleasant surprise, since you’d have expected Seventh Key to simply hold on to the artistic path set out with »The Raging Fire«. Instead, they reached higher and went a step further.
The title track naturally gathers all the typical elements of Seventh Key’s catchy melodic rhetoric, and it’s spiced up even more with improvised keyboard and guitar passages, which, especially in the middle and closing sections, give it that typical progressive touch inherited from Kansas. Seventh Key come within a hair’s breadth of this song’s arrangement mold once more. Right near the end of the album, with the closing track I Want It All. The album’s exceptional variety of moods and high dynamic range are also kept up by the organic-sounding, gently pretty, mystical Sea Of Dreams, where the team once again stuns with the outstanding coloring of the lead vocals, masterfully layered with harmony backing vocals. Sea Of Dreams, with its combination of acoustic guitar and Ragsdale’s violin parts, evokes the feeling of standing on a seashore where, at sunset, gentle waves draw delicate cracks in the sandy beach as the rustling fades away. Among the most beautiful compositions on the album are the punchy ballad What Love’s Supposed To Be, which, together with the closing I Want It All, provides the atmospheric peak of »I Will Survive« in the final stretch, and, in the middle, Time And Time Again, with its outstanding build-up of mood to a crescendo, caught in a superbly crafted chorus melody.
On this album you also meet some darker moments. They’re built on minor keys, so the melancholic melos, combined with the sheer melodic strength of the track, comes through loud and clear. I See You There is especially like that, with one of the most gripping choruses on the album, as is the particularly rugged Down, backed by a veil of blues aesthetics. The direct rock impact of a beefy exposition, a dialogue between a guitar phrase and the support of a Hammond sound, is embodied especially effectively by Lay In On The Line. The songs are cut to the verse-pre-chorus-chorus mold, with the obligatory middle-eight figure before the final repeat of the chorus. The two musicians, of course, decorate this basic mold with a string of brilliant melodic passages that keep the songs’ basic form moving throughout. A new vocal melody can be woven into the middle eight, followed by a guitar solo on top (The Only One). That’s the seasoned craft of these two masters, who know exactly where to place a certain figure in a song so it works at its best. That’s the brilliance and the kind of excellence that will let you explore this phenomenal studio effort for a long time, and it will reward you richly and gratefully.
You’ll have a hard time picking favorites on this album. The songs are, one and all, superbly detailed in what they say, and like I said. Hard to go any further. This is the point of artistry where you can’t add or take away a single thing from the work. We waited nine years for this musical gem, and given that Kansas haven’t recorded studio albums for the last 13 years, Seventh Key, with this album, are taking on, to a certain extent, a credible role as heirs to the musical legacy of the legendary progressive masters. Judging by the top-notch art aesthetics of this record, that can’t be any kind of provocation aimed at fans of Kansas’s musical legacy, but rather a new fact.
Lineup
Billy Greer – vocals, bass guitar
Mike Slamer – guitar, keyboards, programming
Chet Wynd – drums
GUEST MUSICIANS
David Ragsdale – violin
Billy Trudel – backing vocals
Terry Brock – backing vocals
Barry “The Blade” Johnson . guitar
David Manion – keyboards
Production
Mike Slamer
Tracklist
1. I Will Survive
2. Lay In On The Line
3. I See You There
4. It’s Just A State Of Mind
5. Sea Of Dreams
6. Time And Time Again
7. When Love Sets You Free
8. Down
9. The Only One
10. What Love’s Supposed To Be
11. I Want It All
