Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Uriah Heep
Label: Frontiers Records
Release: 2011
Length: 52:58
Rating: 4.5/5
Uriah Heep are British art rockers and undisputed legends who have ridden out the colorful, wildly jagged ups and downs of a long-lived career and written themselves into rock history in letters of gold, drawing back the curtains on new dimensions with the releases of their most famous and recognizable works! Back when rock was still young and innocent, they shocked the world with their modesty and a sonic destructiveness that was radical for its time, as songs of new horizons came one after another: Gypsy, Bird Of Prey, Look At Yourself, Easy Livin’,… “Demons And Wizards” (1972) and “The Magician’s Birthday” (1972) belong in the mandatory inventory of every household on this planet that gives even a pinch of care to how it looks from the outside.
Now it’s 2011, and 41 years have passed since the debut “…Very ‘eavy,… Very ‘umble” (1970), when some music critic in an American review declared he’d be forced to kill himself if Uriah Heep ever made it. The story is well known, and in a few moments of deeper personal contemplation that critic was probably level-headed and present enough to break his promise. You may well be asking yourselves at this point why the hell we’re going so far back, right to the heart of the birth of Uriah Heep and the band’s first creative steps?
After ten years of abstinence, Uriah Heep finally released the album “Wake The Sleeper” in 2008, and with it they already signaled a turn back toward the origins of their mission. They completely rejected the sound of the previous, otherwise superb, studio album “Sonic Origami”, released in 1998. On “Wake The Sleeper” they weighed the guitar riffs down with Hammond sound, just as on their most famous albums, when Ken Hensley still ruled the organ and David Byron swung the microphone. Later Uriah Heep, I mean the “post-seventies” Uriah Heep albums, never sounded as old-school as their last two studio albums, released three years apart, sound again. The new album “Into The Wild” sticks to that direction. More than that. It deepens it.
The producer stayed the same. And yet the sound of the new album is a bit different compared to “Wake The Sleeper”. It feels even livelier, even warmer, and at the same time even heavier and more destructive than its predecessor! It’s well known that with their numerous yearly tours, Uriah Heep remain one of the tightest bands in the world. The “Bernie Shaw era” lineup has been doing it for years, too. Few bands in four decades of activity have racked up that much mileage. And even after four decades, Uriah Heep remain one of the hardest-working live bands in the world. And they’ve carried that stage grind into the studio. Yes. Uriah Heep still record albums today the way it used to be done, when recording was limited by how much tape you had and when you got just one take to play or sing your parts in the studio. These seasoned men haven’t thought about courage in ages! It flows in their blood. Recording in the form of a studio gig is a given for them. That way of making albums is a virtue and a skill that only the biggest bands boldly use and handle with ease today, bands that put rock on its feet and successfully defy the tooth and rust of time even now (besides Uriah Heep, living rock giants like that include Rush and/or Van Der Graaf Generator). You can’t get more authentic than what you hear on “Into The Wild”! Once again, the difference in the newly achieved sound depended first and foremost on the radiating essence of the five-piece in the studio and on the mood of the day, the so-called working chemistry in the studio.Uriah Heep simply enjoy being relaxed in their own skin. And there’s plenty of that freedom on the new album too. It’s a principle that can’t let you down. And Heep know it.
There’s no ballad on the new album. The closing Kiss Of Freedom comes closest to that label, and with its solemnity it likes to recall past songs like The Golden Palace (“Sonic Origami”, 1998), but of course in 2011 with a completely different arrangement. The start of the album is thoroughly playful and sarcastic. Uriah Heep chose to open the album with the cheeky Nail On The Head. It instantly announces a pronouncedly destructive yet warm sound, built first of all on a massive wall of chunky dialogue between the Hammond organ and white-hot guitar riffing. It’s also the only spot on the album that might sting a wary ear a little, thanks to its very simple and predictable chorus, which the band, especially in the outro, gave two or three rounds of repetition too many. It really does come across as a touch annoying, but if you turn to the chorus line “over and over again” and look at it from the bright side, the song becomes fully acceptable. I Can See You continues the album’s cheeky opening side. The verse slightly recalls, in its chosen lead phrase and the way the verses are handled in the vocal line, the Uriah Heep classic Devil’s Daughter (“Return To Fantasy”, 1975).
Things get more serious when the title track arrives. From here on, the album itself really starts to grow more intense with every song, and picking your personal favorites will fall exclusively to each individual listener who gives this album a chance. Uriah Heep have always been regarded as peacemakers. The title track also carries an anti-war lyric that, in the message of its verses (not the arrangement!), recalls a bit the song from the “Sea Of Light” (1995) album called Fires Of Hell. With that the album also grows into drama theater, the sarcasm gives way to a darker mood that, in its liveliness and fullness, throbs undiminished and keeps seizing you in an embodied reality! Money Talk firmly holds this destructive but gloomy content of captured mood, with an interesting contrast of mischievous verses describing the working day of strippers and all the short-witted “bimbos” who make a living just by flaunting their curves and nakedness.
Considering that Uriah Heep have dragged their retro approach to shaping sound out of mothballs again, even Shaw’s vocals sound like they’ll be acceptable more than ever to all of you who can’t get over the loss of the late David Byron’s vocal presence.Bernie Shaw remains fantastic in every respect. In emotional depth and the confident delivery of vocal lines across different tonalities. A man of unique tone and approach, he keeps maturing like good old wine.
Uriah Heep are also the kind of band known for occasionally liking to “complicate things”. So we can’t call them typical hard rockers, we’d be superficial. Art rock, though, suffices as a basic description of the character of all the developmental forms of their music. I’m Ready is a song that combines chunky riff punch that will abundantly fill your veins with an adrenaline rush through its untamed potency, while its middle section is vividly enriched with a few mood changes, the result of a colorful build-up of drama theater through several shifts of the basic motifs. Trail Of Diamonds is conceived similarly to What Kind Of A God from the album “Wake The Sleeper”. In the longer opening section, the delicacy of Bernie’s vocals sparkles especially in the embrace of the organ. A sudden switch of atmosphere follows in a rockin’ ride, where the band masterfully builds up a highly dramatic mood from round to round. At this point the dialogue between Lanzon and Box shines most intensely on the album! The mood is reinforced further by additional multipart vocal harmonies, which Uriah Heep have always known how to use skillfully and which many bands, Queen among them, took after Uriah Heep for. Trail Of Diamonds has barely ended when the second favorite follows, if you’re a fan of melancholic songs packed with epic drama. That’s Southern Star! A song par excellence, which in the emotional side it really delivers moves the listener no less than Trial Of Diamonds before it. These are two songs of many turns, songs shod from head to toe in the skilled mastery of unique Uriah Heep playing, which shines brightest on the new album precisely in this sequence.
The new album has an even closer drum sound, whose cannon-like loudness gets under your skin especially in mid-tempo rhythms. In a song like Lost, for instance, the drums plow especially deep in the sonic picture. Russell Gilbrook sounds even more confident and decisive than on “Wake The Sleeper”, his work is outstanding, and Russell is even louder yet at the same time even more vivid and energetic in his drumming! The new drummer, who joined the band in early 2006 to replace the grizzled bear Lee Kerslake, is becoming an ever more important swing vote when it comes to making crucial decisions. Judging by what’s on the new album, it’s more than obvious that he brought a new creative elan into the band, on the strength of which the band finally started recording and releasing new material.
Believe is the fastest song on the album. With its positive outlook it turns the album’s mood to the bright side. This is a song that has to find its embodiment on concert stages. Compact, highly melodic in what it gets out of its material, and above all exceptionally singable. As bright as Believe is, the song right after it on the album, Lost, is that much darker. The obscure side is underlined especially by the content of Phil Lanzon’s vocal essence, as he takes over lead vocals entirely on this track. It’s also the only song on the new album written by bassist Trevor Bolder. All the other songs on the album were contributed by Mick Box and Phil Lanzon. Toward the end Heep once again treat themselves to a lot of fun with the song T-Bird Angel, in which you’ll no doubt enjoy a ride in a prestige car of the “Thunderbird” make.
The album’s only minus is, once again, its extremely kitschy cover, which was already true of the predecessor “Wake The Sleeper”. It’s a cheap job of using the computer program “photo shop”. The sea, stones and rocks were once painted far more beautifully by hand by Roger Dean for the album “Sea Of Light” (1995). At this point it would be worth paying a bit more attention in the future. If nothing else, Uriah Heep would sell more T-shirts on their concert tours that way.
“Into The Wild” is an album of the kind we can only wish for from Uriah Heep today. With it the guys prove that the tooth of time, mold and rust are nowhere near able to touch them. This much convincing energy of a unique sermon, which the lineup still has after 41 years of defiance and which the new album has also captured, was really not something to expect, let alone demand, from these venerable sages. So after just three years they’ve brought an excellent album to the horizon, one that once again points out that the circle has closed, that Uriah Heep have come to the end of the story in their adventure, in which they eyed its beginning once more.Given all the delicacies of a one-of-a-kind band and the extraordinary creative drive that can be felt again and that the new album embodies as well, we can be confident that another excellent studio album will follow. “Into The Wild” is a freshly inspired new album, made by a band that has been active for 41 years, with an inexhaustible source of ideas and a fully formed character that is unique in the music world. “Into The Wild” is an unrepeatable pearl of the singular charisma of Uriah Heep’s artistry, whose expressive power no price in the music stores can measure.
Lineup
Bernie Shaw – vocals, backing vocals
Mick Box – guitar, backing vocals
Phil Lanzon – keyboards, backing vocals
Trevor Bolder – bass guitar, backing vocals
Russell Gilbrook – drums, backing vocals
Production
Mike Paxman
Tracklist
1. Nail on the Head
2. I Can See You
3. Into the Wild
4. Money Talk
5. I’m Ready
6. Trail of Diamonds
7. Southern Star
8. Believe
9. Lost
10. T-bird Angel
11. Kiss of Freedom
