Artist: Kimball, Bobby & Jamison, Jimi
Label: Frontiers Records
Release: 2011
Running time: 51:09
Rating: 3.5/5
What do birds without a nest do when they’re far from home? Two former frontmen of two major bands that scored huge commercial hits, Bobby Kimball (Toto) and Jimi Jamison (Survivor), join forces in a shared project. Two singers who each stand on their own riverbank when it comes to vocal interpretation. Hard to square on paper, or rather to the ear, but that very difference is often the guarantee of spice and interesting results.
A good 51 minutes of this album prove that this team-up of two vocal titans is a mission marked “success”. There’s really no way to miss here. Jamison’s classic AOR-polished, melodic, mildly raspy voice and Kimball’s soulful explosiveness! The two singers stick to those recipes on this record too. Both on purpose and not on purpose. In the first case it’s a guaranteed way to buy the instant goodwill of Toto and Survivor nostalgics; in the second, it’s simply the best that both of them know and can do. But the biggest draw of this release is precisely the harmony of the duets, created by that more-than-welcome diversity in the two singers’ basic approaches to vocal interpretation, described above.
It’s interesting to realize that in a riff-driven rock outfit Jamison’s voice works much better than Kimball’s. Quite simply, that kind of riff uniform is stripped down to the point where it demands extra melody, which it normally gets from the vocals. Kimball’s approach, forever hunting for room to veer off into improvisation, works great in calmer chansons with a blues and R&B flavor, into which some jazz sophistication sneaks as well. That’s why the climate of the arranged material on this album suits him less this time. Jamison, who wasn’t handed that kind of vocal talent in the cradle like Kimball, has matured over the years, and capitalized on his full stature as a vocalist especially on his solo release that came out two years ago.
The backbone of this album is the AOR west coast approach to arranging. So basically closer to Survivor than to Toto. Decidedly closer. Among the musicians who contributed arrangements for the singers, the name Jim Peterik shows up again, and with that most of the puzzle behind the scenes of the album’s creation is pretty much solved. Even Richard Page of Mr. Mister contributed an arrangement for two songs, and then there’s a whole herd of Scandinavian masters among the songwriters, who have already made a name for themselves in their home bands, like the W.E.T. buddies Erik Martensson and Robert Saal (also in Work Of Art), then Niklas Edbert, Henrik Wickstrom, Mikael Persson, as well as Gui Oliver from the Brazilian AOR outfit Auras. One of the songs, Shadows Of Love, written by the brothers John and Jeff Kent together with Norman Mershon, also turned up this year on John Waite’s solo album. A motley crew and, as a result? A motley batch of material on the album.
Still, the album doesn’t have the kind of dynamic flow you get on Fergie Frederiksen’s brand-new solo album “Happiness Is The Road” (2011), which just came out. It’s not so much about the arranging approach as about how the chosen team of instrumentalists executed the material, and about the production. Obviously the financial situation of the two singers isn’t exactly rosy, so they turned to German musicians for help. The “lumberjack” approach is only too familiar to us, and the Germans love to produce melodic hard rock so that they almost as a rule crank the guitar riffs all the way up. They even go so far as to keep a properly metallic rawness in the riffs. Going further, behind the singers stands the crew of Voodoo Circle, which belongs to the excellent, multidimensional German guitar hero Alex Beyrodt, armed with plenty of “Malmsteen-esque” chops. And where Beyrodt is, Mat SInner is always close by. This time Sinner heads up the production, and of course he also rattled off all the bass lines. Sinner only started dabbling in melodic rock a few years ago. He comes from the old school of hard rock and the Teutonic principles of ossified heavy metal that was born on German soil in the early eighties. His fantastically produced albums by Sinner (especially the trilogy Judgement Day, Nature Of Evil, End Of Sanctuary) and the Primal Fear albums from the debut up to “The Devils’ Ground” are still the benchmark for the best that German metal (power metal) has produced in its history. And that harder approach turns out to be a touch too coarse for the Kimball Jamison project album. The two should have turned at least to Scandinavian producers, or at the very least to the American with a European passport, Dennis Ward, if their American colleague Jim Peterik, the most fitting address for something like this, was too busy at the time. Simply put, Voodoo Circle at times don’t know how to “shift down a gear”, and I also missed more acoustic dressing in the arrangements, which rules out capitalizing on the sophistication and subtlety that these two voices develop so effectively in different musical climates.
So that doesn’t mean you won’t like the album. Quite the opposite. There are no rules here. Everybody hears it their own way. But I do have reservations about the stronger contrast of vocal expression in the production. Had we not been dealing with two renowned and highly regarded rock singers, we’d almost skip over this “little thing”, and it wouldn’t hurt anyone.
The first half of the album is stronger compositionally. It opens anthemically with two AOR assault songs, Worth Fighting For and Can’t Wait For Love, then the guys hit the brakes on that initial fury with the mid-tempo west coast bubbler Sail Away, and the album goes on to flare up in the glow of a true Survivor hairdo through Peterik’s song Chasing Euphoria, which is loaded with pomp from start to finish. The ballad Find Another Way also, with its polish, keeps this point’s high quality going, along with a masterfully balanced swing in the album’s dynamics and shifting of moods. In the second half the compositions don’t have the same expressive power and that high level fades a bit, but that doesn’t take away from the album’s satisfying flexibility and the real dynamite of excellent rock potency, commanded by the varied contrast of these two striking voices. In the finale, the song Kicking And Screaming already feels downright “German” in its melodic rock approach.
The album is very good any way you slice it! A must-try for fans of the character of both singers! And of course, even though the songs could potentially have radiated even more sensual character through the vocal interpretation of both vocal approaches with a slightly more sophisticated production, the album comes across as compact and superbly equipped, and the typical German-sound implementation has to be taken as a reality this time, because that way you can instantly become this album’s best friend! But those melodic rock fans among you who are thin-skinned about absorbing sonic vibrations might want to skip this one this time.
Lineup
Bobby Kimball – vocals, backing vocals
Jimi Jamison – vocals, backing vocals
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Alex Beyrodt – guitar
Mat Sinner – bass guitar
Jimmy Kresic – keyboards
Martin Schmidt – drums, percussion
Production
Mat Sinner
Track list
1. Worth Fighting For
2. Can’t Wait For Love
3. Sail Away
4. Chasing Euphoria
5. Find Another Way
6. Get Back In The Game
7. I Did Everything Wrong
8. Shadows Of Love
9. Hearts Beat Again
10. We Gotta Believe
11. Kicking And Screaming
12. Your Photograph
