Label: AOR Heaven Records
Release date: September 10, 2021
Production: Steve Newman
Album length: 56.32 min
Genre: AOR/Melodic Rock
Rating: 9.0/10
Newman are a British AOR and hard rock outfit, and behind the name, since the mid-nineties, stands its founder, songwriter, producer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Steve Newman. In recent years he’s been brimming with creative freshness and new ideas. His last album, “Ignition,” came out at the end of last March and, like many Newman albums before it, earned glowing reviews from our webzine.
The latest album, “Into The Monster’s Playground,” follows that same vision, which doesn’t really change much, it just gets more mature. Year after year. These days Newman have been a proper band for quite a while, one that can hit the stage anytime, but a lot of water had to flow under the bridge before Steve managed to turn a studio-only ‘one man band’ project into something that drew enough attention from labels and music distributors to grow into something bigger.
More than deserved. Anyone who knows at least the last three Newman albums, “Ignition” (2020), “Aerial” (2017) and/or “The Elegance Machine” (2015), knows what to expect from the new “Into The Monster’s Playground.” The new album sounds very, very similar to its excellent predecessor “Ignition,” and it’s honestly unbelievable that Steve Newman can pull together enough solid musical ideas in such a short time to fuel compositions of this quality, as the new album shows. Steve Newman once again did everything himself. As always. Production included. Only the drums were handled in the studio by his reliable partner in crime Rob McEwen. And we’re not talking ten new songs and a good 40 minutes of music here, but twelve new tracks and an album just shy of an hour, and once again Steve Newman didn’t make a single misstep. Not in the production, not in the arrangements. Experience is experience. Vocally, too, Steve has made enormous progress over the last decade of his musical career.
So “Into The Monster’s Playground” serves up the tried-and-true recipe once more, and within its strictly defined musical formula, with some crafty recycling tricks, it manages yet again to deliver musical substance in which pretty much everything was said long ago, in a way that keeps fascinating AOR fans over and over and never leaves them indifferent.
Welcome to the eighties, then. As a rule, every track is once again slyly decked out with theatrical multi-harmony vocal lines, which is the AOR standard, and Newman handle it masterfully, as ever. The emotional peaks are all bombastically woven into the choruses, which crawl under your skin on the very first listen. From ballads like the excellent Shadows of Love, just before the end of the album, through the mostly mid-tempo songs where the atmosphere of the AOR aesthetic is especially teasing in its packaging (those rustling blankets of eighties synth sound), to the faster moments where the guitar lines also steal the spotlight, “Into The Monster’s Playground” carries every essential ingredient of the AOR genre, and Steve Newman’s visionary figure shines through all of it. The man doesn’t stray from the proven, ignition-ready recipe. At what he does, he’s a top-notch master and a wizard of his trade, and one of the leading matadors who keep alive, even in post-millennial times, the legacy of the lively AOR scene of the British Isles, which carved out a very special place in the history of rock and roll (through the eighties).
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1 Start This Fire
2 Timebomb
3 Hurricane Sky
4 I’ll Be The One
5 Icon
6 Don’t Come Runnin’
7 Lightning Tree
8 Give Me Tonight
9 The Monsters’ Playground
10 Spirit Cries
11 Shadows Of Love
12 This Life Alone
Lineup:
Steve Newman – vocals, guitar, keyboards
Rob McEwen – drums, percussion
