Label: Frontiers Music Srl.
Release date: July 12, 2024
Production: Michael Palace
Album length: 43.09 min
Genre: AOR revival
Rating: 9.0/10
Palace stays devoted to the AOR revival with this new album too. The name Palace belongs to a musical visionary, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, composer and producer, Michael Palace (a Swedish musician born in Lithuania). And talented is putting it mildly. The guy first served Frontiers Music Srl. as a handy studio hired gun (writing material and playing guitar on albums by Toby Hitchcock, First Signal, Kryptonite, City Of Dawn, Adrenaline Rush, Find Me, Big Time), and since 2016 the label has been putting out studio albums under the Palace name too. The latest one, “Reckless Heart”, landed in mid-July this year and is the fifth Palace album overall.
The new album follows the artistic philosophy of its predecessors, and quality-wise it sits closest to “One For A Road” (2022). That makes total sense, given the incredible streak of inspiration this guy keeps up and boldly carries over from record to record. They show real maturing. Even though it’s all AOR revivalism, everything on the latest release sits exactly where it should. In the right place, in other words. “Reckless Heart” blasts you straight into the carefree joy of the eighties. Plenty of tracks on the new album could easily have been dropped into one of the cult action or fantasy flicks of the decade, like “Top Gun”, “Electric Dreams”, “Flashdance” and “Back To The Future”, and Palace would be raking in millions off the singles. But times are completely different in the new millennium, and there’s no way a genre niche like the one Palace occupies is breaking through commercially. One of the tracks on the new album is even called Back In ’85.
Anthem after anthem. Pomp piled on pomp! With the bombast of huge chorus hooks, where the songs keep stealing the spotlight from each other across the whole album, “Reckless Love” is no worse than its predecessor “One For The Road”. Palace keeps cranking out a new studio album every two years or so, which is a pretty short turnaround. The ideas and creative charge aren’t running dry, and that matters a lot, because with album releases this close together you’re always pushed onto thin ice when it comes to keeping your artistic credibility. But you can’t feel any creative fatigue across all 11 new tracks.
There are acts like Radioactive, CWF, Newman, Houston and Work of Art, among others, where you can find close parallels in the songwriting and production tricks, but Palace’s writing style leans toward flirting with the legacy of the American West Coast AOR scene, and the first name that jumps to mind is the mastery of Jim Peterik (ex-Survivor). You can also feel the middle and later stretch of Toto’s songwriting essence as one of the core inspirations. Michael Palace is a perfectionist. He has an exceptional feel for developing musicality, and he’s also incredibly cunning when it comes to building catchy moods up to full-on pomp and drama theater. And he really did it all himself. He couldn’t completely dodge the click-track programming, but that hardly matters. His vocal is the most essential thing. It’s a real magnet and tailor-made for the genre Michael handles. All the other elements that dress up the vocal and build the instrumental soundscape are arranged in brilliant balance. Standout guitar phrasing, wrapped in layers of synths loaded with the shimmering, bubbling (in a good way) sonic character of the eighties, in constantly tasteful contrast with the springy rhythm. The lead vocal gets extra vocal harmonies at just the right moments in just the right places. Polished guitar solos? Of course. On the new album Palace dives into the eighties harder than ever before, hunting for the missing link between 1985 and 2024. And then, listening to “Reckless Heart”, all those solo, commercially successful eighties acts spring to mind, from Richard Marx and Michael Bolton (up to and including the album “The Hunger”) to Rick Springfield, Bryan Adams, Stan Bush,…
Revivalism and tugging at the nostalgia heartstrings! Eighties AOR brought back to life. Again. This time even more intensely than you’d expect. We’ll see how long Palace keeps chopping out albums like this and when he runs out of steam, if (ever) he does. Will that moment of artistic saturation arrive, or will Michael Palace stay sprawled out this comfortably in his time machine, deep in hibernation among the ‘electric dreams’ of the mid-eighties?
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Reckless Heart
2. The Widow’s Web
3. Back In Your Arms
4. Girl Is An Angel
5. You Give Me A Reason To Live
6. Back To ‘85
7. For The Love
8. Turn This Car Around
9. Weightless
10. Move Me
11. Stronger By The Day
Line-up:
Michael Palace – vocals, all instruments
