Label: Frontiers Music Srl.
Release date: January 28, 2022
Production: Praying Mantis
Album length: 58.06 min
Genre: Heavy Metal / AOR
Rating: 8.5/10
Praying Mantis, the grand veterans of British melodic hard and heavy rock who rose out of the N.W.O.B.H.M. days, are back with a new studio album, “Katharsis”, their eleventh overall. The band has been through heaven and hell on its thorny road, and despite a string of phenomenal studio albums it has stayed in the shadow of its debut, “Time Tells No Lies”. That debut slotted them into the N.W.O.B.H.M. movement, even though it already showed a clear, homegrown stance that the band followed ever more faithfully later on, when it pumped even more ultra-musical catchiness into its vocabulary and kept putting out brilliant AOR hard rock gems. Sadly, the band never managed to break through on the scene and to this day remains unfairly overlooked.
Katharsis is another excellent album. The essential, elemental pillars of the band remain the brothers Tino Troy and Chris Troy, so the bulk of the composed material always passes through their hands. You know where the blessing for what ends up on the record comes from, and “Katharsis” is a new, almost flawless piece of work that this long-lived and thoroughly obscure British outfit can once again be proud of.
The band is special in that it has managed to develop a homegrown, recognizable musical recipe, and for quite some time now its songwriting has been closer to what Uriah Heep did in the nineties (the new song Sacrifice says a lot about that) or The Sweet in the late eighties than to classic heavy metal, where Praying Mantis originally come from. If we stick to comparisons on the British Isles and dig around among their generational peers, we land near Lionheart, Air Raid and Grand Prix. This is highly infectious melodic metal, with plenty of twin guitar harmonies in thirds over the phrasing, polished, authoritative, dominant ultra-melodic singing with pompous chorus hooks, classically razor-sharp guitar solos, and over all of it brilliant songwriting that radiates uncommon shrewdness, experience and definition. The band’s inventive insight and flexibility haven’t abandoned it in its mature years.
“Katharsis” is a new, highly atmospheric and gripping Praying Mantis album that keeps the creative bar as high as on its predecessors, including the previous two, “Legacy” (2015) and “Gravity” (2018). Praying Mantis simply don’t let up. Theatrical drama and bombast aren’t lacking on the new record either. Praying Mantis again get much of that vibrant mood from cleverly arranged backing vocal harmonies joining the lead vocal of singer John Cuijpers, who every now and then channels Robin McAuley. The band can also conjure an unmistakably dark and doomy atmosphere with a touch of the occult, as hinted at in Masquerade, among others. “Katharsis” is a rather melancholic album. Many songs unfold in minor keys, and judging by the titles, not only of the album but of some songs too, the mood of the last two years the blue planet has witnessed has left deep cuts and scars on the band members’ hearts.
With “Katharsis”, Praying Mantis remain a band that can’t and won’t disappoint. They deliver just the right dose of theatricality and pomp, woven through the band’s basic heavy metal stance. It holds on to the high musicality the band is so well known for, and this time it speaks in a darker, more melancholic voice, and more often, than you’d expect. There are moments that are awakening and preachy, like Find Our Way Back Home, where the band keeps a ray of hope for a brighter tomorrow. And a brighter, fairer tomorrow actually needs a ‘catharsis’. The closing The Devil Never Changes is a proper mini epic suite, even flirting with progressive elements. All in all, a lovely, well-rounded new studio effort from this legendary, cult British band, which with a bit more sonic polishing, especially in updating the production approach, would hit even harder. The production sounds a bit old-fashioned. British-conservative, you could say.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Cry For The Nations
2. Closer To Heaven
3. Ain’t No Rock ‘N’ Roll In Heaven
4. Non Omnis Moriar
5. Long Time Coming
6. Sacrifice
7. Wheels In Motion
8. Masquerade
9. Find Our Way Back Home
10. Don’t Call Us Now
11. The Devil Never Changes
Lineup:
Tino Troy – guitar & backing vocals
Chris Troy – bass & backing vocals
Andy Burgess – guitar & backing vocals
John ‘Jaycee’ Cuijpers – vocals
Hans in ‘t Zandt – drums
