Artist: Pharao
Label: SAOL Music
Release: 2010
Rating: 4/5
Another piece of good music news! This time for all fans of the old-school, hard-boiled approach to the “kick-ass” genre known as heavy metal. Of Berlin origin! In other words, a starved beast has once again snapped its chain and bolted into the night, to drink its fill of your intoxicating blood!
Let’s refresh the memory and shed some light on the background of this metaphor-seasoned opening. Pharao are old-school heavy metal horsemen who formed in the mid-eighties in Berlin, that is, on the soil of the then German Democratic Republic, a Russian satellite! They put out their first album in already-reunified Germany in 1990, and its title, “Bad Boys From The East”, announced the burden the band members had carried through life under the chopping block of the Russian occupation. To make sure the album came out, band leader Jacky Lee Man even slipped quietly over to West Germany, where he signed a deal for the debut. Pharao could otherwise have ended up with a story similar to that of Lene kosti, the Slovenian metal assault troops of days gone by. Well, the wheel of time washed the communist regimes of both the GDR and Yugoslavia into a handful of history, time healed the wounds, the choppy waters calmed, and Pharao and Lene kosti survived.
But back to Pharao. The band split up in 1991 due to a lack of financial support and disputes with the label that released the debut. After a few labor pains, and with the dawn of 2006, the guys, finally reunited, managed to muster enough focus and gather enough support from their surroundings to put together a new album.
And the result is full of virtues. If we remember the origins of the long-ago debut, where fury and aggression splashed right out of the songs, raw Teutonic energy close to the early work of bands like Grave Digger, Rage and Running Wild, then “Road To Nowhere” is a more mature, more polished, considerably more varied and more clearly defined album. How could it not be, with a full 20 years between the two releases. There was plenty of time to file down new compositions and ideas and, as a result, to pick the best of the bunch!
And so an album came into the world that boasts exceptional variety in its leading motifs, yet at the same time compactness and consistency, with quality that holds up over the entire running time. That’s generally not easy to pull off across as many as twelve tracks, which is what the album carries. The band also achieved the album’s dynamic development and its motivic and atmospheric variety by inviting some interesting guest musicians. Just the touch of the voice of Saxon’s original throat Biff Byford in the duet On The Attack, by the way a song with a catchy riff and an excellent choice for opening the album, automatically opens up views onto the legacy of the Saxon jurisdiction. Interestingly, the two singers don’t create any particular contrast of vocal approaches, even though Biff is among those metal vocalists with a strictly recognizable identity. A particularly firm embrace of evil grabs the listener when they fight their way to Why Not!, where the guttural, snarling vocal lines of Mind Oddyssey singer Mario Le Mole are added to the chorus.
The production is classically German when it comes to metal. Prominent guitar riffing in a furiously live production, with no shortage of sharp screeching of the whammy bars and squealing finishes to individual guitar notes, while Jacky Lee Man proves he has long production mileage behind him, since he paid special attention to clearly foregrounding the bass line, which pulses melodically across the album and underlines the depth of a hugely dynamic sonic picture. If not earlier, you’ll witness this confirmed in the third track, Mother Earth! Later this approach capitalizes beautifully in the “Saxon-esque” We Are and, right after it, Seven Seas. Here the bass line and its lively melodizing play an exceptional role, especially in the parts where the riff lurks down a bit, while in contrast the atmosphere itself and the drama theater of the songs gratefully swell (Like A Phoenix, Seven Seals, I Believe).
The songs all carry a boldly captured mood of hopeless doom and apocalyptic visions, as the tradition of every such album devoted to the magic of heavy metal demands (the chorus of The Other Side is the real winner here). The band by no means forgot to season the songs with compact instrumental middle sections that deepen the dramatic mood and keep the content tight. The interplay of all the instrumentalists is outstanding, and the full use of the established sonic picture only confirms their studio seasoning.
The band definitely comes close to the image of Saxon a few times (the later Saxon, as we understand them from the time of their move under the wing of the German label SPV Records). The title track is an interesting cross with Saxon’s Dragon’s Lair, as hinted at by the riff-and-rhythm design in the verse and the punchiness of a typical German-style chorus melody, the kind characteristic of a band like Primal Fear. The song We Are is a collaboration between Pharao and The Chiliboys. The Chiliboys this time are members of Saxon minus Biff Byford and Doug Scarrat. This collaboration causes quite a few audible parallels with the veterans of metal. For instance, the verse riff drags toward the Saxon song Running For The Border. Seconds To Minutes also sounds very classic on the album, owing a little to the vocabulary of the Accept-style off-the-rack school of music.
Standing out on the album is Before The Storm, with the roaring vocals of Sodom’s Tom Angelripper in the verse, which, precisely because of that, manages to capture the greatest verse-to-chorus contrast. The chorus unexpectedly spills over into an ultra-melodic tune that, thanks to this excellent combination of punch and melody, mustn’t be missing from live performances either! This song is actually the true finish of the album. After it comes an interesting cover of the Bachman Turner Overdrive hit You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, as proof of the band’s big studio party. Of course this moment on the album departs from Pharao’s jargon. Hence the band’s decision to put it at the very end. These classic sounds are, after all, what the guys grew up on and shed their skins as musicians to.
With the new album Pharao have more than successfully landed back on planet metal and plugged into the reach of its evolutionary stage for 2010. They served up a bundle of songs of exceptional variety, a highly doomy drama-theater atmosphere and more than bold voltage punch, and packaged it all in a raw live production! In doing so they added the missing piece to the mosaic of the old Teutonic school’s heritage. Something that, given the band’s historical significance and emergence, Pharao still owed the music community. The debt is thus repaid, and you lovers of the authentic purity of classic metal charisma can rest sacredly assured that “Road To Nowhere” will keep thrilling you with a roar for a long time to come.
This review was created in collaboration between RockLine and Rock Hard Slovenija.
Lineup
Jacky Lee Man – vocals
T.R. Yorg – guitar
Steven Floyd – bass
Lars Thomas – drums
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Biff Byford – vocals on track no. 1
Mario Le Mole – vocals on track no. 2
Paul Quinn – guitar on tracks no. 7 and 8.
Nibbs Carter – bass on track no. 6
Nigel Glockler – drums on track no. 6
Tom Angelripper – vocals on track no. 11
Tracklist
01. On The Attack
02. Mother Earth
03. Why Not!
04. Road To Nowhere
05. The Other Site
06. Like A Phoenix (You Will Rise)
07. We Are
08. Seven Seas
09. I Believe
10. Seconds To Minutes
11. Before The Storm
12. You Ain´t Seen Nothing Yet
