Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Marcello, Kee
Label: Frontiers Records
Release: 2016
Rating: 3/5
Our good old friend from Bluesiana is back on the scene with his fourth solo studio album overall, and he’s just been confirmed as one of the acts at Frontiers Rock Festival 2017. That’s former Europe guitarist Kee Marcello, whose real name is Kjell Hilding Löfbom.
The album »Scaling Up« is his first on Frontiers Records, and on it Kee makes a sharp about-turn and takes a long look back down the musical road he’s travelled, a colorful and turbulent career if there ever was one. Kee went in at full speed with the creative wind in his sails and put together a whole twelve tracks that made it onto his new studio effort.
Recorded this spring, the album, compared to the style of its predecessor »Judas Kiss« (2013), flirts surprisingly more heavily with the traditional rock genres that shaped Marcello as a musician. Whether it’s the near-proverbial inspiration drawn from classic hard rock, where we can safely name-drop Rainbow and Deep Purple, or moments that in some other era could have kept the material on both Easy Action albums company without much fuss, since they ooze poisonously retro-sounding melodic rock, occasionally even AOR, not to say forgivingly »sleazy«. But above all that, the first thing that creeps into your ear is a sound that’s strongly kin to Europe, and I’m aiming especially at the era of the album »Prisoners in Paradise« (1991).
Given that last remark, it’s hardly surprising, considering Kee has once again restored two Europe songs that never got any further than the »unreleased demo recording« stage in Europe’s career. In their freshly reworked form (arrangement- and production-wise), they’re also the stronger points of »Scaling Up«. Those are Don’t Know How to Love No More and Wild Child (Europe even put this one into their live sets back in 1989), both originally written when Marcello worked with Europe vocalist Joey Tempest. And as we plow through the rest of the material on this record, some compositional similarities to Europe jump out at you easily. That goes for the opening Black Hole Star and, later on the album, the musically especially vivid and catchy I Don’t Miss You Much.
Kee Marcello is of course first and foremost an excellent guitar virtuoso. On this album, too, fans of guitar acrobatics won’t be left cold. But Marcello was also after a so-called »band moment« here, so the songs feel extremely compact in their arrangements and sharply focused, both in striking a production balance between the building blocks of the sound and in letting catchy melodic chorus hooks take the peaks over the »mid-eight« passages that belong to Kee’s own stormy guitar escapades.
The album is consistent and high-quality. Kee focused on the details. Maybe even too much. Production-wise, too, the album sounds almost too »scrubbed clean« for modern times, where the melodic rock scene prefers a beefier, guitar-ragged sound. The keyboards often take the lead, unless they’re carrying an equal role alongside the guitar phrases in building the sonic landscape. But this album has one basic minus. The vocals. Kee Marcello decided to sing all the vocals on the album himself. It’s clear that Marcello isn’t known as a good vocalist. Let’s say he’s solid, but only for coloring in basic vocals with backing support. Well, the man decided to take the lead vocal spot, and you can feel an expressive reserve in the songs, one a real singer would surely have tapped much more deftly and effectively. In places Kee’s vocal limitations hide neatly in the contrast of vocal harmonies, and in places they just don’t.
»Scaling Up« is thus, from head to toe, a solid and very nice hard rock album that sounds retro, with a good helping of variety between tracks, but none of them leaves a particular impression or any »staying power over a longer stretch of time«. It offers nothing you haven’t heard before, or anything that would really stand out on the record. Just that mildly uncomfortable feeling that the album as a whole would work much better with a real singer on board.
Kee Marcello – Wild Child:
Lineup
Kee Marcello – guitar, vocals, keyboards
Ken Sandin – bass guitar
Darby Todd – drums
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Mattias Eklundh – lead guitar on ‘Good Men Gone Bad’
Michele Luppi (Whitesnake) – keyboards on ‘Wild Child’
Production
Kee Marcello
Track list
1. Black Hole Star
2. On The Radio
3. Don’t Miss You Much
4. Fix Me
5. Wild Child
6. Finger On The Trigger
7. Soldier Down
8. Scandinavia
9. Good Men Gone Bad
10. Scaling Up
11. Don’t Know How To Love No More
12. Blow By Blow
