Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Snakecharmer
Label: Frontiers Records
Release: 2013
Length: 58:12
Rating: 4/5
What do you get when ex-Whitesnake men Micky Moody and Neil Murray join forces? And the questions don’t stop there. What do you get if you throw in another old-school guitarist, Laurie Wisefield (Wishbone Ash, Tina Turner), plus Adam Wakeman (Ozzy Osbourne), son of Yes man Rick Wakeman, on keys, then Magnum and Thunder drummer Harry James, and put Chris Ousey (Heartland) on vocals? No less and no more than a super rock band. And no less and no more than an album David Coverdale can only dream of. Since 1984, if we’re being very precise.
So what’s waiting for us is a good hour of top-notch strutting, along the expected lines of the primal blueprint of the classic hard rock school, laid down by Deep Purple, Rainbow and then built up further by Whitesnake. Leaning hard on the roots of blues music. Yep. We’ll be bumping into the Whitesnake name most of all this time around.
»Snakecharmer« is an album that takes you back to the Whitesnake days at the turn of the seventies into the eighties. The albums »Love Hunter, »Ready ‘N Willing«. How homey it all sounds. No two ways about it. Micky Moody’s magic touch on the guitar is one of a kind, distinctive, unmistakable, recognizable almost instantly, and what matters most, it stays endlessly infectious and utterly listenable. Not a hint of rust has crept into the fine playing of this guitar guru. His softness and refined blend of bluesy hard-erotic nobility with a half-acoustic tone has no match on this planet, and we can say without mincing words that in that softness only good old Richie Blackmore comes close to Moody. In that sense the album »Snakechamer« works like a lost Whitesnke album, the one that should have come out after »Slide It In« but wasn’t meant to, because Micky Moody, banished from the Whitesnake paradise, had to do other things up to this day.
The Murray – Moody partnership knows each other damn well. And still clicks just as well. The individual members of this sextet have seen concert venues packed with 100,000 heads and more in their careers. Those were the golden years of eighties rock, which they built themselves. Stadiums, the biggest indoor arenas in the world. All the puzzles are long solved for them, and there are no more hide-and-seek games or secrets left. The routine and experience are phenomenal.
The organic melting pot of a sonic density that works instantly, built on one side by the superb bridge between the guitar work of Weinsfield and Moody and the embrace of Wakeman’s Hammond organ, and on the other by the active, dynamically accented bass of Neil Murray alongside the cannon-like swings at the snare drum by Harry James, sounds elemental, primal, almost hypnotic, straight out of the school rock textbook that most of this lineup wrote themselves. There isn’t a single fumble in the song arrangements, and honestly, no surprises either. It’s just a one-of-a-kind experience of coming home, to the cradle, through the door of re-creating a musical experience we’d missed for a long, long time, or to put it more precisely, had given up hoping we’d ever run into again. The best example of the stellar chemistry of the Snakechamer members and their witty flexibility in re-creating the rock feelings of long ago is caught in A Little Rock And Roll, where the listener gets a six-minute revelation straight out of the rock bible. A song full of mood swings, with exceptional flow between the main motifs, a real mini epic suite of an album that walks the thin line between fusing the bluesy blackness of the Delta and a neoclassical approach to the search for melody.
All of this would be much harder to pull off so convincingly if Chris Ousey weren’t on vocals. A singer who was never meant to break through to the rock scene with his Heartland over a long career, since the band stayed in the shadow of far more successful British AOR heavyweights FM, he’s the type of vocalist with a touch of Coverdale and a touch of Hughes in him, and when we go looking for comparisons, he’s by no means alone on the British rock scene. We can put him right alongside Keith Murell (Airrace), Lee Small (Shy, Surveillance) and Steve Overland (FM). With his help, Snakecharmer come within an inch of old-school Whitesnake on the album, especially in songs like Turn Of The Screw, the playful opening of To The Rescue, as well as Smoking Gun and, right before the finish, Nothing To Lose. Unbelievable. A manifesto an inch away from recreating Whitesnake in their best »pre-1987« era. Recruiting Ousey into Snakechamer is the ideal solution for Moody and Murray. They were looking for a juicy voice, one that can turn actively into soul acrobatics, while enriching the riffs with its interpretation in the contour of a velvety, throaty tone. Moody already tried Jorn Lande in similar musical trials in the past, so he didn’t want to repeat himself and get caught in the trap of what’s been heard and tried before. Ousey, then, is tailor-made for the Snakecharmer game.
As a guitar partner for Moody, Wisefield is the ideal replacement for Bernie Marsden. Moody and Wisefield complement each other incredibly in their solo duels, which they often trade off through shared transitional parts that tie the individual solos together, teasing the listener with a dose of dramatic development. Moody is so smooth in his soloing that you can sometimes mistake that smoothness for his occasional slide guitar excursions on the album. There’s no shortage of guitar dynamite on this record.
Stand Up is an example of a song where the band even briefly brushes up against the realm of AOR melodicism, when you add a veil of Foreigner, The Sweet from the second half of the seventies, even Boston or Airrace to the old-school Whitesnake foundation. Refined, bathed in the glow of exquisite bluesy arranging. Never pretentious. Effective, with all the structures combined in perfect balance. An album of full rock impact, the kind only the greatest masters of the trade can put together. An album that grows from song to song and swells intensely into the superb finale, the drama theater of the last four songs, which sends the listener’s wrist into an automatic »play again« command on the CD player. The thunderous build-up of mood in Gulity As Charged sends shivers down your spine with ease. And that’s not the only such moment on this album that’ll make the hair on your skin stand up. »Snakechamer« won’t be leaving your CD player for a long time and is one of the early candidates of 2013 for the shortlist of the honorary title of album of the year! No more and no less. Now let’s hope for a confirmed tour and that Snakecharmer strike while the iron is hot and deliver a studio follow-up to this album in the foreseeable future.
This is an album that really doesn’t say anything new. But it sounds so authentic, sincere and insightful in its stance that it totally stuns with elements we thought were impossible to re-create in 2013. Elements that are the hardest to bring out in today’s musical oversaturation. But the founders of the hard rock school are simply proving they haven’t forgotten how to serve this stuff up. They walk around »sharply dressed« in the threads that suit them best and in which they feel most creative. This is their home turf and nobody can take that away from them. An album of biblical rock revelation. A pure album five-out-of-five of rock classic pedigree.
Line-up
Chris Ousey – vocals
Micky Moody – guitar, “slide” guitar, backing vocals
Laurie Wisefield – guitar, backing vocals
Adam Wakeman – keyboards, backing vocals
Neil Murray – bass guitar
Harry James – drums, backing vocals
Production
Snakecharmer
Tracklist
1. My Angel
2. Accident Prone
3. To The Rescue
4. Falling Leaves
5. A Little Rock & Roll
6. Turn Of The Screw
7. Smoking Gun
8. Stand Up
9. Guilty As Charged
10. Nothing To Lose
11. Cover Me In You
