Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Answer, The
Label: Napalm Records
Released: 2016
Runtime: 49:11
Rating: 4.5/5
A bit late, but never mind. If this album didn’t stand apart from the back catalog of Northern Irish heroes The Answer, it would most likely have slipped right past the RockLine reviews too. The band burst onto the scene in 2005 with an almost fundamentalist, laser-focused revivalism, vividly painting rock’n’roll pictures of days long gone and standing as the new hope of world rock’n’roll. Now they’re delivering their sixth studio album, “Solas” (in Gaelic, “solas” means light).
Between 2009 and 2010 the band circled the globe with AC/DC on their Black Ice tour, and in 2011 and 2016 they hit the road twice as Whitesnake’s support act. The band’s first five albums are, one after another, a masterclass in reinterpreting rock’n’roll at its most primal, with unadulterated, primordially erosive punch, and over the years the band never eased off its power by so much as an inch.
After ten years, though, the band got caught in a proper tornado. Cormac Neeson’s world suddenly turned black when he had to swaddle his son, born three months too early and weighing barely over half a kilo, a boy he and his wife fought for down to the last drop of blood. Until that moment the man hadn’t even known what a black life really means, and now it had become his day-and-night nightmare. It was a time when everything seemed to be going wrong: the band was slowly losing its way, the bonds in the foursome were weakening, the guys were gradually drifting apart. Wrong.
It was in exactly those tough moments that the guys found incredible inspiration for writing (and showed incredible responsibility toward “self-preservation”). Above all, the biggest thing you notice about this sonic and compositional rebirth is Neeson’s vocal approach, which is a real revelation. From his relentless screaming, the kind that wants to pierce and tear apart every last membrane on even the sturdiest amps, he has suddenly slipped into the bosom of incredible sensual softness and vocally reconciliatory richness, where (especially in the mid-range) it hits you that it sounds like an entirely different singer on this album.
Of course The Answer have kept the fierceness of primal rock’n’roll revivalism in their riffs, though these days they often work more like glowing embers under freshly stacked logs from (any old) »Gašperček«. At the same time the new album is packed with songs that stress freshly inspired compositional approaches, with The Answer reaching much deeper into the melos of traditional folk charm from Irish music, so the sense of mysticism burns all the brighter, and beneath the melancholy is a wonderfully packaged surge of awakening, a newly found sense of reason to keep going on life’s path. As a result, the album carries an exceptional dose of mysticism, which makes it especially alluring. All of this is captured brilliantly by one of the album’s strongest compositions, the epic Battle Cry, which echoes like a kind of »black celebration« with Neeson sounding like a true vocal preacher. Neeson even wove verses in genuine Irish, meaning the Gaelic language (Irish Celtic), and even in Latin, into the poetry. The band came out of this whole story stronger than ever, especially in terms of a mature shift toward a newly delivered musical artistry. So it’s no longer all that important how this strength shows up on the best-selling album charts, even though »Solas« did crack the golden-mean elite of the forty best-selling records in the UK, which is a really nice and praiseworthy achievement for a rock’n’roll band in 2016.
So the band is more mature, wiser, and increasingly open to all kinds of ideas in its arrangements, which it now realizes more skillfully in the freshly written compositions. Neeson no longer sounds like an inconsolable screamer who would forever be compared to Robert Plant, Dan McCafferty or Janis Joplin. On »Solas« he found his own formula, a vocal one-of-a-kind in the way he interprets The Answer’s poetry. Mostly thanks to that, and also thanks to some exceptionally bold, imaginatively inspired shake-ups in the arrangements that nobody could have predicted from The Answer until now (the shift in arranging ideas and maturity from guitarist Paul Mahon), the band sounds incredibly fresh and deep on this album, with a cumulus of rudimentary punch and (newly found) softness, yet emotionally penetrating and perceptive. And yes. They’ve become »unique« more than ever before. Through natural evolution, on their sixth album they’ve arrived at the very definition of artistic balance in a product as a whole, a mark of authorial originality that firmly defines your unique art position in the vast rock’n’roll universe. Through gradual maturing. The opening (title) track alone is a total revelation in this regard, and it works so that you know right away: »This is a different The Answer album from the rest.« So you keep listening with interest, and from song to song the album turns into an ever bigger revelation, hitting with incredible intensity through the raw hunger of genuine passions and emotions.
»Solas« is an album that gives The Answer an extremely welcome artistic turn, even though it won’t bring the band bigger commercial success, which no longer matters anyway. This is the album that will make the band’s true fans hold them in even higher esteem. We can say with certainty that over time, among fans of the band, it will definitely become the most valued and respected of all The Answer albums released so far.
The Answer – Solas (official video):
Line-up
Cormac Neeson – vocals
Paul Mahon – guitar
Michael Waters – bass
James Heatley – drums
Production
Andy Bradfield & Avril Mackintosh
Tracklist
1. Solas (4:35)
2. Beautiful World (4:19)
3. Battle Cry (6:13)
4. Untrue Colour (4:07)
5. In This Land (3:50)
6. Thief Of Light (4:06)
7. Being Begotten (4:37)
8. Left Me Standing (4:19)
9. Demon Driven Man (3:26)
10. Real Life Dreamers (4:35)
11. Tunnel (5:00)
