Artist: Starbreaker
Label: Frontiers Records
Released: 2005
Starbreaker is an international project made up of killer musicians. I’ll say it right off the bat: their self-titled debut is a standout in today’s hard rock, in a market buried under a hailstorm of albums that are faceless, average clones of the best.
Front and center is the vocal of Tony Harnell (ex-TNT), and the first thing you notice here is interesting. This is not the typical product you’d expect from a TNT singer. Compared to the production sound of the TNT albums with Harnell on vocals, Starbreaker sounds far more aggressive and rawer in production, rather than being geared toward a wider audience. The credit goes to the album’s producer and Starbreaker bassist Fabrizio Grossi, who has worked with big names like Glenn Hughres, Dave Navarro and House Of Lords. He also nailed the pulse of Starbreaker on tape! At the same time, Starbreaker stay faithful to a strong dose of melody.
A very important piece of the puzzle is guitarist Magnus Karlsson (Last Tribe, Allen/Lande), and once again I can only repeat that he was born to write and play in company like this. The Scandinavian has a sharp riffing tone, and the raw production smudges it ever so slightly, so all the riff material sounds a touch more modern, with a hint of thrilling “groove”, while that guitarist’s superior feel for laying down impressively crafted, ultra-melodic solos is never missing, slotting tightly into the fabric of every single song.
The main element that pulls the album away from hard rock clichés, though, is John Macaluso. This excellent drummer is a top-notch instrumentalist who has played with Y.J. Malmsteen and the legendary Riot, and he can also boast two superb albums released under the banner of the unforgettable project Ark. Macaluso and Harnell are old buddies from the days of the TNT album “Realised Fantasies” (1992), on which Macaluso contributed the drums. Macaluso is the factor that brings in a progressive streak, meaning the riffs get brilliantly built up in the transitions with colorful, witty rollings, while the variety in the drum work brings an element of unpredictability to the album, which is a real rarity in hard rock, like looking for a needle in a haystack, but this stuff, when it’s there, naturally lifts the quality above the average right away! The album’s only instrumental, Dragonfly, is a reminder of what Macaluso meant to Ark, a band that sadly fell apart too soon. It briefly brushes against what Macaluso did with Ark. The track belongs to progressive metal genre-wise and is pure as a tear on that front. A moment of jerky jamming that catapults the dynamics of the whole album to an even higher level! And the incredible thing is that the pre-chorus of the closer Save Yourself catches yet again the magic of the progressive streak that lavishly adorned Ark.
The album is the definitive standout of the hard rock scene for 2005, and it easily stretches that time limit past the upper and lower bounds, maybe even by decades. This is an extremely compact, consistently high-quality record from the first second to the last. That means there’s not a single “filler” on the album eating up minutes and gnawing at your ears and the association cortex of your brain, and not one bad song that could emotionally cool you off on this album. Die For You, which opens the album, starts off with a motif of a Hindu celebration that is suddenly shot through by a punchy riff, and the album kicks into gear at high voltage that doesn’t let up until the very end! The variety of the songs guarantees the album’s high dynamics, while the personal confession in the “minor-key” garb of the melodies guarantees a dose of drama and, as a result, the album’s high atmosphere. A classically built hard rock album that nevertheless stands out thanks to a splendid pinch of experimentation, witty ideas and a lively, “groovy” production that lifts the whole picture, in which the word cliché gets completely lost. You can’t single out any highlights. The songs are equally strong, and on that front the album is truly flawless. Given how busy the musicians on it otherwise are, the only question that comes up is about the successor to this rock gem. An album that is simply bursting and boiling over with the release of creative energy!
Lineup
Tony Harnell – vocals
Magnus Karlsson – guitar, keyboards
Fabrizio Grossi – bass guitar, sampler
John Macaluso – drums
Production
Fabrizio Grossi
Tracklist
1. Die For You
2. Lies
3. Break My Bones
4. Crushed
5. Days Of Confusion
6. Transparent
7. Light At The End Of The World
8. Cradle To The Grave
9. Underneath A Falling Sky
10. Turn It Off
11. Dragonfly – (instrumental)
12. Save Yourself
Album length: 52.27
