Label: Napalm Records
Release date: January 31, 2025
Production: The Night Flight Orchestra & Sebastian Forslund
Album length:
Genre: AOR/Arena Rock revival
Rating: 9.0/10
The Night Flight Orchestra are, in every way, a very special band. They’re built from extremely experienced and seriously talented musicians. The lineup is a kind of ‘pressure valve’, since its core members come from the world of extreme metal. Makes sense: you can’t spend your whole life playing and writing nothing but melodic death metal. “Give Us The Moon” is already the band’s seventh studio album, and they reeled off the first six in no time. Within nine years. The gap between the last one, “Aeromantic II” (RockLine review, 2021), and the newest one is three and a half years, but you have to factor in the chaos of the ‘p(l)andemic’ era, as well as the tragedy that hit the band in 2022, when David Andersson, one of the band’s driving forces and its guitarist, suddenly passed away. But that didn’t stop The Night Flight Orchestra. Quite the opposite. They actually grew. From a septet into an octet. The lineup now keeps two guitarists and has added another keyboardist.
The new album is a bit different from the previous ones. It’s more dynamic and varied in its arrangements. But there’s something here. The songs are once again set up so that if The Night Flight Orchestra had shown up in the second half of the seventies, we’d count them today as arena rock pioneers of the AOR genre, with albums that went multi-platinum.
The Night Flight Orchestra are Swedish musicians who are incredibly dedicated and pedantic about their craft. They’ve got an inner sense of musicality that instantly sends us down a web of associations with the timeless legacy of ABBA, and they won’t put a track on tape until it’s detailed and polished down to the last bit. Production-wise and arrangement-wise. In a way that grabs you right away. Listening ‘on first spin’, you get hit by ultra-catchy, singable choruses that are also the peaks of the album’s pomp and bombast! The brilliance of the record is also that all this high bombast isn’t interrupted by some ‘syrupy ballad’, which was practically obligatory on the AOR classics of the eighties.
With the artistic consistency on display here, having strung together one genuinely quality release after another, The Night Flight Orchestra earned the wings they fly high on a long time ago. Close to the sun. And yet they never get burned and come crashing down. And the poetry and inspiration? Everything that goes on behind the scenes on passenger planes is brought close once again. Nostalgia, romantic affairs among the crew, a series of ‘tingling’ and intriguing temptations. In new tales of airplanes and intercontinental travel. And let’s be honest. “Give Us The Moon” is once again such an extremely listenable, bombastically cranked-up record that it fits perfectly in the player of any vehicle. Especially on a long night drive, when your passengers are already fast asleep and you’re behind the wheel, cranking the album to the max! It’s the ideal sidekick for your everyday life! Also because it captures the cheerful carefreeness and that inimitable positive vibe of the eighties!
Yes. The influences can’t be denied. The title track and later A Paris Point Of View owe their main motifs to ABBA, and even carry a bit of a distant disco-funk undertone in the rhythm. The track Stratus, which kicks off the new album, and later Cosmic Tide could, judging by the keyboard arrangements, be compared to moments of Toto’s AOR maneuvers from the eighties, which other Scandinavian contemporaries of The Night Flight Orchestra, such as Palace, Houston or Work Of Art, also absorb really well on their records today. Of course, that ‘west-coast/AOR’ element is once again the album’s central gravitational point, which means “Give Us The Moon” will again thrill older listeners who grew up as teenagers on the sounds of Survivor, NIght Ranger and Journey. Way To Spend The Night carries, in its rhythmic setup, an echo of Blondie’s hit Call Me, only sped up, pushed harder, cranked higher. With an especially fantastic chorus! Along with the one in Shooting Velvet, it’s definitely one of the standout choruses on the album. Way To Spend The Night could easily open the new album, too (no wonder the band picked both of those tracks as the album’s singles).
The advantage of bands like The Night Flight Orchestra today is that they draw inspiration from an archaic genre and, with exceptional credibility, recycle elements of AOR and arena rock into a modern production and arrangement look. There are very few bands like this, so generations of metalheads who got to know the band’s members as teenagers through Arch Enemy and/or Soilwork come into contact with a musical direction that’s totally foreign to them, but thanks to their boundless loyalty to the home bands the individual members of The Night Flight Orchestra belong to, they know how to make it their own (and dig deeper into where that direction comes from, though with ‘hardened metalheads’ that’s quite rare). You have to keep in mind that the band’s core musicians are, at heart, still metalheads, and the new album doesn’t hide it either. You can pick it up in some of the touches within the tracks on “Give Us The Moon” (the drum transitions, the emphasized phrasing of both guitars in places).
Strid is vocally phenomenal, poured perfectly into the form of the compositions, where he’s charmingly surrounded by female vocal harmonies and shimmering layers of eighties synths. He didn’t earn Dave Bickler’s (Survivor) beret for nothing. The Night Flight Orchestra also carry a pinch of parody, which works in the background but is immensely fun at the same time! Especially thanks to the stage outfits of the individual members, which instantly includes the vocal squad led by Björn Strid, with his gold-silk robe, beret and Ray Ban shades, and especially the two backing singers, who are always and everywhere dressed as flight attendants.
“Give Us The Moon” is another top-quality achievement from the band. They stay true to their musical approach here, while trying out a few different things and weaving them into the songs, which gives the album a higher level of variety and dynamics, plus an energetic payoff with a high-flow drive that pulls you in right away. The peak of it all is definitely the closing track Stewardess, Empress, Hot Mess (And The Captain Of Pain), which runs almost eight minutes. It’s an interesting mix, drawing on seventies arena rock elements (Angel, early Foreigner) and AOR, and it doesn’t hide some colorful progressive rock maneuvers either, which sneak in especially in the second half of the song. The track is deliberately placed at the tail end of the album because it strays slightly from the rest of the material. Bottom line: The Night Flight Orchestra have once again completed their mission with flying colors!
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Final Call (Intro)
2. Stratus
3. Shooting Velvet
4. Like The Beating Of A Heart
5. Melbourne, May I?
6. Miraculous
7. Paloma
8. Cosmic Tide
9. Give Us The Moon
10. A Paris Point Of View
11. Runaways
12. Way To Spend The Night
13. Stewardess, Empress, Hot Mess (And The Captain Of Pain)
Lineup:
Björn Strid – vocals
Sharlee D’Angelo – bass guitar
Jonas Källsbäck – drums
Sebastian Forslund – guitar, percussion
John Lönnmyr – keyboards
Rasmus Ehrnborn – guitar
Anna Brygard – backing vocals
Åsa Lundman – backing vocals
