Label: Frontiers Music Srl.
Release date: 08/26/2011
Production: Eric Martensson
Album length: 54:55
Genre: AOR / Melodic Rock
Toby Hitchcock is yet another name from the league of vocalists with a superbly seasoned voice and stature. Of the younger generation, that is. He first got serious attention as the singer in Pride Of Lions, the band founded and led by former Survivor mastermind Jim Peterik.
Being at an age where you’re hungry to prove yourself, to perform, to express yourself creatively through music, while at the same time depending on others to keep the project and/or band you’re part of moving, can be a pretty lousy spot to be in. Of course, the folks at Frontiers Records know full well how big Toby’s vocal talent is, so they pulled an interesting move and put Hitchcock together with the Swedish multi-instrumentalist wizard and producer Erik Martensson, who is also a member of the Swedish AOR outfit Eclipse. Martensson, for instance, is largely responsible for the debut of the American-Swedish melodic rock team-up W.E.T., with Jeff Scott Soto on vocals, which dropped a highly acclaimed studio debut last year.
The Swedes can boast plenty of musical miracle workers. When it comes to transcribing the basic building blocks of the AOR tradition, they keep proving they can do it with the pinky of their left hand. Another one of those all-in-one guys, like Martensson (guitar shredder, bassist, keyboardist, drummer, arranger and producer all at once), is Magnus Karlsson, who wrote the entire latest album for Magnum singer Bob Catley, did the same for The Sweet singer Tony O’Hora, contributes heavily to every album of the Allen/Lande project, and on top of that plays in a band that has nothing to do with melodic rock. The German power metal usurpers Primal Fear.
Back to “Mercury’s Down”. Wherever the melody and energy of Survivor, Pride Of Lions, and the solo work of Jim Peterik or Jimi Jamison live, the inspiration for “Mercury’s Down” lives too. So Martensson laid out the whole framework. He set up the tracks. From the guitar phrases, which he carefully dressed up in the arrangements and contrasted juicily with the keyboards, which of course bring the eighties energy back to life. Martensson is a genius. In a short time he managed to put together song foundations with arrangements lively enough that the album doesn’t suffer from the cloned-motif syndrome. The whole thing works as if Frontiers Records had literally ordered it from Martensson.
Hitchcock, who is characterized by the state of mind described in the second paragraph of this review, naturally threw himself at the material with all the zeal and a definite surplus of testosterone. This time around, things rise and fall on Hitchcock! He’s the needle on the scale that decides which way the songs tip. Both in energy and in style. West coast AOR, Survivor style! You can’t miss the approach Toby picked up in Peterik’s school of hard knocks. And where Survivor is close, Journey is only a shade further away (Just Say Goodbye in the chorus dangerously veers toward Don’t Stop Believin’). A song like Strong Enough revives the Survivor energy so shamelessly it’s almost cheeky. But all of that is logical, given the background Hitchcock comes from. The little twists are interesting. Let Go is the song on this album that boasts especially well-crafted Martensson arrangements (a masterful interplay between guitars and keyboards with a strongly effective theater-drama moment), making optimal use of a solid, well-defined pairing and a compact verse-chorus relationship. Paired with a different type of vocalist, it could easily have been steered in a completely different energetic direction, but here we have Toby Hitchcock, who with his pipes once again flintily brings the west coast AOR approach back to life. So the album really does sound half American and half Scandinavian.
Tear Down The Barricades stands out on the album. This is where the melodic hard rock of the Scandinavian school really sparks, drawing inspiration from the pioneers Rainbow. The lead guitar phrase can’t hide it in any way. The melodic purism of strictly classic foundations is even underlined by melodic single-string picking over individual guitar phrases, which is a heavy metal rule, but a hugely welcome bit of variety on “Mercury’s Down”. What’s incredible, though, is the sheer expressive power of Hitchcock’s figure, since in the chorus he steers the track right back into “west coast” territory. The title track, which closes the album, repeats that same energy and approach. A Different Drum captures the two different approaches of the Martensson – Hitchcock pairing on this album, with excellent chemistry, keeping the most Euro flavor and, as a result, the typical Scandi hard rock seasoning.
An album like this has its minuses too. The first is that it’s an artificially created partnership between two musicians who mostly communicated during the making of the album through e-mails and by sending mp3 samples. That’s why the album doesn’t have a fully developed sense of dynamics or a more tangible flow of shifting moods, even though Hitchcock is extremely focused in his work, and he “kills” every last doubter with his brilliant know-how at the latest in the punchy melodramatic half-ballad One Day I’ll Stop Loving You, which also shows off the singer’s chansonnier power. The work of two people is of course limited in variety, especially when you’re locked into AOR molds. If there’s no feeling that a band is present on the album, it’s hard to reach the optimum of convincing impact from the energy that’s been captured on the recording. That’s where the minus comes through, when Martensson’s involvement feels more like a well-paid commission from Frontiers Records than anything else. And of course this is first and foremost Toby Hitchcock’s debut, which isn’t necessarily for the best. The man is so eager to prove himself that at times his vocals overfill the available space in the songs almost excessively. So he often “runs over” the guitar embellishments, even the outro solos in the songs. That’s why this very high-quality product, well worth savoring in every way, is a somewhat harder album to digest, a notch more demanding to listen to, and it’s tougher for it to catch fire on the first spin.
However I turn it over, “Mercury’s Down” is a really nice piece of work. It’ll be interesting for everyone who gets fired up by the west coast AOR approach. Of course, that sentence reads as if AOR were in the crowds’ focus and written in 1987, but it’s meant for at least that handful of today’s survivors who hold this music dear. “Mercury’s Dawn” won’t leave you indifferent either. And Toby is supposedly going to be kept busier soon, since according to Frontiers Records’ announcements, his employer Jim Peterik is set to return to the scene next year with a new Pride Of Lions record. In the meantime, you can kill time effectively with “Mercury’s Down”.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 8.0 / 10
Tracklist:
1. This Is The Moment
2. Strong Enough
3. How To Stop
4. Let Go
5. One Day I’ll Stop Loving You
6. I Should Have Said
7. If It’s To Be (It’s Up To Me)
8. Just Say Goodbye
9. Summer Nights In Cabo
10. Tear Down The Barricades
11. A Different Drum
12. Mercury’s Down
Musicians:
Toby Hitchcock – vocals, backing vocals
Erik Martensson – all instruments
