release date: September 14, 2018
label: Frontiers Music Srl.
album length: 52:25
production: Peter Mansson & Anders Wikström
rating: 9.5 / 10
Treat are long-lived Swedish hard rockers, a band with the track record of Europe’s contemporaries, but one that, even in its mature years, has held onto (and carried over to its new albums) a good deal more of the musical DNA of the eighties AOR boom than its generational peers (the ones I just mentioned). Treat came back in 2010 with the superb “Coup De Grace”, followed six years later by the equally excellent “Ghost Of Graceland”. This time it took them just two years to deliver the follow-up. They called it “Tunguska”. It’s named after the Russian locality where something went off with a mighty bang in 1908. The theory is that a small asteroid shattered there, and the force of that blast is estimated at 10 to 15 megatons. So the band is clearly tapping into the weight behind the name Tunguska. This new album is supposed to be “rattling the foundations”.
Not to ramble: “Tunguska” keeps all the compositional and arrangement elegance and expressive maturity of its two great studio predecessors. Treat haven’t run out of creative steam one bit. They’ve kept the inspiration sky-high and the creative edge sharp. It’s a new landscape of pleasingly varied hard rock firebrands, with no dips in quality; the album holds a strictly high, vibrant creative and energetic appeal from start to finish. There’s not a single track that drags or otherwise serves up a creative flop. Everything stands where it should.
The album brings a new batch of superbly polished and utterly (musically) contagious chorus melodies, with atmospheric peaks woven in. The moods are carefully graduated. It’s all here. Meticulously crafted “mid-eight” passages where Anders Wikström explodes on guitar, in the best tradition of the true Scandinavian school of solo perfectionism. Epic scale, bombast, drama theater. They serve it all up masterfully. They’ve got it down in the pinky of their left hand. The choruses, and the pre-choruses too, get harmonized with extra vocal lines, which further amps up the rich emotional lavishness of the songs. There are also surging synth lines, old-school eighties style, even though they’re chasing an organic sonic nature in the keyboards to keep the guitar phrases company. They also lean on emulating the Hammond sound. That guarantees an extremely chunky sound that the album’s production develops, even though we’re in the realm of melodic hard rock.
Robert Ernlund is in superb vocal form. He keeps all the charisma, punch, and catchiness, and gives the album and the band’s essence its expressive recognizability and, to a degree, uniqueness. Treat prove that on “Tunguska” they’ve pushed the characteristics of their musical expression to a creative peak. The compositions show incredible creative maturity and loads of resourcefulness in gluing the right ideas into a common thread, which is no easy feat within the predictable templates of hard rock. Still, you have to keep in mind that Treat are just the kind of “rock legends” who’ve piled up a ton of routine and priceless experience through sheer longevity. Mileage, in other words. In craft, hardly anyone comes close. It’s just a shame they’ve remained mildly overlooked on the rock’n’roll map.
All the band’s longtime followers will grab onto “Tunguska” for good, as will all the fans who value and seek the flawlessness of “scandi melodic rock” perfectionism, in which Treat remain right at the top of the “surviving” generational peers. The new-wave, otherwise successful and more than confident new Scandinavian bands such as Eclipse, H.E.A.T., Crazy Lixx and so on can, of course, only look up to them. What we have in front of us is old school that once again, and very successfully, survives the crossover with new times, both in terms of the technological progress offered by recording studios and the evolutionary gap melodic hard rock has covered between the eighties and the new millennium. An outstanding achievement, then.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
tracks:
1. Progenitors
2. Always Have, Always Will
3. Best Of Enemies
4. Rose Of Jericho
5. Heartmath City
6. Creeps
7. Build The Love
8. Man Overboard
9. Riptide
10. Tomorrow Never Comes
11. All Bets Are Off
12. Undefeated
lineup:
Robert Ernlund – vocals
Anders Wikström – guitar, backing vocals
Patrick Appelgren – keyboards, guitar, backing vocals
Pontus Egberg – bass, backing vocals
Jamie Borger – drums
