Artist: Charing Cross
Label: Metal Heaven
Release: 2008
Rating: 3/5
Charing Cross? The name sounds new, but there’s a longer story behind it than you’d think. The band’s roots go back to the late eighties. With the lineup hit by extreme instability, their mission couldn’t fully take off until this year. These guys are packed with experience and racked up the miles as a support act for Nazareth, Soul Sirkus and Suzie Quatro, and by 2005 they’d put out 4 demos and an EP. That was also the year the lineup took the shape it has today.
Charing Cross are loyal to the old school. This is a hard-hitting sound with razor-sharp, properly metallic guitars, driven by the confident, evenly matched riffing of both guitarists. The album proves that the members walked a long musical road before putting it out, and it comes across as fresh in its ideas, polished, dynamic and ambitious. The basic template is old-school, ranging from raw, in-your-face hard rock attitude, like the album opener Final Day, through songs with suspiciously NWOBHM-flavored triple-harmony runs over a hard rock riff in Kick Ass Rock N’ Roll, where the singer’s vocals, with a constant slight touch of the obscure, fuel that feeling even more, all the way to the current pompous, arena-oriented melodies in songs like Burn The Sun or Voices.
But let’s not drag this out. The production keeps a welcome raw sound, and it feels like the album was recorded live. The band delivers a nice level of anthemic quality, kept grounded by exactly that live, steely sound, while the higher-pitched, melodic vocals bring some of that drama typical of old-school “eighties” rebel metal (!) bands. With its bombastic vocal lines, the album tries to catch up with the current sound of the likes of H.E.A.T., Wig-Wam or Brother’s Firetribe, and with excellent guitar duels that slot neatly into the core of the melodies, the band also has a knack for building up the atmosphere to a “crescendo” in the choruses. The production, though, is the real deal, properly Central European, and the songs, which in some other studio on planet Earth could have gotten a proper AOR accent, follow the tradition of melodic European hard rock. The highly singable anthemic choruses are also effectively seasoned with nicely fitting multi-part vocal harmonies. The rough production adds a touch of rebellious bite, which you hear right away in Final Day. Charing Cross are much sharper and more steel-forged and less refined than their compatriots Gotthard, and still less direct than Krokus, if we keep comparing them with Swiss bands. No sugar.
The band has a real gift for crafting big melodies, which they cleverly combine with “fist-in-your-face crazy riffs”, and the stuff catches fire very effectively on first listen. Charing Cross have sailed out happily with a debut that offers a variety of basic motifs and, with that, plenty of dynamics (also thanks to the album’s live production). You can also feel in the songs that their writers know exactly what they want to offer and express in the music. This is a band that’s capable of continuing to delight all hard rock fans with new albums in the future. It’ll be interesting to see whether they steer toward even more flirting with arena-style melodic sound and, despite the genericness, manage to keep convincingly mastering it with compact, confident, tightly knit writing and playing of their material. If I were to add keyboards for the guys, they’d sound like Masterplan crossed with Rainbow.
Lineup
Peter Hochuli – vocals
Pascal Zwyssig – guitar
Andy Dormann – guitar
Markus Flury – bass
Tommy Pfiffner – drums
Production
Charing Cross & Dave Ponzio
Tracklist
01. Final Day
02. Kick Ass Rock N’Roll
03. Burn The Sun
04. Ain’t Got No Time
05. Can’t Have It All
06. Voices
07. Goin’ Down
08. Long Time Ago
09. Palace Of Fate
10. Forever Rockin’
11. Broken
12. Vanished Memories
