release date: 19.10.2018
label: AOR Heaven Records
album length: 39:49
production: Xavier Millis
rating: 7.0 / 10
White Widdow are an interesting band. Well, actually, not really. Musically, they’re not reinventing anything. They’re AOR revivalists. »Victory« is their new studio album and, eight years after the self-titled debut, their fifth overall. They’re interesting in the sense that, in the new millennium, they draw inspiration from the legacy of a pretty much extinct genre that was hugely popular in the eighties.
With the predecessor »Silhouette«, White Widdow more or less settled in. They defined their sound and locked into a tried-and-tested, reliably catchy recipe. The base of listeners that has embraced them is decent, and they get a lot of joy out of writing and composing this kind of music, which is of course what matters most.
White Widdow are interesting, totally stuck in the eighties. In production, today’s bands (especially from the Scandinavian corner) tackling AOR revivalism mostly stick to a balanced production, or else go for a slightly to clearly “pushed-forward” guitar riff sound (which goes more for the German revivalism). The Australian White Widdow, interestingly, generally put the keyboard sound front and center. No wonder, since keyboardist Xavier Millis is also the main producer of all the band’s albums, »Victory« included. The keyboards carry that typical shimmering wave of synth sound, which pairs beautifully with the mostly mid-register, ultra-catchy melodic lines of the harmonized chorus hooks. White Widdow have an excellent guitarist in their ranks. That’s Enzo Almanzi, who learned many a masterpiece by listening to aces like Eddie Van Halen. But his talent, ideas and high technical polish stay underused in White Widdow’s music. At times the guitar even feels inferior in the arrangement, meaning it’s subordinate in the mix. The band treats itself to that kind of “excursion” in Reach Up, and then the album comes to a screeching halt with the boring ballad Anything. The synth “curtains” are sometimes so thick that you only notice the guitar in the “background.”
White Widdow once again trade very effectively on a proven formula of musical vocabulary, but the album once again falls prey to the overall feeling that the songs are too similar to each other. Okay, sure, in the AOR genre it’s hard to swerve “left” or “right” since the molds are clearly laid out, but the ideas still sometimes feel almost identical, just packaged a little differently in the compositions (chord progression lines in the phrasing, vocal melodies in the verses). The predecessor »Silhoutte« (2016) left the same impression. The good old Bajaga once said: »Doboš, udara samo na dva« («The drum only hits on two»). Meaning the band is “strictly mathematical” and doesn’t stray from the four-quarter fluttering of its little songs, even if some repeated transitional bits in the mid-eight passages don’t satisfy at all, since, following the mold, White Widdow don’t use the space opening up for them, which they could have filled with extra guitar solos. What White Widdow need is a good producer and maybe another guitarist, or else a fundamental change in the arrangements so they make much better use of Almanzi, because he’s a truly superb musician.
Sonically, White Widdow are interesting for everyone drawn in this new era to the “softer” sound of bands like Houston, Work Of Art, and a few “decent” Def Leppard imitators à la Grand Design. White Widdow certainly drag the findings of classic eighties AOR bands à la FM and/or Giuffria out into the open, which is of course expected. »Victory« will also go down well with fans of classic AOR sound, decently “reheated,” “translated,” and “repackaged” for new times. That said, White Widdow have started repeating themselves, and at this rate they’ll have a hard time ever being as interesting and “fresh” as the material on their first three studio albums.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
track list:
1 Victory (3:34)
2 Fight For Love (3:34)
3 Second Hand Heart (4:51)
4 Late Night Liaison (3:47)
5 Danced in the Moonlight (4:43)
6 Love And Hate (3:58)
7 Reach Up (3:46)
8 Anything (4:02)
9 America (4:28)
10 Run and Hide (3:41)
line-up:
Jules Millis – vocals
Xavier Millis – keyboards, backing vocals
Enzo Almanzi – guitar
Ben Webster – bass guitar
Gavin Hill – drums
