Frontiers Records

A new album from House Of Lords is something I’m always looking for.  In all those years since this band, fronted by James Christian came on the scene, they’ve never managed to release a bad album.

It has to be said they won’t win the price for originality or inventiveness, as time upon time they go back to their roots, but hey is that so bad ?  Other bands have done the same, if I only may mention one of my all time metal gods Iron Maiden.  So what you get on this album is melodic hard rock, well performed.

When I played this album for the first time, similarities between this band’s music and Sonata Arctica where something I immediately remarked.  And this should not sound as a wonder, since the brain between this was none other than Jani Liimatainen, one of the founding members of Sonata Arctica.

My guess is, lots of visitors of this website weren’t even born when this band started out. After all, Uriah Heep have been around for over 4 decades, and should be named as one of the founding fathers of our beloved music genre, together with Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. And after all these years, the Heep still continue bringing out new albums, and relentlessly touring the earth.

What is the result when you join Russel Allen (Symphony X, Adrenaline Mobb) and Mat Sinner (Sinner, Primal Fear,…) ?  A highly explosive, volatile cocktail that brings us a fantastic metal album.  To complete the lineup, there’s Randy Black on drums, and Alex Beyrodt on guitar but also Alessandro Del Vecchio (Hardline, Voodoo Circle) on guitars, and finally Roland Grapow (ex Hellowe

What do you get when you combine the vocals of Michael Sweet of Christian hard rockers Stryper, and the guitar of George Lynch (Dokken, Lynch Mob) ?  A fantastic sounding combination.  Add James Lomenzo (ex Megadeth, White Lion, Black Label Society) and finally Brian Tichy (ex Whitesnake) on drums.

When I saw the name Bailey I immediately thought of Blaze Bailey, but this is an album by Nigel Bailey, frontmen of Three Lions.  As a matter of fact the release of this album is only six months after the release of the Three Lions album.

I’ve always wondered what to make of this band.  They have some great rock songs, but are probably best known for their global hit ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’, and also for ‘Waiting For A Girl Like You’.  Both of these hits were recorded with Lou Gramm on vocals, who was the original vocalist of the band, and who left in 1990, only to return in 1992, and again leaving the band in 2003.

So far this Swedish band has released 3 studio albums, so this self-named album is their fourth effort. What they bring us here is a mix of hair metal, combined with melodic hard rock, so this might be an album that pleases a lot of people. What this band reminds me of, are the glorious eighthies, with stadium bands like Def Leppard and Whitesnake, although their sound is not the same, due to the hair metal influences of course.

Is David Coverdale in need of some money, or is Frontiers Records running out of new bands I don’t know, but this is the umpteenth live album from this band that is released the last years.

Of course it’s true that 2014 marks the 30^th Anniversary of the ‘Slide It In’ album, which is the first album they received multiple Platinum for.  But we’ve heard all these songs before, and most of them feature on one – or another – live album from this band.

I never was a real Heart fan, despite the facts that they had some good songs, not the least of all on of their early successes ‘Barracuda’, but also to the fact that in the eighties I used to listen to AFN network (the radio station for the American Forces in Germany), because this was one of the few radio stations at that time that played AOR.