Veronica “The V” Freeman will be familar to some as the vocalist with power metallers Benedictum, a US/Euro outfit who often favour bombast over decent songs. Her first solo release, 2015’s ‘Now Or Never’ (released via Frontiers Records, home of the previous two Benedictum discs) retains a fair amount of heaviness, but brings in a much welcome melodic element. The dozen featured numbers hark back to the days of classic eighties sounding metal, with tunes regularly casting Freeman in a Doro Pesche-esque mould.
Tag Archives: hard rock
INTERIM – Metanarratives EP
Interim are a five piece alternative/hard rock band from Australia who’ve previously been championed by their own country’s famous rock radio station Triple J. By the time of their 2015 EP release ‘Metanarratives’ the band sounds more than established – the five songs on this release are of a very high standard indeed, effortlessly mixing hard rock, post-grunge and blues sounds to create a heavy yet melodic style.
DEAD SHED JOKERS – Dead Shed Jokers
Following the release of their debut album in 2013, Welsh hard rockers Dead Shed Jokers were praised by UK’s Classic Rock Magazine and picked out as a band whose star was very much on the ascent. Two years on, their self-titled follow up brings the rock in a hugely unsubtle fashion, mixing heavy blues riffs with a truckload of distortion, a post-grungy attitude towards the more angular and a frightening amount of bravado.
BEAUVOIR/FREE – American Trash
1992 saw the launch of Now & Then Records, a small independent label specialising in melodic rock. Although the UK label’s time was brief, over the course of their lifespan, the label released the best AOR of the era. Gaining the rights to a few tapes that had otherwise sat gathering dust in record company vaults, they released records by Jeff Cannata, Mark Free and Takara, a band fronted by the now legendary Jeff Scott Soto. Among the label’s other early releases was the Crown of Thorns debut, a band uniting singer-songwriter Jean Beauvoir previously of Voodoo X and the Plasmatics with guitarist/songwriter Micki Free, previously of the rather more unlikely Shalamar. One of the all-time great debuts of rock, the record brought killer melodic rock track after killer melodic rock track in a way that few had managed since 1987, and choruses that represent the finest AOR melodies. Decades on, ‘Crown of Thorns’ is a recording that never pales in its appeal.
CROWSAW – Karma EP
In 2014 UK rockers Crowsaw released ‘Smoke & Mirrors’, a blues-edged collection of songs which was well received in some quarters. For those expecting them to pick up where they left off and build upon their cult following, 2015’s ‘Karma’ may come as a bit of a surprise. Rethinking their game plan, the band have taken their melodic vocal and riff-based sound, dispensed with pretty much any Hendrix and Cry Of Love influences and heavied up the guitars about seventy percent. There’s a huge amount of rock at the core of the material – as is only natural – but all previous blues influences have been thrown out of the window in favour of channelling a defiant metallic crunch.