The debut album from Circus of Rock gave hard rock fans plenty to enjoy. The side project from King Company’s Mika Rantanen saw the Finnish musician collaborating with a whole host of familiar faces, including Tyketto’s Danny Vaughn, Axel Rudi Pell, Hardline vocalist Johnny Gioeli, and ex-Nightwish man Marco Hietala. This second outing for the Circus (released in May 2023) isn’t quite as impressive in terms of roll call, but any album that features vocal contributions from Uriah Heep’s Bernie Shaw and the legendary Jeff Scott Soto is definitely worth hearing.
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BLACK EYE – Black Eye
David Readman will be familiar to many rock fans for being the vocalist with German band Pink Cream 69. He replaced Andi Deris as their frontman in 1994 and has since contributed to some of the melodic rock/metal band’s strongest work, with 2013’s ‘Ceremonial’ providing something of a late career high point. In addition, he’s been the vocalist for Voodoo Circle and Room Service, and guested on cult works by Luca Turilli’s Rhapsody, Place Vendome, and Magnus Karlsson’s Free Fall. In 2021, he released a well received solo album ‘Medusa’, which showed how he’d lost none of his vocal power over the years.
KHYMERA – Master Of Illusions
‘Master of Illusions’ comes five years after Khymera’s previous studio album ‘The Grand Design’, making the wait for new material almost as long as the band’s seven year hiatus following 2008’s ‘The Greatest Wonder’. It’s not like band leader Dennis Ward has been resting, of course: he’s continued to be one of the busiest men in the melodic rock scene, working with his other band Pink Cream 69 and moonlighting with Place Vendome (both of whom released albums in 2017), making an album with Gus G in 2018 and even stepping in for bass duties on Magnum’s 2020 opus ‘The Serpent Rings’. You have to wonder if he ever sleeps.
The all round quality of Khymera’s ‘Master of Illusions’ doesn’t suggest that Ward has spread himself too thinly, either. The album has more than enough top drawer material to make it stand up with the band’s earlier works. In ‘Follow The Sun’ and ‘After All This Time’, there are a couple of career bests, which is reason enough to check out this long player.
KHYMERA – The Grand Design
Khymera are an example of a band with a fairly fluid existence. Originally formed as a project for Italian musician Daniele Liverani and sometime Kansas man Steve Walsh, they gained a following despite not always being as impressive as Walsh’s Streets, or hitting the highs of another band from the Kansas family tree, the mighty Seventh Key. Walsh only appeared on the debut LP, subsequently handing lead vocal duties over to Pink Cream 69 man Dennis Ward for the next two releases – works that seemed well respected within the AOR community.
MAGNUS KARLSSON’S FREE FALL – Kingdom Of Rock
Back in 2013 Magnus Karlsson released an album entitled ‘Free Fall‘, a disc of hard rock collaborations with various guest vocalists that yielded mixed results. Mixed, maybe, but when those collaborations worked, in terms of classic hard rock, they hit the spot.