Frontiers [Release date : 15.09.23]

Unsurprisingly, after the commercial and critical success of Seventh Wonder’s most recent album, The Testament, released May 2022, the band’s previous, much lower profile albums have been given a new lease of life.

Frontiers Music recently bought up the licensing rights to four of those earlier releases:

Become (2005)
Waiting In The Wings (2006)
Mercy Falls (2008)
Great Escape (2010)

And have reissued them as a four album suite, all available from 15/9/23.
They can be bought separately, but once you’ve heard one . . .

The band took the Progressive Rock genre by the scruff of the neck back in 2005 and shook it vigorously. All the loose stuff fell out before they reached the studio… the needlessly frequent time changes; the esoteric lyrics; the literary allusions, and so on.

The albums that resulted are not without their concepts, what Progrock album would be? But what we have here is a band unafraid to push compositional and arrangement boundaries just far enough to make the music more interesting, indeed challenging at times, without spilling over into the unlistenable. They underpin this with memorable melodies. And that’s the key.

Lead track on Become, the punchy, finely calibrated ‘Day By Day’, could easily have been mistaken for a track from Graham Bonnet’s The Day I Went Mad, as he wrapped his stratospheric vocals around Mario Parga’s fiery but concise axework. Even the long guitar passage has a most unprog like Celtic / Galician flavour, adding colour with flamboyant, fine grain brush strokes.

True to the longform traditions of the genre, the source of the album’s title, ‘What I’ve Become’, clocks in at almost 9 minutes. The swarming guitars sometimes mistake power metal for progrock, but they keep the music fast and tight, and for the most part they trade melody for a satisfying complexity around the anti-war lyrics. ***1/2

While no one could argue that Waiting In The Wings is anything less than a Prog Rock album, the rock element is clearly beginning to outweigh the Prog. ‘Not An Angel’ and ‘Walking Tall’ have quite evidently crossed the border into Melodic Hard Rock territory. New vocalist Tommy Karevik (now with Kamelot), adds bite and conviction to the pointed lyrics. ***1/2

The “man in a coma” concept seems to have given the band additional focus on this 75 minute album, Mercy Falls. Artistic credibility, or artistic ambition at least, appears here to be a key motivator for the band. Telling an epic human tale is the stuff that people/ fans remember.

Opener, ‘A New Beginning’ is an immense piece of modified Progrock, melodically tailored to suit a wider Prog/Rock audience. Coupled with sequential track, ‘There And Back’ we’re introduced to lots of symphonic input, and an easy to follow storyline.

This is the sound of a band who really know where they’re headed and how to get there. ****

The Great Escape’s 30 minute title track is clearly the band’s magnum opus. A song where all they have aimed for is realised in an epic tale, musically and lyrically. The “division” of the song into musical chapters allows each one to carry the emotional weight needed to propel the story. It’s a musical and lyrical journey that burns slowly at times, yet flares brightly at the right moments.

Elsewhere, they twist and turn prog into melodic hard rock and vice versa, with ‘Alley Cat’ and ‘Move On Through’ being genuine standouts. ****

Listen to one of these four and you’ll want to hear the others.

Review by Brian McGowan

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Power Plays w/c 9 December 2024

In this sequence we play ‘The Best of 2024′ GRTR! reviewer selections

Featured Albums w/c 9 December 2024

09:00-12:00 The Best of 2024 (Melodic Rock)
12:00-13:00 The Best of 2003-2024 (Melodic Hard Rock)
14:00-16:00 The Best of 2024 (Singer Songwriter)

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