Album review: ALLIANCE – Before Our Eyes

March 24th, 2025 by brianmc

Frontiers Music [Release date: 28.03.25]

Before Our Eyes is the new album from Alliance: Robert (3, GTR) Berry, David (Sammy Hagar) Lauser and Gary (Boston) Pihl. It’s their first on Frontiers, and only their sixth in 30 years.

The band members’ storied past and present – careers on the frontline of rock’n’roll – is well documented online.

Large gaps between albums suggest these musicians are always busy on other projects, and they are. But the truth is they’ve been sending and swapping their digitised recordings with each other online for a while now.

It’s a modus operandi for a lot of bands. Geography is not a limiting factor today.

And you might expect that all these years in the music business would lead to a safety first, take no risks attitude. Instead, rather than stifle creativeness, that in itself lends a freshness to the music.

Before Our Eyes is an album brimming with experience, emotion and ideas, it’s ultimately aimed at the fans who have always stuck with them, through thick and thin.

The songs. Sometimes they simmer, like the bluesy, world weary observations of ‘Too Many People’. Sometimes they sparkle, like ‘Tell Somebody’, where Berry’s rough hewn vocals squeeze out a song crafted from Texas blues.

Most of the time they show an aversion to polished sounds. On the sardonic, sanded down melodic rock of ‘Nothing Will Make You Change’, Lauser’s beats and Berry’s bass can be heard loud and clear. Pihl’s chiming guitar just sits in front of it all, adding and subtracting, a slight change of direction here and there, like an orchestra conductor, allowing Berry free rein to voice the frustrations he clearly feels.

‘Good Life’ is a tip of the hat to a life lived in rock, opening with Who like power chords, and closing, deftly, on a Revolver-ish guitar solo. We get it.

Especially, when ‘Joan Of Arc’ describes the flipside. ‘Life is hard on the road, drivin in the dark, when all I want is to make it home’.

In among these tracks is the more commercially sounding ‘Face Of Justice’… an energetic melodic rock song punctuated by Prog stylings. Peter Gabriel meets Night Ranger. A compelling creation. ***1/2

Review by Brian McGowan

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