Album review: ZADRA – Guiding Star

February 20th, 2022 by brianmc

Frontiers [Release date : 18.02.22]

Guitarist/songwriter/vocalist, August Zadra’s main claim to fame is his lengthy tenure as Dennis DeYoung’s sideman, touring and recording with him since 2010.

Guiding Star is his first “solo” album. A considerable weight of talent and experience was added to the songwriting and the recording effort, including DeYoung, Jeff Scott Soto, Pete Alpenborg, Jan Akesson and the famous Jimmy Leahy.

An epic, majestic intro leads us into opening track, ‘Come Together’. Full of choral harmony bgvs and a spare orchestral arrangement, ignited by spiralling axework. It makes us sit up and take notice. Entirely the point.

The trick, of course, is to make the musical styles of the past, specifically the eighties, sound relevant today. His “bandmate”, DeYoung does that in his solo act with skill and acumen, by marrying a vaudevillian take on rock’n'roll to dramatic, stadium sized balladry.

Zadra wears those influences well, integrating them into an intense and forceful musical style, with a welcome emphasis on melody. . . the spiritual yearning of ‘Nothing To Say’ builds quickly, crafting a liquid wall of backing voices onto a muscular tune, and ‘Escape The Rain’, one of the album’s standout tracks, is good old fashioned melodic rock with a sharp edge and a sturdy, clean shaven chorus, like something Tommy Shaw might have written for Damn Yankees.

The rest of the album follows this example. Nothing truly breaks the mould, or wants to. The direct, torqued up guitars of ‘Ship Of Fools’ hasten Zadra’s gritty vocals into a climactic, hard hitting chorus, and the smooth, shuffling nitetime AOR of ‘Come back To me’ provides some nicely set up romanticism.

Only the balladic ‘Take My Hand’ really dares to be different. It’s an insightful, personal appraisal of life and living that suddenly switches gears, exploding into amped up guitar action halfway through, then blazes its way to the finishing like in a welter of Styx like harmonies. ***1/2

Review by Brian McGowan

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