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Frontiers [Release date: 21.10.22]
Stryper are a talented, durable, outspoken band, and well before their gradual drift from AOR to Hard Rock to Heavy Metal they were strongly influenced by what they observed around them, and accordingly expressed their beliefs in song.
The core of the band remains Michael Sweet, Robert Sweet and Oz Fox. Personal health problems have no doubt thrown a shadow over much of what they write and record nowadays.
When we reviewed their last album, “Even The Devil Believes”, we noted that it might just be Stryper’s most significant recording, one where they’ve felt free to speak openly without restraint. The Heavy Metal genre has always seemed the most suitable place to do that, and their direction of travel is maintained here.
Musically, melodically, The Final Battle mines the motherlode of Classic Metal they’ve been gravitating toward, and it seems to come easy now.
Vocalist/ Writer/ Guitarist/ Producer, Michael Sweet again lets loose a high pitched howl as he strides onto the melodic metal battlefield that belongs to ‘Transgressor’, the album’s opening track. This “war cry” has become a Heavy Metal Kitemark as much as a statement of intent, branding the band’s music as metal we can trust.
Standout track, ‘Rise To The Call’ was released as a trailer single earlier this year. It comes barrelling out the speakers like a juggernaut, powerful, melodic and single minded. The band might be looking back on the long road travelled and sizing up the the shorter road ahead, but this feels fresh.
The galloping rhythms of ‘Same Old Story’s old school metal and the emphatic, pared down ‘Out, Up and In’ provide some variation to the blueprint, and elsewhere, song titles like ‘No Rest For The Wicked’ and ‘Heart And Soul’ just about tell their own story.
No argument, in the best sense of the word, Sweet is a journeyman. He knows that simple, well written metal, surefooted, with not too many moving parts, punctuated by his nasal howl, gets the job done. ****
Review by Brian McGowan
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