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Frontiers [Release date 17.02.23]
Harry (Harem Scarem) Hess teams up this time with producer/writer, Michele Guiatoli, who has recently impressed us with his guitar and mixing desk skills on the Issa album, Lights Of Japan.
The last First Signal album was something of a disappointment, largely down to Daniel Flores’s milky production and Alessandro Del Vecchio’s unexciting songs.
Face Your Fears, appropriately, goes quite some way to correcting that.
Opener, ‘Unbreakable’ reminds us, as if we’ve forgotten, that Hess was the prime mover in the legendary Harem Scarem, at one time the genre’s great white hope.
Apparently Guiatoli challenged Hess … not necessarily to match his earlier HS high points, but make a truly great melodic rock album again.
Working in collaboration, the duo met the challenge head on, and here have delivered 11 tracks that sound fresh, exciting and powerful, overflowing with conviction in their ability as artists, and clearly filled with affection for their art.
‘Unbreakable’ is the first statement. It’s a hard hitting, compelling melodic rock song.
‘Face Your Fears’, ‘Never Let You Go’ and ‘Never Be Silenced’ are brimful of heart stopping hooks and aggressively infectious choruses.
Better than that, ‘Shoot The Bullet’s blessed chorus and ‘Rain For Your Roses’ beautiful chord shifts pick up where Harem Scarem left off with Weight Of The World in 2002. In your face, almost carelessly melodic, engaging, purposeful. When you get to this point you’re thinking that Hess is on a mission of some kind. Getting older, a family man. Plenty of steely guitar work, but there’s a warmth here, like there is something more going on.
The highly accessible ballad/ love song, ‘Always Be There’, confirms that notion, with Hess suggesting that he’s been there, done that, and is perfectly happy with where he is now… ‘you and me are forever’.
Nice way to sign off. ****1/2
Review by Brian McGowan
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