Review Summary: Let's Zep-Again or Rock N'Roll as it should be
When I hear the word supergroup I think immediately of the word “Rockstar resurrection”.
The reason why is quite obvious: Musicians from past decades, who are barely noticed anymore by larger audiences, team up with their peers or younger, sometimes unknown, artist and record one or two albums together and usually achieve some success. Remember Vevlet Revolvers Contraband? Love it, hate it or ignore it: It is one of the few rock albums to reach No.1 on the Billboard 200 within the last decade. Weiland, Slash & Co. were mainstream performers again and not some kind of relict from the past. Black Country Communion seems to be quite promising – at least name-wise. The band consists of Glenn Hughes(Deep Purple, Trapeze) on vocals/bass, Joe Bonamassa on guitar/vocals, Derek Sherinian(Dream Theater) on keyboards and Jason Bonham(son of John Bonahm) – of course – on the drums.
The album starts with full power straight away with
“The Outsider”. Big guitar riffs, a bluesy solo, textures and solos by the keyboard and the best thing: Glenn Hughes can still sing like back in the days. Always 100%. Nothing less. A few more tracks (most notably
“Smokestack Woman”) on the album work in a quite similar way, but each of them is unique and different enough from the others to make it a pleasure to listen to them without the feeling, that you have already heard this track a dozen times.
Folk-Rock songs like
“The Battle for Hadrian’s Wall” and more slow and melancholic, but not icky at all, songs always create enough diversity in addition to the classic hard rock. Although I just have to notice 1 thing: They sound a lot like Led Zeppelin.
“Little Secret”, for example, is basically a 1:1 copy of “Since I’ve been loving you”. Another song is
“Save Me”, which more or less sounds like “Kashmir”, which is best shown by the usage of the strings during this song, in combination with a slightly varied riff from “Immigrant Song”. Since we are not at school, no one complains about copying other peoples work. In fact, this is what most people, myself included, consider good rock music. What is probably more important: All of those songs sound really authentic. They all consist of handmade melodies, dynamic and yet heavy sounding rhythms and the right amount of textures and details added.
Special mention goes to the penultimate track
“Crossfire”, which has a probably the most memorable guitar riff you will hear on this album (and probably for the next few months). The rather clean chorus highlights the distorted riff even more. Followed by the last track,
“Cold”, which is a beautiful, sad, but yet really powerful, ballad, the overall mood calms down and is therefore a good closer for the album.
Overall, the music consists of explosive drum beats, bluesy guitar solos crying like banshees, big riffs, refreshing additional instruments and Hughes always sings with full emotion and power. Every member of the band seems to be in his element. Whereas their debut album included a lot of endless jam marathon songs, “2” is rather focusing on clear structures and elaborated melodies. All songs sound like what you would expect from classic rock, but they are all unique enough to create enough diversity. I would like to conclude by saying that the album is just lacking 1 thing: Something new and extraordinary. You won’t hear anything that really surprises you or any real outstanding song, but you won’t hear a single bad song over the whole 64 minute duration.
4.0/5
Recommended Tracks:
“Smokestack Woman”
“Cold”
“The Outsider”
“The Battle for Hadrian’s Wall”
