Album Review: Front Row Warriors - Running Out Of Time
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
I thought about writing this review in German. It seemed like a fun gimmick, and thematically congruent with the band themselves being German. The idea ultimately collapsed when I realised that I don’t know German, and while I do put a lot of effort into these reviews, I'm not quite comfortable asking the editor to give me an extra few months on the deadline so I can pick up a second language for a gag that makes the review harder to read. Es tut mir leid. However, all is not lost, for the music of Front Row Warriors speaks entirely for itself. Theirs is the fertile soil between traditional heavy metal and a distinctly European strand of power metal, armed with diamond-edged hooks that puncture with almost perfunctory ease any defences raised in defiance of them.
We’re dealing with some prime German engineering here, the type of thing overseen by a heavily moustachioed guy in a picklehaube who nods once, expression frozen, and says “Ja. Ist gut”. But it goes beyond merely satisfactory; “Cast a Spell” is so good it feels like it might be legally dubious. It’s a conglomeration of excellent elements from it’s scything verse riff to the epinephrine surge of it’s chorus; the best though comes later - the way the bridge into the solo builds and builds then just ignites outstrips the power of words to do it justice. It’s components don’t escape dry description but that could never hope to encapsulate the effect that a simple accumulation of words, enunciated with distorted yet piercing clarity, free falling into the solo had, sending a shiver like an earthquake dancing down my spine:
I
CAST
A
SPEEEEEEELL
And the solo tears off at escape velocity, vitrifying the launch pad below it as it knifes into the heavens.
There are so many moments like that across the whole album in which the band seem to harness the restless spirit of metal itself in order to deliver uncompromising teutonic heavy metal of the first degree, but the price seems to have been the requirement to periodically indulge in the most godawful, insipid power balladry ever. “Seems Like Heaven” is unlistenably cheesy, almost like drowning in fondue, this slippery, saccharine, unbearably ‘80s spat of crooning that yanks the brakes on the crazy train and forces us all through an interminable 5 minutes of slow, sappy oxygen thievery. It’s the undisputed nadir of the album, with runner-up for that honour going to “Theory of Mind”, a wholly irrelevant minute long spate of synths and the sort of aimless prog guitar fiddling that ET listens to when he sparks up a fat blunt. That it comes as the second song of the album is such a weird choice of sequencing too, as though the intention was to corral any steam the introductory track itself had built.
Somehow it’s more annoying when something awesome sports a few prominent flaws than it is when something uniformly shit exists in its entirety. With Front Row Warriors, what I have is an album full of fantastic shit like “Rise Against”, with duelling guitar and keyboard solos, a snarling pugilist of a chorus that lodges into your brain like grey matter implanted via ICBM, and a scream at 0.08 that sounds like Pavarotti slamming his nuts in car door. Fantastic shit like “Heartbreaker” that calls forth the impossibly cool swagger of “Starbreaker” from the immortal “Sin After Sin” album, imbued with the steadfast conviction that the down-picked chug and a kinetic, spritely drum pattern will forever remain the most compelling single musical combination of all time. Fantastic shit like opener “Turn the Tide” which zeroes in like an airstrike, glorious power metal riffs sledgehammering away with infinite magnificence, the slinky keyboards in the background injecting new melodies layered o’erhanging and righteous, and can we talk about vocalist Elkie Gee? Christ, she’s good – her default voice has this sneering attitude that totally sells every word and she can switch between tones at the drop of...well, virtually anything. Swap the earth’s core out with a black hole and she’ll beat it’s gravity to the punch. But you know those moments when metal vocalists decide the time has come to send their voices shooting up to wave hello to presumably rather confused Boeing 737 pilots ploughing amiably through the cloudbed? Well, Elkie nails every one of those perfect moments, like at 3.45 when she hits a scream that disorients bats across the globe. Fantastic shit, wherever you turn. Then what does the final, eponymous track decide is in order? Why, cowbell of course. It’s not even as though it’s a bad song on the whole – the guitar harmonies at 3.36 are amazing, and the song in large part feels as though it’s trying to invoke the stadium-levelling might of a pop metal behemoth like “Living after Midnight”, but there’s just... occasional choices that derail it.
It wouldn’t be fair to call this a mixed bag, not when the good is as good as it is, and not when it outweighs the bad as comprehensively as it does. It entirely comes down to what I mentioned earlier – the faults being all the more noticeable for their marvellous surroundings. Like if I give you some bucolic scene of pastoral splendour, you’re going to notice the burnt wreckage of a bus a bit more easily than you would if you and it were shoved into the same post-nuclear irradiated wasteland. I’m writing this from a holiday resort in Majorca that is, for whatever reason, absolutely full of Germans. I don’t know if any of them like metal, though I’ve a certain urge to find out by screaming Sodom lyrics and seeing who joins in. Not that I’m a big believer in a divine will or anything along those lines, but it’s whimsical how these things turn out sometimes. You should never do this, but if you were to rank people according to the respective contributions of their parent nation to heavy metal, then the Germans would most assuredly warrant one of the topmost spots. Front Row Warriors proudly continue that most revered tradition of German metal excellence. I hope they can knock a few of the little annoyances on the head next time around, but whatever they decide to do, I’ll be waiting and listening intently.
