Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Take the mightiest roar from the express train that hurtles past you at 100 miles an hour at your local railway station and mix it with the romance and visual sense of a tropical thunderstorm in full force. That image is part the way to something that your jaw might just drop to as you take in the absolute power of nature and with that your some way to the effect that Michael Schenker and his latest album Bridge the Gap will leave you with.
Following on from his highly impressive Temple of Rock album, Michael Schenker returns with Herman Rarebell on drums, Francis Buchholz on bass alongside Doogie White and Wayne Findley to create something that could kick start a lethargic jet plane into gear. This sonorous and booming album resounds with the rock appetite, the crunching and terrific riffs that Michael Schenker does and has continued to do so well but with the great Doogie White’s unbelievably great vocals that soar higher than an eagle drifting majestically on a summer’s breeze alongside each near perfect note.
This album is not just dynamic, tracks such as Rock ‘n’ Symphony, the brutal strength and vigour of Land Of Thunder and the phenomenal Temple of the Holy show off the intensity of self-motivation, an enthusiasm of a collective sense of being somewhere together just at the right time and place to bring such quality onto one record. These feelings together with the honest appreciation that will surely follow from the fan base that may have thought that Temple of Rock might never be equalled as a 21st century Schenker classic.
Michael Schenker suggests that he wanted this album fast, heavy and melodic, on all three counts he has delivered in full, he has produced a knock-out blow to anyone who dare have any thought that rock, good old fashioned steam roller over the opposition, may have started to let go of its hold over the beating heart.
With Michael Schenker you can never really be in any doubt that what you will have is something that drives along at top speed but with the precision of a well-aimed set of arrows that hit the mark again and again, in Bridge The Gap that aim is heightened and even more true.
Bridge The Gap is released on Monday 2nd December.
Ian D. Hall