Wednesday, April 25, 2012

WILD FRONTIER: "2012"

Rating: 7/10
Label: Music By Mail 2012
Review by Alan Holloway

I know it’s not a new thing to have a band pop up that I’ve never heard of before, so it was no surprise to learn that Germany’s Wild Frontier have been recording an album every four or five years since the early 90s and in that time never darkened my personal doorstep. “2012” is their fifth such album, and although it contains nothing new it is still a nice piece or work.

Wild Frontier certainly seem to come across as a very, well, German band. Take bits of Bonfire and The Scorpions and mix liberally with the likes of Dokken, and you might well find Running Wild at the bottom of the bowl. Jens Walkenhorst has a slightly grating voice that takes a few songs to get used to, sort of like Klaus Meine with a bit of a sore throat, but by my second playback of the album I was quite enjoying myself. Thirteen tracks full of nice retro melody and thumping hard rock backing later I was actually enjoying “2012” much more than I had initially thought I would.

When they get going, such as on the blistering “It’s All Over Now”, or “Another Lonely Day Without You”, Wild Frontier can hold their own with the best melodic hard rock acts in Europe. There’s some cracking songs here, along with some more average ones (“Why Don’t You Save Me”, “Stay Tough”) and a sorely misguided cover of ABBA’s “Gimme Gimme Gimme”. The good certainly outweighs the bad, and whilst this isn’t anything big or particularly clever, “2012” is anything but a disaster
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