Burning Rain - Face The Music (2019) [Hi-Res]

When a super band arises with members with long experience in its ranks, the fans’ anxiety is great, because they believe that their loved musicians will keep the same playing style that they are used to. It can be a gross mistake to have such feeling sometimes, while in other times it isn’t. And BURNING RAIN is on the second set of bands, because “Face the Music” is similar in many ways to what its members did on the past and do today.

It’s a Hard Rock with some influences from Blues Rock and Rock ‘n’ Roll, something that everyone already heard many times before. But what can we wait from a band whose members play (or have played) on well-known acts as THE DEAD DAISIES, DIO, WHITESNAKE (Doug); MONTROSE (Keith); and now Y & T (Brad) and SLAUGHTER (Blas)? A set of excellent songs, the purest breed of Hard Rock/Classic Rock music, done with excellent melodies, but always with a crude silk touch on the hooking melodies. Yes, it’s a great album, indeed.

“Face the Music” bears the classic sound quality for such musical genre: clean, aggressive and with the right amount of musical weight. But it sounds organic, spontaneous and alive, with a very good set of instrumental tunes (that seems to be the most natural possible, without modern gears boosting them all). And it fits perfectly on what their music needs.

Their music is so good to the ears that it makes the work to find the best songs a hard time. The best thing to do is to put the album to play on the repeat, but it’s impossible to not surrender when songs as the bluesy weight of “Revolution” (excellent guitars), the slow paced tempos and weight of “Lorelei” (bass guitar and drums are really creating a heavy rhythm here), the accessible and “put-the-house-down” Rock ‘n’ Roll of “Nasty Hustle”, the Country/Southern song “Shelter” (excellent vocals and backing vocals are present in the middle of the acoustic approach of the song), the nasty weight with aggressive guitars of “Beautiful Road”, the organic mix between Glam Metal with Hard Rock melodies shown on “Hit and Run”, and the Rock ‘n’ Blues crude insight of “Since I'm Loving You”. And there’s a bonus: another version for “Shelter”, with 95% of acoustic elements.

Although it’s nothing new at all, “Face the Music” is another excellent work from BURNING RAIN.