Album Review: MSG - Immortal

It's been a good long while since I found myself enjoying a Michael Schenker album. "In The Midst Of Beauty" was very good, even if it featured the controversial vocals of Gary Barden (his voice is shot, yes, but it turned into a tone I find interesting). Since then, Schenker has been touring and recording under various 'band' names, recruiting every singer he had ever played and broken up with, turning as much into a nostalgic festival dedicated to himself than anything forward looking. His recent albums have been more of the same, just with singers who are there to make you say, "hey, look who's singing!". Oh, and several of them happen to sound pretty old at this point.

So now that Schenker has revived the MSG moniker, you might think that means things have changed. It doesn't. This is still a Michael Schenker album as we have known them, and the rotating cast of voices is still here, albeit with a new addition. If anything says Schenker is up-to-date, it's the inclusion of Ronnie Romero. Good grief, I am sick of hearing the guy.

We also get vocals from Ralf Scheepers, Joe Lynn Turner, and Michael Voss, so if you expect this 'band' to sound like a band, you're out of luck. It sounds like a jukebox of Michael Schenker trademarks, which might be fine for you, but it's gets old for me. Other than his solos, there isn't much to tie the album together song-by-song.

Scheepers is the first one up on "Drilled To Kill", where he rasps more than screams over a chugging Schenker riff. There isn't much hook behind his military-themed lyrics, while the most interesting part of the song is the organ that colors the verses. The rest of the song is too cookie-cutter to be of much impact, and shows the wear and tear of fifty years of Schenker doing the exact same things. We've heard these same bits and pieces hundreds of times before, and we've heard most of them done better.

Voss sings the ballad "After The Rain", which feels far longer than its four-and-a-half minutes. Something about the song rings hollow, and doesn't have the emotional climax a great ballad needs. The parts are all there, but the spark isn't. It sounds more tired than it does emotional, so it doesn't work.

Also not working is "Devil's Daughter", where Scheepers takes on a vocal affect some people will describe as 'pure rock', but I will call unlistenable. He quietly shrieks his way through the verses with a ghastly tone, and I can't stand to make it through the rest of the song. If you ran Brian Johnson from AC/DC through vocal filters that sapped any of the bluesy swagger from him, you might have an approximation of what Scheepers is doing here. It's about as cool as rat-tail hairstyles were.

It's actually Romero who does the best job on this record, as he is the only singer who sounds comfortable singing hard rock that isn't trying to be metal. His songs, "Knight Of The Dead" and "Sail The Darkness" are perfectly solid Schenker tracks, and if they had gotten together to make an entire album of that sort, I would be pleasantly happy with the results. It still wouldn't be quite as good as "In The Midst Of Beauty", but it would have a lot going for it.

But with this cavalcade of voices that either don't sound good, or don't sound good for this music, MSG's album is more a collection of singles than a proper record. It's easier to take the handful of songs that are good separately, rather than sitting through the entire album. There simply isn't enough in this music to keep me interested for forty-five minutes through the questionable choices. At some point, I think Schenker needs to commit to one singer if he wants to make another great album, because these 'all-star' affairs never feel cohesive, and they have yet to really work.