Album Review: Spirits Of Fire - Embrace The Unknown

What does a band do when they lose one of the generic, man-in-every-band singers in Ripper Owens? They replace him with his European counterpart, Fabio Leone, who has been in more bands at this point than I can count. Music has become increasingly incestuous in recent years, as the same people keep coming together in new combinations to make the same boring music. I get why they feel like they need to do this, but at a certain point it becomes too much for us, the listeners. There's only so much we can take of the same thing again and again. I'm tired of a lot of it.

Fabio is truly a gun-for-hire here, changing his whole delivery to more or less sound exactly like Ripper. He growls and shrieks his way through these songs in quite the mimicry job, to the point where he barely sounds like himself. Credit is due for the skill, but immediately taken away for the cynicism of the whole thing.

The song "Resurrection" drove me absolutely nuts. Chris Caffery's riff in the verse uses a harmonic in such a repetitive way it almost made me dizzy, and it certainly made me not care about anything else the song had to offer. That wasn't much, but still. "Wildest Dreams" is much better, since it actually has a melody, and Fabio sings it in a voice that doesn't sound like an act. If they decided to go down that route, rather than trying to prove how heavy and metal they are, this would be a far better album.

Too much of the album feels like the band going through the motions, ticking off the boxes of what a metal album is supposed to be. Caffery is best known for playing in Savatage, but don't expect any of that band's personality to come through here. Everything anyone loved about that band came from other people, and Caffery doesn't seem to have absorbed any of it through osmosis, other than the very scooped 80s guitar tone.

We still have Judas Priest making this kind of metal, and we have KK's Priest joining the fray, and Ripper gets hired to do the same quite often. With so much already being put out that has a true connection to the history of the sound, this second-rate version doesn't even have a pedigree to fall back on. It's a band of people who have never been great songwriters trying to find their way without anyone to point them in the right direction. There are a couple of spots where they get it right, but too many where they play dull riffs and sing bland melodies.

You don't need to look much further than the album cover. It's a cheesy looking take on what was cool in the 80s. This album is still living in those days, and rather than being a fun throwback, it sounds like people unable to move on once that time passed by. It's been done far worse, but that doesn't mean being better than that is the same thing as being good.