Magnus Karlsson is a Swedish heavy metal songwriter, guitarist, multi-instrumentalist and producer. He is currently a session musician and songwriter of Primal Fear. Karlsson is well known as the mastermind behind several Frontiers productions, including the successful Allen/Lande trilogy as well as releases by Starbreaker (with Tony Harnell), Bob Catley, and Kiske/Somerville. Free Fall is his own project with the first full-length studio album being released in 2013. It was a very good album featuring an all star line-up with singers such as Russell Allen, Ralf Scheepers, Rick Altzi, David Readman and Mark Boals. The second album, Kingdom of Rock (2015) also had a great line-up, but I remember it fell flat for me.
Five years later Karlsson is back with the same concept. He writes the music, plays guitars, bass, keyboard and sings a couple of songs, he hires a good drummer, in this case Anders Köllerfors, and a roster of singers. For We Are the Night we have Dino Jelusick (Animal Drive), Renan Zonta (Electric Mob) and Tony Martin (ex-Black Sabbath) in 2 songs each. Noora Louhimo (Battle Beast), Mike Andersson (Cloudscape), and Ronnie Romero (Rainbow) in one song each. This is obviously a much less stellar line-up of singers compared to the previous two albums. However, the performances are actually at par or even better than previously. Here we have quite a few hungry young talents giving all they can on those songs. Additionally, this time around the mixing was done by Jacob Hansen (Volbeat, Primal Fear, Amaranthe, Pretty Maids, etc.). Spoiler alert, the result is the best Free Fall album to date.
The advantage of the Free Fall concept compared to, for example, Avantasia, is that Karlsson let each singer perform a full song by him/herself. That gives character to each song and moreover we don't have to listen to duets all the time. The album is of course full of cliches and it's very predictable but it's all done with high quality and it's super fun and catchy. The melodies immediately become sing-along anthems and the choruses are big and contagious. There are cool power metal riffs, twin guitars, great solos and needless to say outstanding vocal performances. Another positive point is that the one song more on the ballad side is not too mellow and Noora Louhimo delivers it with power. Very often an album like this features a super cheesy ballad with a female singer that completely ruins the album flow for me. But while track four "Queen Of Fire" starts that way, after one minute it becomes a mid-tempo hard rock song that is quite fun to listen to. There's also an instrumental song "On My Way Back To Earth" full of shredding intertwined with some beautiful acoustic guitar arpeggios. It's actually an homage to Steve Morse played on his signature guitar. No wonder I liked it so much.
Dino Jelusick and Renan Zonta performances and songs are the highlights of the album. The only veteran singer Tony Martin does a fine job with his two songs. There are no bad tracks in We Are the Night. That's very often a problem with power metal albums, they get too long and loose steam at the end. Not the case here, albeit a bit long with 12 songs in one hour, the disc sustains the quality till the end. My least favorite songs are "All The Way To The Stars". It's too bad and features a fantastic guitar solo, but maybe too close to being an AOR song and "Don't Walk Away".
I'm glad that We Are the Night release date was kept because with less competing releases, it got the deserved attention. Magnus Karlsson neck for writing catchy melodic metal combined with singers full of talent and energy and wrapped in an above average production is one of the good surprises of the year. The best Free Fall album to date is indeed a power metal blast which can’t be missed by all lovers of European melodic metal!
SCORE: 82/100
Genre: Power Metal
Released by Frontiers Music srl on June 12th, 2020
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Rating System*
99 - 100 Perfect
94 - 98 Excellent
87 - 93 Great
82 - 86 Very Good
77 - 81 Good
66 - 76 Mixed
58 - 65 Bad
* slightly adapted on May 24th, 2020 due to statistical review
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