Vintage Guitar April 2019

Suzi Quatro remains a staple for so many rock fans spanning far and wide so it’s of little surprise that news of a new album is the catalyst for celebration the globe over. If one puts aside for a moment who this is and with a feeble attempt to ignore the hype the most striking element of the new album title No Control is surely that it is a genuinely great album all on its own. Returning our key protagonists to the fore and releasing the cheers of unbridled glee is when the collection establishes a new dimension of genuine greatness…

Awesome solo disc by this excellent guitarist from Greece featuring 13 songs of retro-classic, blues-based, soul-powered, dynamic hard rock music that lands with supreme excellence. Stavros Papadopoulos is a modern day Greek guitar hero, songwriter & producer who was born to rock…

Continuing their nearly unbroken string of unclassifiably terrific albums, Norwegian trio Motorpsycho deliver one of their finest with the epic Black Hole/Blank Canvas. A two-disc, 17-track set, Black Hole/Blank Canvas leans more to the group's drony psychedelic side than its heavier acid rock sound, with a stronger than usual overlay of sweetly melodic pop hooks to go along with all the pleasurably noisy guitars…

From the USA came Lift, an enthusiastic and talented progressive ensemble that released their debut album "Caverns of Your Brain" during the second half of the 70s, although their repertoire at the time was older ,as well as more abundant than the one finally container in the original release. What we have here is a combination of vibrating melodic symphonic prog (pre-Howe Yes, Flash), the energy of "Remember the Future"- era Nektar and the eerie ambiances of Floydian inspiration, generally for the softer parts of the material. Hilton-Green's vocal timber helps the band to keep their Yessian tendencies well alive. The musical ideas are more focused on dynamics than on solidity, which makes them stand closer to their compatriots Quill and The Load and less closer to Kansas and Babylon (just to name other compatriots): the musicians of Lift are more into deepening the potentials of their musical ideas and transform them into robust jamming in an ordered fashion, yet revealing wide space for freedom in the culmination of their sonic expression.

This is Roine Stolt's (The Flower Kings, Transatlantic, Agents of Mercy, Kaipa) double solo CD that’s rootsy and bluesy and very cool. Featuring some lead and backing vocals from Neal Morse, this album has a killer band and is trademark, vintage Roine in all his creative brilliance. This is what Roine says about it: “For a long time I've wanted to do something that is connected with my roots and the way I heard music in my teens. Even the lyrics on this album reflect a spirit that was around at the time, slightly political and as true today as back then. I also wanted to do an album that focus heavily on my guitar playing and in particular the more 60-70's style blues playing with a sound that is closer to clean tube amp than modern overdriven rectified…

Since bursting on to the UK Blues scene with their debut record ‘The Uprising EP’ in April 2019 followed by their second EP ‘Innocence Of Youth’ in May 2020, Grace and Aaron have been going from strength to strength. The British husband and wife duo have an ever-growing online fan base and have gained the attention of Cerys Matthews’ The Blues Show on BBC Radio 2. Their unique harmonic vocal-led approach to song writing, dirty electric guitar, slide resonator mandolin and fiddle create a unique distinctive and contemporary blues rock sound that echoes 1970s classic rock with hints of the 1930s blues that inspire them.