ALTER BRIDGE: Pawns & Kings (ALTERNATIVE METAL): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Nothing stops the duo at the helm of Alter Bridge, certainly not a pandemic that cut short the promotion of the excellent "Walk The Sky". Since this last one, the singer Myles Kennedy released his solo album "The Ides Of March" and "4" with Slash, and the guitarist Mark Tremonti his fifth personal opus "Marching In Time". Respecting the three years separating each production of their common project, here is the seventh album of Alter Bridge entitled "Pawns & Kings".

Album after album, the Americans accustom us each time a little more to excellence. This "Pawns & Kings" maintains the addictive effect without creating the overdose but without provoking the ecstasy for all that. With a direct and devastating beginning, a particularly topical and metal-laden 'This Is War', 'Dead Among The Living' and 'Silver Tongue' more alternative but not less melodic, "Pawns & Kings" makes a demonstration of bravery from its beginning. Alter Bridge places its record under the sign of a raw metal without the apparatuses of arrangements which could have been highlighted in the last record. This does not prevent it from appearing musically dense, diversifying the formats and making its compositions more complex.

With such a thematic crossing the disc, this one could obviously not make the impasse on the most epic component developed by the band these last ten years . Three tracks stand out, 'Sin After Sin', its brilliant riff in triad of notes and its false mid-tempo side boosted with steroids, the final 'Pawns & Kings' and its surging musical narrative and especially the fabulous 'Fable Of The Silent Son', mixing grandiloquence of the songs, with a superb vocal performance, variety of sequences and successions of irresistible rises in intensity. All three of them justify the attentive listening of this record which knows some more restful moments and more prompts to catch the greatest number like the mid-tempo 'Stay' sung by a Tremonti who shows once more his progress in this field and 'Holiday' carried by its driving rhythm.

"Pawns & Kings" synthesizes all the qualities of Alter Bridge, its gift for densified formats and its art of balance to build a varied and interesting record from beginning to end. As there was a qualitative leap with "Fortress", in which the Americans started to propose more elaborated compositions, Alter Bridge has all the cards in hand to find other margins of evolution in the future. Well installed on its throne, Alter Bridge can continue to forge its metal without fearing the challenge of its hold on the genre. - Official website

ALTER BRIDGE

PAWNS & KINGS

NAPALM RECORDS

ALTERNATIVE METAL