IMPELLITTERI – War Machine

vote
6.0

• Bands:
  IMPELLITTERIAN
• Duration: 00:43:01
• Available from: 08/11/2024
• Label:

• Frontiers

Streaming not yet available

Chris Impellitteri is a true guitar icon, who has inspired many musicians and still continues to make albums with the band that bears his name and which has now sold more than two million records worldwide. This new work, entitled “War Machine”, is the twelfth full-length of the group, which sees in the line-up the confirmations of the faithful Rob Rock on vocals and James Pulli on bass and an absolute novelty, represented by the ex Slayer Paul Bostaph on drums.
The training is therefore of the highest level, and the album is undoubtedly impeccable from the point of view of the performance of the four musicians. Considering the songwriting instead, we cannot be as enthusiastic about this “War Machine”, because the tracklist does not really shine for originality: it is fine to play a classic heavy metal, but in this case there is too much of the feeling of 'already heard', with riffs and vocal lines that are all too obvious and overused, with strong inspiration taken from various historical bands such as Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Rainbow; right towards the end you can find some tracks like “Just Another Day”, which barely tries to break out of the overly consolidated patterns.
In any case, among the top songs we can include the anthemic “Out Of My Mind (Heavy Metal)”, the fast and powerful “Wrathchild” and the priestly “Power Grab” and “Beware The Hunter”. Impellitteri's solos are also one of the strong pieces of the album, but even in this case we cannot say that the Maestro has pulled great magic out of the hat, given that he has accustomed us to much more.
The album thus gives the impression of being a bit of a work of craft, it almost appears written hastily (even though a good six years have passed since the previous full-length), throwing down some fairly conventional riffs and lyrics: we believe that songs like these could be written by musicians of this caliber in a really short time, without even too much effort.
It is therefore a pleasant album to listen to, full of grit and energy and well performed, but certainly not essential, with songs that are not bad, but not even really exciting and with not particularly inspired songwriting. Undoubtedly, we expected something more.