vote
6.5
- Band:
NEPTUNE (SWE) - Duration: 00:39:21
- Available from: 20/09/2024
- Label:
-
Pride & Joy Music
Streaming not yet available
One of the positive aspects of the nostalgia effect that has been pervading all of Western pop culture, heavy metal included, for a few years now is that it has convinced artists of all kinds to pick up the tools of the trade again, perhaps after decades of hiatus, to try to do something new.
For those who are particularly well-versed in old school, the moniker Neptune will not sound new: formed between 1979 and 1980 in Sweden, they can be considered among those groups that hybridized the speed metal of Heavy Load with the more melodic part of our favorite music, in fact entering the vein of what thanks to Helloween and Scanner would become European power metal. Well, after the success of the compilation “Land Of Northern”, released in 2018 and which for the first time collected the four demos of the band released between '84 and '87, our guys, led by bassist Roland Alexandersson, guitarist Anders Olsson and drummer Jonas Wikström, decide to reunite.
Unfortunately, the historic singer Reine Alexandersson passes away after having recorded a couple of singles, leaving a void that the band decides to fill by having Roland sing: we arrive at the good “Northern Steel”, released in 2020, which finally gives Pride & Joy Music an album of unreleased songs, except for the beautiful cover of “Land Of Northern” rerecorded for the occasion. Four years pass between other singles and compilations and here we are, finally, with “End Of Time” in our hands, a new record that marks the return of the Swedes to the field.
For a band with such a troubled history, but with a fierce group of fans, it is not trivial to arrive in 2024 like this: just start “Metal Hearts” to find yourself in a song that combines melodic heavy metal with the hard rock of Deep Purple Mark V, where Roland's voice and Johan Rosth's keyboards dominate the scene.
We then move from these cadences to the declared power metal of “Brightest Steel” and the anthem of “Motherland”, which show us a chameleon-like band that easily switches between one genre and another.
Compared to the previous album, however, it is noticeable how our guys don't really know where to go, continually changing register without stopping anywhere. Of the whole lot, it seems to us that the songs that work best are those most blatantly pushed in terms of rhythm, such as the aforementioned “Brightest Steel”, the priest-like “Power” or the rocking “Highlands”, while the more cadenced pieces such as “Nepturion”, the title-track and “Revenge”, suffer a bit from this double attitude that Neptune try to make stay together.
The production doesn't change much compared to the previous studio album, with Roland's voice heavily effected and under different reverbs, with the guitars leaving a lot of space for the keyboards, as we said above, and this is perhaps one of the reasons why not all the songs on “End Of Time” are as captivating as they should be.
In short, the second official studio effort for a band that has never really given up, but that, perhaps, still has to find a precise balance: the return of Neptune, even if not with a bang, seems packaged for those who jumped for joy seeing other illustrious colleagues of ours reform, in particular for those who love particularly keyboard-heavy heavy influenced by all the bands we mentioned in the review.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM