SKIES TURN BLACK

No Place Like Home SELF-RELEASED Hard-rocking British upstarts jam the gears with cheese In some respects, No Place

Like Home is a sublime guitar album. The stunning riffs that George Turner and Jamie Jordan cook up on this debut LP pack the perfect balance of technicality, grooves and excitement to provide some of 2018’s best guitar-work. Unfortunately, the medium through which STB display their six-string magnificence is pseudopower metal anthems that reek of commercialised Dragonforce wannabe-ism, and the album constantly reinforces the feeling that the band can do better. The only stand-out is the nineminute Revolution, dialling up the prog by balancing shreds with diverse singing and symphonic bombast. If the quartet could follow this song as a blueprint on their second release, they could climb a rung on the ladder to brilliance.