The sky is no longer the limit for alter bridge.
Walk The Sky NAPALM
Orlando’s sky-razing rockers keep their throttle on full
So nice guys do finish first after all. Alter Bridge are the nearest thing the 21st century has thrown up to an honest-to-god old-school arena rock success story. Other new-gen bands may be bigger or cooler – Avenged Sevenfold, Bring Me The Horizon, Ghost – but none possess the same cross-genre appeal as Myles Kennedy and co. More impressively, they’ve done it with minimal fuss and none of the cartoon drama that their illustrious forebears sported like a badge of honour. You’re more likely to find a Love Island contestant with a double-digit IQ than stumble across the singer crammed into a toilet cubicle with three prostitutes and a bag of Peruvian nose ningle or hear guitarist Mark Tremonti grumbling about how much of a pain in the nadgers it is selling out the O2.
You can put that success down to one simple thing: nobody writes songs like Alter Bridge do anymore. Their entire career has been built
on the kind of grandstanding yet heartfelt anthems that exist uniquely in the centre of a Venn diagram where roof-rattling hard rock, scalpel-sharp riff-metal and scaled-up postgrunge dynamics meet. You wonder why more bands haven’t followed their lead, given it’s hardly rocket science.
The band’s sixth album doesn’t deviate massively from the groove they locked into on its five predecessors, content to tweak the formula just enough to avoid repetition.
Walk The Sky gets the dosages right when it comes to gleam and grit, Myles Kennedy’s sky-lining vocal acrobatics perfectly counterbalanced by Mark Tremonti’s ground-level riffing and old-school soloing. For every blockbusting chorus like the one that sends
Take The Crown vaulting skywards, there’s a concrete-heavy riff such as the one that underpins Native Son.
For all that, there’s the odd surprise to be found on Walk The Sky. Listen hard to Pay No Mind and the emotionally charged Godspeed
– the latter inspired by the death of one of Mark Tremonti’s oldest friends – and you can detect the faintest spectre of synthwave lurking in the background. They’ve hardly gone full on Carpenter Brut, but it’s an unexpected flourish nonetheless.
But Alter Bridge’s bread and butter remains grand guitar rock, and they’re the modern masters of it. Moody intro piece One Life aside, Walk The Sky sets its sights high and doesn’t touch down for the next 60 minutes; In The Deep, Take The Crown and Walking On The Sky
spiral ever upwards, borne aloft on giant ambition. Sometimes the wind-tunnel approach overwhelms any subtlety Alter Bridge are shooting for; Walk The Sky has been pitched as a kind of beacon of hope in a crazed world, though you’d have to listen hard to glean that through the weaponised bombast of Tear Us Apart or Clear Horizon.
But then Alter Bridge’s prime function isn’t subtlety. At a time when what used to be called arena rock is on the back foot, it’s refreshing to hear a band who have spent 15 years clawing their way to the top still finding it within themselves to go for broke. On this evidence, that’s not going to change any time soon. ■■■■■■■■■■
FOR FANS OF: Soundgarden, Shinedown,
Stone Sour
DAVE EVERLEY
“Nobody writes songs like alter bridge anymore”