Ten - Spellbound | ||
Tracks:
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Album Cover: ![[Image]](../../cd_images/spellbound.jpg) |
Label: Frontiers Records Production company : Now & Then & UK Distribution Producers: Gary Hughes Year: Total Playing Time: 54:00 m:s Review date: 3 May 1999 |
| Web site: www.nowandthen.co.uk
Email: | ||
| Rating: 7.5 | ||
| Verdict: Ten have become traditional sword & scorcery HM merchants. | ||
| Ten's high work rate continues with the 4th studio album in their short history. I've bought all 4, but I wouldn't call myself a Ten fan. Maybe it is more curiosity than anything else. Ten started off with some well-executed, if somewhat derivative, AOR tunes on the debut. Thereafter they have been getting heavier with each album. A desire to be a heavier version of Magnum seemed to be their prime objective. Then they teamed up with Bob Catley for his solo album and gave us a cracking album in vintage Magnum style. Either this has got the Magnum fixation out of their system or they've realised that being Magnum is best left to Bob & Tony, because there has been a shift in emphasis this time. All pure AOR fans out there should forget about Ten. They've left that well and truly behind. Ten now fit into the melodic hard rock, maybe even melodic heavy metal, category. OK, so there is still the occasional AOR ballad floating around. It sounds to me like the boys have been digging out their Deep Purple/Whitesnake & Thin Lizzy albums. All this means that how you view this album really depends upon who you want, or wanted, Ten to be. If you see them as the great white hope of British AOR you'll be sorely disappointed and dismiss this as a dead loss. If you can accept their new identity as British HR/HM merchants (complete with sword & scorcery lyrics & album covers), then this is another fine Ten's performance. March Of The Argonauts is a suitably grandiose start to proceedings, as we've come to expect from Ten. I can't help feeling that a more straightforward opening to a Ten album might now have a greater impact. "Feel The Force" is an uptempo rocker which doesn't grab the attention as much as say "Name Of The Rose" or "The Robe" did. "Inside The Pyramid Of Light" also rocks, but this time the chorus is a tad more memorable. The title track, "Spellbound", sounds like a Coverdale fronted Purple without the Jon Lord keyboards. Sue Willets of Dante Fox and Bob Catley of Hard Rain(/Magnum) join in for the backing vocal to the battle anthem "We Rule The Night". Stirring stuff, but hardly original. The battle theme is continued on "Remembrance For The Brave" & "Red". The Celtic instrumental introduces a tale of the battlefields of yore. This type of stuff has been done before and it is the type of music every schoolboy HM fan wants to write after a history lesson. The uptempo sword & sorcery assault continues on "The Alchemist". "Wonderland" finally cools things down in typical Ten fashion, but "Eclipse" hits back with even more venom than before. Similarly, "The Phantom" is another anonymous rocker rescued by some scorching Vinny Burns axe work. "Till The End Of Time" closes the album with a ballad. As Ten head off to become HM heroes, despite the reasonably high standard of their output (indeed Vinny Burns deserves a mention for his scorching guitar work on this album), my interest seems to diminish with each release. | ||
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