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Steve Walsh - Shadowman CD (album) cover

SHADOWMAN

Steve Walsh

 

Crossover Prog

3.23 | 40 ratings

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ZowieZiggy
Prog Reviewer
1 stars The short (in terms of albums) solo career of Steve Walsh has been quite a deception for me.

His last album (five years prior to this release) showed already STRONG heavy metal influences which did not really correspond with my expectations.

This "Shadowman" only dig further into this style. Both the opening number "Rise" as well as the title track fully belong to this genre. Noisy songs, no melody at all. Boring. Press next.

I understand that an artist is willing to pursue other musical directions while being on a solo album. But this same artist has to understand that fans can be very disappointed with his new musical "directions" as well.

This album remains painful during "Davey And The Stone That Rolled Away". Not only is this heavy metal, but there will even be some orchestrations (which I almost never liked expecept with "ELO") totally out of purpose.

During fifteen seconds, "Keep On Knockin'" sounds as the intro of "Baba O'Riley" ("The Who"). But no. We won't get a cover song here. Just a dull and heavy rock song with little flavour. AOR-ish to the bones and painful.

I am completely stunned with the ratings of this album. Nothing else than five and four star ratings. I am afraid that I would not follow this trend.

To break these heavy metal sounds, Steve displays a poor and insipid rock ballad. "Pages Of Old" sounds better if you press next before listening to it. But this is a general tendency. I think that "Hell Is Full Of Heroes" is probably the worse you can get here. Some heavy "dance" music. Hard to believe!

"After" starts with a long orchestration part which is mixed with metal sounds. The worse being achieved as soon as the vocals get in. A real pain from this moment onwards. And this treatment lasts for about ten minutes! You can also forget the closing number "The River" (no, it's not a cover from "Springsteen", unfortunately).

I do not rate an album frequently with one star. Some seven per cent out of almost eleven hundred reviews but this album is truely poor. I have been reviewing twenty+ albums of Kansas and I can not be suspected of any kind of animosity with Steve. On the contrary. But this is a very weak effort. One star.

ZowieZiggy | 1/5 |

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