Black Country Communion
Afterglow

The British singer and bassist Glenn Hughes (Trapeze, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and a slew of solo albums and collaborations) never completely convinced me: great means and energy, but I've always sensed something forced, mechanical in everything he does, sings, shouts, and plays.

The American guitarist Joe Bonamassa I don't know well enough yet, it's clear he can play very well but nothing that can't be overlooked, at least for now and for me. It seems to me that this generation of new millennium guitarists who harken back to the seventies has too much respect for the Page, Kossoff, and Beck, the Claptons, Blackmores, and Moores, so much so that they're unable to break away from their patterns to reach their personal incisiveness. And then, exactly like Hughes, this guy publishes too much music, with hyper-productivity leading to dilution.

The keyboardist Derek Sherinan (ex-Dream Theater) always seemed like a great crowd follower to me, I haven't delved into his solo albums and fusion music with other virtuosos, but here he accomplishes virtually nothing, keeping his fingers on the Hammond keys without delivering any exceptional passage, any surprising play. He merely “fills in”.

It turns out that when listening to these Black Country Communion, the musician who conveys the most interest and admiration to me is by far the drummer Jason Bonham: he's perfect! The challenging burden of being constantly (and hopelessly) compared to the colossal figure of his father John will accompany him throughout his life, but he has nonetheless been able to grow and refine himself over the years, cleaning up his initially overly eager-to-impress style until he became one of the best “heavy” drummers in the world. He plays hard, precise, and smartly, a pleasure to listen to.

This is the third and final album of the quartet (year 2012), following which they quarreled and went their separate ways, and it's practically a work of Glenn Hughes: he composes and sings it all. Bonamassa, distracted by his other thousand projects and likely already fed up with his volcanic partner, limits himself to doing his assignment and puts the guitar in his pleasant, competent, and virtuously embellishment-free and unstructured style, but unfortunately also lacking genius.

The genre is right and the production high-end (with Kevin Shirley at work, who has handled more or less all the big names in hard rock), yet the whole thing sounds sterile, empty, useless, didactic. There's sweat, but it's the sweat of a fitness gym, not that of the street. The sounds are too rounded, there's no interaction, madness, emotion. Hughes pushes and pushes, but it feels like the effect of travel group entertainers, who become cheerful and brilliant on command, and then he's not a rock singer, he's never been one: he's a soul singer, hence out of context.

The best track of the lot is the eponymous one: it begins with acoustic guitar and strings with a Zeppelin-like undertone, followed by singing that on this occasion is somewhat falsetto in Gary Moore style, with Hughes struggling to soften his voice (he's certainly not a ballad type, for example), pushing even in the more rarefied moments; six well-conceived minutes, nevertheless.

The rest is a sequence of standard hard rock situations as they were conceived back in the day by the Who (I'm referring to “Midnight Sun”), the Zeppelin (the opener “This Is Your Time” and then “Dandelion”), the Rush (evoked on “Confessor”), Deep Purple in moments when Sheridan manages to emerge a bit with the organ. And when for the grand finale, you find yourself with the usual oriental-tinged strings à la John Paul Jones, swaying over Bonham's pachydermic slow-tempo thuds on the drums, you can only think “we've already been there...” and at the end of the track shelve the album among the sporadic listens, if at all.