Giant
Time To Burn

'Time to burn' is the second album by Giant, a band dedicated to melodic hard rock with AOR overtones. It rose to prominence in the last stages of the hard-rock-AOR era, because shortly after, grunge would have relegated these sounds to the underground.

As often happens, the final phase of a musical genre is often the one that brings to light the most mature, more reflective, less raw works, the true masterpieces of a genre that cannot fully express its potential when it is newly born. This whole discussion is to say that the two works of the Giant composed between the late '80s (the first now-classic "last of the runaways") and the early '90s are for me the pinnacle or at least among the best works melodic hard rock has ever given us.

The Giant are not pure AOR, because the guitars are quite rocky and powerful and the keyboards are relegated to the background and the rhythm section is quite solid, which is why I would prefer to call them a hard-AOR group. Among the band members, we find Alan Pasqua and Dan Huff who have produced countless albums and played in a myriad of bands (Dan Huff was nevertheless permanently with White Heart), and the same goes for bassist Mike Brignardello and drummer Dan Huff. Someone could now talk about session musicians, of a band built at the table to ride the wave, yet even for the debut, there was no advertising campaign to support the album, which nevertheless had a decent success thanks to the tear-jerking ballad video "I'll see you in my dreams" which circulated on MTV Headbangers Ball back in the day.

Perhaps it was precisely the musicians' curriculum vitae that allowed them to produce these masterpieces. Producers and session musicians know better than the fixed members of a band what people want; they go straight to the emotions and are skilled songwriters. The producer is often the real mind behind a band! Many songs of the album we will examine (I think seven) were also composed by Mark Spiro, who is for many the guru of chic-AOR, writing several songs also for Mr. Big, Bad English, Heart, etc. After this long introduction (which will undoubtedly attract many criticisms, but necessary to understand the greatness of a group that I think is known only by a few), let's get to the album in question: "time to burn", the second album, changes some rules compared to the debut.

It's still hard-AOR, but in several situations, it touches arena rock, and the album has a certain climate of grandeur and solemnity (which was not missing in the first album, but is emphasized here). Many songs almost seem like anthems, thanks to reverberating choruses and hymnic chants like the resounding opener "thunder and lightning" which already makes us understand that we are facing a top-level album, just as the following elegant (no more fitting term for a song) "chained".
The "title track" is a pure hard rock anthem that would have made the genre's fathers proud, but this song carries with it all the maturity and magnificent production that an album can have in the early '90s, spectacular! And what about "I'll be there..." and "Save me tonight" with rocky guitars (with a Kashmir-like riff in this latter) and simply spectacular melodies, not to mention the pure hard-rock party of "lay on the line" or what many consider to be the best ballad ever written "now until forever".

I hope, in short, to have sparked a bit of curiosity in you about an album that fits into the pantheon of not only melodic hard rock, strangely semi-unknown (except to enthusiasts and genre aficionados) and perhaps for this reason also a great object of cult!