Gotthard
Need To Believe

Gotthard "Need To Believe" (2009) Hard Rock 

9 months are needed to transform an orgasm into the cry of a baby, 24 hours for the Earth to, voila, make a turn on itself, 4 minutes for these creamy frozen gnocchi to defrost and satisfy my not-so-demanding stomach... 2 years, however, is the time Gotthard usually takes to tease a new album and especially create the right anticipation for the fans that encourages them to buy. After "Lipservice" and "Domino Effect," here comes this giant hand on a black cover holding a bunch of stones: they obviously embody hope, necessity, and the primordial need theoretically inherent in each of us; that something that should never allow us to drop those damn stones because it's never too late to start believing. Oh Jesus what a squeeze of clichés pure diabetes in “Need To Believe.”

I rise to be a know-it-all. Frankly, I struggle to justify some reviews read online that praise this latest effort by Gotthard as proof of the existence of God or almost. It seems a valid product to me, sneaky as usual in the professionally crafted choruses and melodies, played and sung by high-level musicians we didn't discover today. The chubby guitarist Leoni ranges between arpeggios, tight riffing, and tapping for solos destined to get stuck in the mind and serve as a backdrop with intros and breaks to the voice of leader Steve Lee. He knows it, the bastard, having vocal cords far superior to the norm. Along with Lande, I consider him my favorite active hard rock singer. With arrogance and irritating ease, he flaunts, narcissistically, vocal range penetrating the ears with low, dirty tones and immediately after delights us with imposing and clean crescendos demonstrating virtually total control of his vocal cords. A hard rock sometimes more robust, sometimes more easygoing and poppy for a nice handful of sufficiently varied songs capable of ensuring good attention from the listener. The sprawling discography of the Swiss rockers has been this for 20 years and “Need To Believe,” as much as it harks more to the past than the recent, doesn’t justify in my opinion shocking adjectives unless the scribe in question discovered the Swiss, like 90% of the people, only 2 albums ago.

Original as the plot of a porn movie, a goal by Filippo Inzaghi, Berlusconi's denial of one of his usual bullshit obviously communistically misrepresented, “Need To Believe,” as predictable as it is, hits the target in its genre like almost all Gotthard albums. Without tearing out your hair, it offers an hour of well-written and pleasant music. The fact that the CD plays from start to finish proves it. Of course, there are ups and downs, but the qualitative level is objectively very homogenous and if you are familiar with the genre, you never feel the need to get up and guillotine a piece that is not particularly successful. We easily move from the sandpaper of “I Don’t Mind” with its direct purely '80s growing grassroots hard rock, to the oriental “Shangri La”: a sinuous and fluctuating track with a profusion of keyboards and backing vocals. Heavy oriented with riffs that almost make the walls shake in “Unspoken Words,” “Rebel Soul” and “Right From Wrong”. Don’t worry: if your ears got hurt, here’s honey and bandages with “Tears To Cry,” “Need To Believe” and “Unconditional Faith” for the ballads in pure Gotthard style. As the cherry on the cake, the melancholic and powerful mid-tempo “I Know, You Know” that, I admit, almost gave me goosebumps.

It’s a bit like the golden days of the Bulls. Opposing coaches, players, and millions of people in front of the TV knew perfectly well that the hot ball would end up in the hands of 23. There was no surprise, but the net, damn it, always moved when it counted. With the necessary oceanic distances, it’s the same for Gotthard: they are a certainty in their genre for the qualitative consistency they have shown in two decades and in two years you can bet your balls that they will return with another album at this level.

ilfreddo