Journey
Trial By Fire

A band always endowed with exceptional class and style, Journey has undergone various lineup changes over the years of their long and honored career, but this 1996 album sees the presence of the great historical names, Perry, Schon, Cain, Valory, and Smith, all united together in a magical reunion that certainly represents a compositional acme.

One could define it, with more appropriate and fitting words, as the album of the group's artistic maturity and the work that, probably more than any other, not only reunites and encapsulates the excellent figures that have made the band famous and renowned worldwide but also, and above all, their greatest compositional and artistic potentials, their ability to merge and interact, through a masterful and sensual voice, an intense and dazzling guitar, a soft, almost velvety keyboard, showcasing a technical ability worthy of the greatest historical groups of the past.

The first track "Message Of Love" represents a perfect fusion of power combined with the best AOR tradition, where voice and guitar chase each other with increasingly fast and pressing rhythms, but soon the romantic vein of the group takes over with a ballad titled "When You Love A Woman", which in 1997 received a Grammy nomination, although, in this context, the song "Still She Cries" is certainly much more relevant and noteworthy, as, for intensity and ability to convey deep and intense emotions, it is the worthy heir of "Open Arms".
There are no lack of particularly effervescent episodes, such as "Castles Burning", where the sounds take on more typically hard and blues contours, with a guitar at times subtly Hendrixian by Neal Schon, just as there are mid-tempo tracks of absolute beauty like "If He Should Break Your Heart" or "Don't Be Down On Me Baby", the latter particularly successful for the brilliant melodic solutions present in it.

But this work of Journey still holds many great emotions, an exceptional love song like "When I Think Of You", a double-take guitar solo that sends chills in "Easy To Fall", the sensation of sadness and melancholy that accompanies us on autumn rainy days in "It's Just The Rain", the sense of continuity with the past in "Trial by Fire", the last song of an album that has in itself the same brightness of the golden years, when the group played "When the lights go down in the City And the sun shines on the bay Do I want to be there in my City Ooh, ooh".

Absolutely to listen to and "savor" like a great vintage wine.