Metal Mind 2014
What do you get when former members of RAINBOW, WHITESNAKE and DIO team up with a young yet promising gun? Purple blood in spades.
These days star-ridden collaborations mushroom far and wide, but this one backs a particularly interesting horse for there’s common denominator to the modus operandi of Doogie White, Vinny Appice and Marco Mendoza: they’re all part of the DEEP PURPLE family. It was the latter’s Polish gig with THIN LIZZY, though, that brought Iggy Gwadera, the guitarist with local metallers ANTI TANK NUN, to the hard rock elite’s attention. Acronym aside, WAMI aren’t a real band, as the four seem to have never shared a room, and it’s hard to tell whether there’ll be a follow-up to their debut, but it’s good while it lasts – as good as one could expect from such a company. Of course, it’s thin on the originality ground, what with “The Rider” lifting its riff from a RAINBOW cut which also gave this record its title, yet the music’s a balm for the hard rock aficionado’s wounds.
The songs’ subjects shift from the allegorical to generic, and one can draw much pleasure from the brisk panache of “Wild Woman (You Oughta Know),” whereas the slow opener “Exodus (The Red Sea Crossing)” finds White’s voice at its most epic, as Mendoza’s bass locks in with Appice’s drums and Iggy lays a molten, sitar-tinctured Eastern figure around their pounding pattern. The nimble-fingered 16-year-old shows a great technique, never playing more than a piece commands, albeit he rarely delivers memorable melodies on solo terms, save for the measured assault on “Heart Of Steel” and “Guardian Of Your Heart” with its strum and harmonic strings. Still, the highlight here is “The Resistance” in which the singer pins his Scottish heritage to a catchy groove, but the slightly alternative slant of “Transition” takes it further down the heavy road. As a result, the more interesting this deceptive predictability gets, and if the quartet are to continue it’s one of their many projects that deserves watching.
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