Artist: Brother Firetribe
Title: Break Out / Heart Full Of Fire
Type: Album and Reissue
Label: Spinefarm
Guilty pleasures. We all have them – whether this is admitted or not, we all have musical foibles which we keep from the metal Gestapo. My predilections tend towards the thrash, doom and death metal ends of the extreme spectrum. That being said, there is a side to my musical tastes that tend to be kept hidden from all but the most trusted of friends...and now you, the much-loved readership of Metal-Team UK. On this very laptop, you will find the entire discography of Van Halen (all eras, and in actual fact I prefer the Hagar years), Foreigner’s “I want to know what love is” and even latter era Rainbow (if there's a better guitar solo than that featured on “I surrender”, I have yet to hear it). So, when the distress call came from MTUK towers that there were a couple of AOR / Hard Rock albums to be reviewed, well, I answered that call.
Brother Firetribe are Finnish, and they're on Spinefarm records. They also have lashings of melodies and keyboards in spades. Those features not withstanding, this is not going to sound like you expect. The only thing bigger than the production on these albums is the size of these guys hair, though to be fair they have released metal under the name of “False Metal”, a tongue-in cheek riposte, I am sure, to the more po-faced stance of their underground metal chums. For those of you still reading (I'm sure I lost a fair few when I mentioned AOR), this is actually pretty inoffensive, easy listening hard rock fun.
Debut proper Break Out has been re-released in time for the new album, dripping with extras, including three bonus tracks and the video for “one single breath”. It's on this album that the blueprint for the new album is set – huge rousing, easily memorable choruses with keyboards looming large in the mix, hefty harmonized clean vocals and a sound that straddles (and yes, in this sense it is an apt verb) the fine line between hard rock and pop sensibilities. Brother Firetribe are a band that aren't afraid to hearken to the days of the 80's when the likes of Journey and Berlin would trouble the top 40, and this is perfect music for driving around in a Ferrari Testarossa, in pastel shirts, black shades and a massive perm. Catchy though “One Single Breath” is, it isn't going to set the world alight, but then I suspect that BF are all about preaching to the converted.
New album Heart Full of Fire carries along in a broadly similar vein, with only cosmetic differences in the over all sound, though to my ears the keyboards have now been settled much more evenly into the mix, and the songwriting composed with an even keener ear for the hooks. There's perhaps more of a feel for the eighties before here, especially with “Heard it on the radio”, which is equal parts Hughie Lewis and the News and Europe. Honestly, much of it sounds like the soundtrack to films of the eighties that I can remember watching as a young teen – the likes of long forgotten classics like Critters and Ferris Buellers day off, though for the younger listener you may find this a more bitter pill to swallow than for the nostalgic old bugger like me! Some of the guitar work is excellent, particularly the tasteful solo work, though this is likely to be just too lightweight and disposable for most of our readers. Me I enjoyed the listen, and I must admit that I did rip the odd song to the hard drive of my Xbox 360 to provide soundtracks to driving games (there's something about driving an eighties Porsche in Forza 2 to the strains of “Out of my Head”), but other than that, I'm afraid my general tastes are just too heavy to play this on any regular basis.
http://www.brotherfiretribe.com
Chris Davison
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