Arjen Lucassen's Supersonic Revolution - "Golden Age of Music"
The King of Metal Collabs strikes again!
Arjen Lucassen is like the Hank Green of the metal world. You can’t keep him from starting new projects. He’s gonna do it. You can try locking him up or tying his hands, but it won’t stop him.
Supersonic Revolution is the most “standard” project we’ve seen from Lucassen in a while, though. Five stable members, no rotating cast, no grand metal opera or epic storyline. Just a band. This album is fifteen tracks long, with the last 4 being covers. And, in my research, I found one of these covers (ZZ Top’s “Heard It On The X”) was the initial spark for this project.
A German music magazine, Eclipsed, reportedly requested a cover track for a compilation. And after working on this, Lucassen got the idea for a musical project which paid homage to the music of his formative years. So the entire album is a love letter to the rock and metal of the 70s (and maybe a bit of the 80s). That’s ZZ Top, Deep Purple, Whitesnake, Dio, maybe a bit of Bowie, among others.
So if the album sounds a bit derivative, it is intentionally done. It’s a love letter to the artists who pushed the boundaries forty or fifty years ago. And it incorporates elements of those songs and styles, but also is very pointedly an Arjen Lucassen album, and sounds, at times, very like Ayreon. Especially in “Odyssey”, for example.
Overall, I don’t get as much from this album as I do from most of Lucassen’s projects. It’s not my era; it’s cool, it’s well done, but it has no special significance for me. So I would be interested to hear from somebody who *does* have a more emotional connection to the rock of that time.
Lucassen is an incredible artist. I will always be interested in listening to what he’s created. Supersonic Revolution’s debut album, “Golden Age of Music”, is no exception. It doesn’t tickle my sensibilities the same way most of his work does, but it’s solid. Giving it a Green, though the album cover is almost enough to put it over the edge and tier it up.
Rating: Green