Hard to Stop

Pharaoh drummer Chris Black, who must be so full of songs they are coming out of his ears, is back with the fourth album from one of his myriad other bands and projects, High Spirits, entitled Hard to Stop. This is after he released THREE solo albums in 2018. High Spirits has always been Black's hard rock/heavy metal outlet and the songwriting on these albums is akin to the NWOBHM, where everything was high energy, fast guitars and no small amount of melody and accessibility. It opens with a nice, up-tempo number in "Since You've Been Gone," a title that might have you thinking mid-period Rainbow, but it is definitely more Saxon or very early Def Leppard. This isn't to say the album doesn't get into commercial territory, because it does, most notably on "Voice in the Wind," which could easily have been on a Bryan Adams album. That's as close as the album gets to something that at one time would have been called a "radio single" before it is right back on the NWOBHM bandwagon with "All Night Long." If you don't like some hard rock in the mix, High Spirits is not a band for you. You can focus on Pharaoh or on one of Black's other, more metal projects. But if the simplicity of heavy metal with a little hard rock influence has a place in your collection, Hard to Stop will fit in nicely.