High Gear

Description

High Gear is the fifth album by the American hard rock/metal band Whitecross, released on StarSong Records in 1992. The album was produced and recorded by Phil Bonanno at Jor-Dan Studios in Wheaton, Illinois. Mixed by Bonanno at Chicago Recording Company’s Studio D in Chicago, Illinois.

The following year, lead singer Scott Wenzel released his solo debut album, Heart Like Thunder.

Sometimes an artist with a long history can harken back to a previous period in their developement with added insight from the intervening years and successfully create something new. Neil Young has been doing it with recent albums, but his solo career goes back 20-odd years. Whitecross, whose first album in 1988 signalled a major maturation in Christian metal music, now sounds as if they’re just looking back an album ago.

As the band stays with Star Song from its previous Pure Metal days, the more accessible elements of a metal/hard rock sound are boosted in the mix and songwriting to accomodate Christian radio play. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. It’s just that ‘High Gear’ sounds like its been constructed from a formula patterned after ‘In the Kingdom‘.

The last set’s title tune sounds awfully high like ‘High Gear’s fuzzily nostalgic «In America». As guitarist Rex Carroll drew the band into «You Will Find It There» with one of his suitably blistering guitar solos («The Eternal Fire») last time, so he does this time with the Van Halen-esque “overdrive” merging into «Without Your Love» which, in turn, melodically mimics ‘Kingdom’s «No Second Chances». It’s enough to drive a discriminating headbanger buggy.

With the death/grind/speed/thrash axis on one end and ’70s revivalists like Pearl Jam on the other, this could be the golden age of metal/hard rock’s diversity. All the more shame, then, for a band once so seminal as Whitecross to plod in rote music and silly songcraft like «Dancin’ in Heaven» and «High Gear». The former’s scene of a kid boogieing in Sunday school would make for a cool video, though.

Toward the end, the band kicks into its ‘High Gear’ of power with «Gonna Keep On» and «Long Road to Walk». In the end, however, one hopes that this is just a temporary low ebb of a band who once rode the crest of a tide. [Jamie Lee Rake, CCM, January 1993]

> Apple Music (https://music.apple.com/us/album/high-gear/716564290)

CD tracklist:

01. High Gear
02. Dancin’ In Heaven
03. In America
04. Overdrive
05. Without Your Love
06. Coming Home
07. My Love
08. I’m Askin’ You Today
09. Gonna Keep On
10. I Shout
11. Long Road To Walk

Note: Simultaneously released on cassette and CD by StarSong Records.

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