Classic Rock
Rise Above Records · 2 October 2026
The opening title track of “Star Power” runs five minutes four and spends them stacking organ, galloping riffs and a drum part that never lets up. That’s the statement for the eleven songs that follow: forty-two and a half minutes of glam with the keyboards out front, out on Rise Above on 2 October, with Chris Dando on keys, Tadhg Bean-Bradley on guitar, Leon Smith on bass and Eddy Geach on drums. Ash Baker adds a second guitar and takes the recording and production credits.
The voice is Siân Greenaway’s, who fronted Alunah from 2017 to 2024 and has left Birmingham doom for something a great deal brighter. “Dirty Martini” gets from T. Rex to a keyboard bridge that could be PFM’s in three and a half minutes; “The Passenger” stretches to five and a half on a Moog that won’t sit still; “Jack Rabbit” starts at the piano, somewhere near “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, and ninety seconds later it’s halfway into an NWOBHM gallop. On “The New Thing” Greenaway picks up the flute and the record turns for four and a half minutes into a waltz looking at Focus and Jethro Tull, and “Take to the Streets” is three minutes flat of blues shuffle with the vocals stacked the way Queen stacked them. Lita Ford and Pendulum’s Gareth McGrillen guest.
The sheer quantity of references is also the problem. Nothing here reaches six minutes, and when three different ideas have to fit inside one song — “Jack Rabbit” goes piano to gallop to psychedelic section in three minutes twenty-six — what gets squeezed out is the song itself. “Planets Collide” holds one idea, sixties garage attitude, for three minutes twenty, and the record is better for it.
It arrives two years almost to the day after “Fandabidozi” (Rise Above, 4 October 2024), the debut, and on the same label.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Enric Vilaplana