Frost - Out In The Cold

There are very few muscicians that busy nowadays as Jack Frost. I can name Devin Townsend and Dave Grohl off course as two majors, but the man mentioned above settles himself in a very good position. After being a member of Metalium and Savatage, Jack is now busy to give all different kinds of great musicians a call, asking him for assistance on his new ‘solo’ album. Luckily enough, Metalrage got a copy of this record to review before the cd will be released on the 10th of October.
Now, the cd contains a variety of instruments. Sometimes you get to notice the ‘classical’ line-up with one guy on vocals, one on drums, one on guitar and one on bass. Other songs contain keyboards and arrangements, but after all, the sound of the songs is just classical metal. Squeezing guitars that end solo’s in a fast and strong way, guiding the vocals as an expert through the valleys of metal.
 
All songs contain these really great musicians from bands like Symphony X, Antrhax and Seven Witches. Especially the variety of the vocals is very interesting, because a change in this ‘instrument’ really gives another dimension to the songs. A good example of this is the raw appearance of Ted Poley on ‘Wasting your Luv’, ‘Sign of the Gipsy Queen’ and ‘Head first’ whereas Dale Toth provides a more warm feeling on ‘Peter and me’ and ‘Passage to the classical Side’. (the ballad)

As I already said, the songs are classic metal, no doubt about that. The production is very nice and the strong guitars by Jack are telling you that you’ve got a fine piece of music. The fact that Jack is even singing one of the songs, ‘Hold on Loosely’ and the appearance of the cover song ‘Cold as Ice’ proves that making this cd wasn’t just a piece of hard work, but also lots of fun. That would I describe as the most powerful aspect of this record. But when it comes to a total analysis, I think I have to make other considerations regarding the score. There are lots of things to consider, as I mentioned above, that all together make it very hard to discuss these aspects. With help from such good musicians, the outcome just hás to be a good product, I think nobody would doubt about that. It is almost as if it is too easy to get high scores. 

Then why would I choose for this score? I think maybe because it just ís easy. I’ll give my opinion and that is the fact that the songs are pretty good, nice to listen to bút, no great hits. Besides that, covering a song that has got way too much airtime in a ‘not-so-original’ way makes clear that this record is not convincing me to listen to a lot of times. The inspiration is a little bit gone in my opinion. With such a line-up, I think it would be a real challenge to make one of the best records in rock & roll history. And the effort of ‘come on guys, make the sweat drip out of every part of our body, we’re going to make the most wonderful thing we’ve ever made’ is not to be noticed. Not this time. But hey, that’s fine by me. It would be a nice disk to put on at a metal party or something, and I’m sure a lot of metal fans would really appreciate the old school sound of heavy guitars again, but I’ll pass.