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Issa: Crossfire

Frontiers Records are quite correctly pretty excited by Norwegian songstress and her fourth album Crossfire; check out this for hyperbole, "The new release is a melodic rock fans wet dream with huge vocals, layers of keyboards and masses of guitars! Think Roxette, meets Romeo's Daughter melted with 80's Heart albums with a more up to date production and you won't be far away." For once, the hype is entirely justified. As I have mentioned elsewhere I consider this to be the best of a very impressive first quarter of 2015 for the Italian record label.

Produced by John Greatwood (Vega) and Vega'ss keyboard man James Martin who helped to co-write alongside Issa herself Crossfire is a veritable delight for connoisseurs of melodic rock. The track which best exemplifies this the utterly wonderful ballad "Raintown" featuring the golden larynx of FM's Steve Overland; Issa more than holds her own against Overland which is no mean feat given that she is gushing in her praise of the great man, "''This was a dream come true for me, Steve Overland is probably my favourite male singer and to get him on board was a true honour, his voice suits the song perfectly." Indeed it does.

I can absolutely see the potential comparisons with Romeo's Daughter and Heart, however, myself I detect more than a hint of Robin Beck especially on "Long Time Coming" which also has some very juicy guitar. It would be quite a special effort to make a duff album given the quality of the musicians involved such as Daniel Palmqvist (XOrigin), Alessandro Del Vecchio (Hardline and practically everything in the universe), Steve Newman, Robert Sall (WORK of Art), Daniel Johansson (Degreed), Stephen Chesney as well as the voices of Pete Newdeck (In faith/Tainted Nation), Matt Black (Fahran, ex-Serpentine) and Michael Kew (Vega) and this is nowhere near a duffer. The quality shines through at all times and if there is a better quartet of tunes in 2015 than "Raintown", "Long Time Coming", "Fight Fire With Rain" and the mega-catchy "Heartbeat" then I want to hear them. This is Issa's best album by far thus far and is deserving of a wide audience.


Track Listing:

  1. Crossfire
  2. New Horizon
  3. Raintown
  4. Long Time Coming
  5. Fight Fire With Rain
  6. Heartbeat
  7. Electric Lights
  8. Ghost
  9. Inside My Heart
  10. Red Lights
  11. We Rise
  12. Only You

Added: February 4th 2015
Reviewer: Simon Bray
Score:
Related Link: Frontiers Records
Hits: 1984
Language: english

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