W.E.T. – Earth Rage Album Review
By Adam McCann
Frontiers Records/2018/AOR/Melodic Hard Rock
Formed by leading names in the melodic hard rock sphere, W.E.T. take their name from their respective founding members bands, Robert Säll from Work of Art, Erik Mårtensson of Eclipse and Jeff Scott Soto from Talisman. The band released their debut album in 2009 and since then, they have worked selectively around their tentative schedules with the band releasing their third studio album ‘Earthrage’ in 2018.
As an album ‘Earthrage’ is an album written by a group of artists at the top of their game and this transpires straight into ‘Earthrage’. Each band member brings almost something unique into W.E.T., Säll introduces his beautiful sense of accessible guitar work whilst Mårtensson uses his multi-instrumentalist talents to provide the perfect canvas for Soto to deliver his constantly reliable and versatile voice.
Since his work with Sons of Apollo, Soto’s voice appears to be stronger than previously heard, with this transposing itself well across to ‘Earthrage’ with excellent tracks such as the storming opener ‘Watch the Fire’, ‘Kings on Thunder Road’ and the album stealing ‘Elegantly Wasted’. Due to this, ‘Earthrage’ begins extremely strongly, but it would seem that the best songs are reserved for the first half of the album with the second half falling into rather typically cliched melodic hard rock. However, the second half is saved by the excellent ‘The Burning Pain of Love’ with its ridiculously catchy chorus and breakdown. In fact, that is one way to describe ‘Earthrage’, it is addictive and will have you shamelessly singing along very quickly to an album that is thoroughly enjoyable and a lot of fun.
Rating : 76/100
MHF Magazine/Adam McCann
