Spiritual Beggars – Return To Zero

1. (Intro)
2. Lost In Yesterday
3. Star Born
4. The Chaos Of Rebirth
5. We Are Free
6. Spirit Of The Wind
7. Coming Home
8. Concrete Horizon
9. A New Dawn Rising
10. Believe In Me
11. Dead Weight
12. The Road Less Travelled
“It has been awhile since we had heard from our spiritual friends. The latest release “Live Fire!” dates already from 2006. That long silence of these Beggars of course has a lot to do with the busy schedule of these guys: band leader Michael Amott is busy working with (mainly) Arch Enemy but also with the resurrected Carcass. Keyboard player Per Wiberg is also a busy guy: of course he is part of the line up of Opeth but in addition, he recently released a new cd with his project MojoBone. Bass player Sharlee D’Angelo also plays in Arch Enemy and Witchery and drummer Ludwig Witt is also active in Firebird. Workaholics? Or just music lovers? Who cares really. However, the band has a new frontman. Singer JB has left the band to be able to fully concentrate on Grand Magus. The new throat is Apollo Papathanasio (what’s in a name). He is the singer of Firewind from Greece and was brought in by Ludwig Witt. And so these five gentlemen have released a fair classic heavy rock album. Like I said, it took them a while but musically nothing has changed.
To start with the vocal performance of Apollo: that is perfectly fine. The man has a strong voice with both range and flexibility. He manages to sing the raw and more heavy parts easily (“Star Born”, “Coming Home”) but also excels in the rustic tracks such as “Spirit Of The Wind” (my personal favorite track from this album) and “The Road Less Travelled” (Lynyrd Skynyrd meets Cuby & The Blizzards). Of course Amott again treats us with the necessary fantastic solos (“Lost In Yesterday” and the incomparable solo in “Concrete Horizon”) but to be honest: I miss a crushing riff on this CD. The contributions of Wiberg in for example “Believe In Me” really add something to the music. Furthermore, there is not much to tell about a new album from our friends: it is familiar and it sounds good.”
Lords Of Metal, Wim
LP album
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