Back together...as good as ever?
Justin Gaines | Northern Virginia | 10/07/2006
(4 out of 5 stars)
"I've only been a Fair Warning fan for a few years (I discovered them in 2003), but I'm a pretty rabid Fair Warning fan. This band's electrifying style of melodic rock blew me away, and I immediately sought out their other works, even though they had more or less split up at that point. So when I heard they had reunited and were releasing a new album, I immediately got my hopes up. How does Brother's Keeper, the band's first album in over five years, measure up? Read on.
More than any other band save perhaps Gotthard, Fair Warning has come to embody everything that is great about European melodic rock. All of the elements of Fair Warning's classic sound are present on Brother's Keeper. The album is upbeat, very melodic, and catchy as hell. It's also fairly well-written, though not quite at the same level as Fair Warning's previous albums. Album opener Don't Keep Me Waiting is a powerful rocker that is as good a song as the band has written, but it's followed by the somewhat odd Generation Jedi, which is the album's weakest track. It definitely picks up from there, but it seems like that song just killed the momentum. The rest of the songs are all quite good, but the album seems to be missing that element that made the other Fair Warning albums so powerful. It's as if by taking such a long hiatus, the band lost the spark that had been driving them previously.
Oh, and adding 7 minutes of silence and 30 seconds of goofing off to the closing track "All I Wanna Do" is very frustrating for those of us who like to import our CDs to iTunes. They should have separated the end and added it as an untitled bonus track.
I don't want to give the impression that Brother's Keeper is a bad album; far from it actually. It is a very good melodic hard rock album, and one that every Fair Warning fan should own. It may not be as awesome as Fair Warning's previous albums, but let's face it; the worst Fair Warning album is still going to be way better than the best efforts by just about every other melodic rock band!"
Track Listings (13) - Disc #1
