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Despite seemingly having played with, and reputedly fallen out with, an illustrious list of hard rock’s best and brightest since he first left his brother in the nascent Scorpions to join UFO – the band with whom he and his trademark Flying V first made their mark of course – Michael Schenker retains plentiful reserves of affection among his fellow metalheads.
Last year’s album with the re-formed Michael Schenker Group, My Years With UFO, featured guest spots from Axl Rose, Slash, Biff Byford, Joey Tempest, Dee Snider and Carmine Appice, among others, as he revisited songs from his several stints with the venerable British rock institution. Another guest, former Skid Row man Erik Grönwall, has remained in place for Schenker’s latest album, Don’t Sell Your Soul.
The album been introduced as the second in a trilogy of albums for his new label earMUSIC. But with the best will in the world, following those UFO songs with this collection of his own new compositions was always going to invite unfavourable comparisons. Nonetheless, the 11 tracks here give Schenker fans what they want, not least on the regular occasions (okay, every track) where the guitarist lets rip on six strings.
In keeping with MSG’s modus operandi, though, these are first and foremost songs rather than Schenker showcases, even if it would be difficult to make out that all of them will live long in the memory. The five-minute title track thunders out of the speakers, wind in its hair, yet the sum total of its wisdom seems to be ‘Don’t sell your soul… can’t have it all’, with little mention of what fearsome forces might be up for buying it. But then amid the galloping bluster of Surrender and the synth-pulsing prowl of Janey The Fox we’re left feeling little has really left its mark.
Into The Storm fares better, even as it paints more vague pictures of an epic conflict: ‘Somewhere between hell and the sky… those that will live, and those that will die, finally standing as one.’ But the sense of mounting hysteria in the chorus pulls it through with strong hints of Dio-era Rainbow. Then there’s the trump card of Schenker’s reliably arresting guitar playing. That helps lift the chuggingly infectious pop-rocker I Can’t Stand Waiting to a place where it would surely have been fit for a 1988 edition of Headbanger’s Ball, and he’s equally ready to play exhilarating squall storms on the propulsive Sign Of The Times and the lascivious It’s You.
More than 50 years since a teenager from Hanover first turned heads, those fingers can still do some serious talking.
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