The Morning After: Legacy

All glammed up.

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Any temptation you might feel to smirk at the Morning After’s 80s glam/metal pastiche withers in the face of their relentless enthusiasm.

They brazenly introduce each element of their sound separately on the opening track – glistening guitars, ball-crushingly high harmonies and predictable but infectious hooks – before cranking the faders up to 11 and letting rip, and there’s as much Def Leppard and Iron Maiden in the mix as there is Sweet and Queen.

For six tracks the band are living the dream. The cracks appear when they try to jam two incompatible songs into one 10-minute epic. The façade wavers and a couple of tracks later there’s an inappropriate outburst of hardcore.

The last three songs – Nightmare Planet, Seasons and I Walk With Giants – sound curiously incomplete.

Hugh Fielder

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 47 years. Actually 58 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.