Winger fail to reinvent themselves again, but who cares when the choruses are this big?

Reanimated 80s FM rockers Winger return with comfortingly familiar seventh album Seven

By Johnny Sharp
( Classic Rock )
published
Winger: Seven cover art
(Image: © Frontiers)

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Unlike many of their hair-metal contemporaries, this perennially radio-friendly, fashion-agnostic quartet have kept their original line-up intact since officially re-forming their late-80s incarnation in 2006.

And by now they are of course well aware of what their audience wants from them and have no need to reinvent themselves. 

So despite a nine-year lay-off since 2014’s Better Days Comin’, they might as well never have been away, judging by the heavy trucking drive of Heaven’s Falling, It’s Okay and Time Bomb, which might recognise that life ain’t a party any more but suggests a big fat arena chorus can make it feel a whole lot better. 

The galloping melodrama of Proud Desperado and Tears Of Blood once again nod towards more adventurous pomp-rock anthemics, and the grungier Voodoo Fire and balladry of Broken Glass are effective pace breakers, but ultimately they are minor diversions from a tried and trusted path.

Johnny Sharp
Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.