JOURNEY
Freedom
FRONTIERS
Initial signs are not good. Journey’s comeback album — their first for 11 years, since 2011’s Eclipse — comprises 15 tracks with a collective running time of over an hour. One’s initial reaction is that some judicious trimming should surely have been done.
On the opening few tracks the band appear to be weighed down by their heritage, but then things change — unequivocally for the better. Neal Schon has long raged against Journey’s perceived wimpiness, and when his steely six-string finally cuts loose on a kinda punky version of (from 1980’s (although comes mighty close); the giant-sounding channels both ZZ Top and UFO; towards the end of keyboard player Jonathan Cain goes stir crazy; then there’s the spine-chilling
