Review | Storace – Crossfire

Frontiers Music Srl

The name Marc Storace should ring a bell with every rocker that has followed the European scene since the eighties. The singer joined Swiss rockers Krokus in the late seventies and was the centre point of that epic Krokus album ‘Metal Rendez-Vous’, (for me and many others the best record they ever made). Krokus became the top band in Switzerland and built up a reputation as a solid hard rock band. Their albums did all right although at stages the originality was beyond par. Still, the band had success with their AC/DC kind of style and stayed around for quite a while. After a hiatus Krokus picked up the slack somewhere in 2008/2009 and remained active for another ten years, before calling it a day, mainly because of health problems that bothered band leader Fernando Von Arb.

SOLO-CAREER

With Krokus finished up it gave Marc Storace the chance to start a solo-career. His first effort ‘Live And Let Live’ came out just before the pandemic and limited the opportunity to really go out there and support the release. The last two years Marc spent his time mainly working on ‘Crossfire’. He found writing partners in drummer Patrick Aeby (Gotus) and guitarist Tommy Henriksen (Alice Cooper, The Hollywood Vampires and more recently Crossbone Skully), with Henriksen also producing the recordings. Some twelve songs have found a spot on ‘Crossfire’ and I must say that father time has not been able to damage the voice of Storace, who is in his seventies. If you are familiar with Krokus you know that Marc’s voice has a lot of similarities with the late great Bon Scott and Mark Tornillo (Accept).

FAMILIAR STYLE AND SOUND

The whole album has a familiar style and sound. Storace rocks hard as he has always done. His songs are a cross between Krokus, Def Leppard and AC/DC. So yet again, there is not much originality to be heard here. But on the other hand Storace knows exactly what his audience wants to hear from him and he delivers precisely that. Whether the songs are called ,,Let’s Get Nuts’’, ,,Love Thing Stealer’’, ,,Thrill And Kiss’’, ,,Adrenaline’’, ,,Hell Yeah’’ or ,,Rock This City’’ makes not so much difference. They are all tightly played, the choruses are big, the guitars loud and the drums are pounding. And in all that Marc Storace is in his musical element, delivering his rasping vocals as he sees fit and as he has done so for almost a handful of decades now. And the production of Henriksen is right up there.

STORACE – THE CONCLUSION

With a minimum of musical risk but with a ballsy attitude and plenty of sing along type of tracks veteran Storace does what he does best. He rocks with energy and most likely does not care at all if the critics find his efforts original or not. Sometimes the music and lyrics are a bit too obvious for me but even I must admit that Storace sounds like a young God on ‘Crossfire’. Take it or leave it, I suppose. Storace just carries on in an old fashioned but very effective manner. And why the hell should he change? His voice carried Krokus so in a way for the singer this record is ‘business as usual’.

Release date: 22 November 2024