Music Reviews: Arena Rock

Sustaining an ongoing 15-year professional career is a challenge for most modern bands. In recent years Ghost has succeeded to the highest degree. Their last album, Impera, met with critical acclaim and raised the group to arena-filling status. Due in part to the song trending on TikTok, “Mary on a Cross” became the Swedish group's first Platinum-certified American single.Their theatrical live shows became immortalized on film with the release of the Rite Here... Read More

Free was one of the great unappreciated late '60's era rock bands. Sure, they had a hit with "All Right Now", but like Stealers Wheel with "Stuck in the Middle", that song is catchy with a barbed hook, but that's about all. Free was a band that simmered: dark, brooding, deep and thoughtful. The albums leading up to Fire and Water didn't sell, and Highway, the one following the big seller, flopped too. The group did better in the... Read More

Ghost is a band you can hardly run away from. Tobias Forge, who assumes the role of frontman Papa Emeritus IV backed by a revolving door of anonymous musicians known as Nameless Ghouls, has brought an element of theatricality back into the music world that can be traced to older acts such as KISS and Alice Cooper. With a schtick that serves as a Satanic parody of Catholicism it's one that could be seen as either sacrilege to the superstitious or tongue-in-cheek... Read More