Over the Horizon

AOR is a touchy subject for many of us who love traditional heavy metal and power metal, mostly because everything we listen to gets lumped into that category because the vocalists don’t barf up a lung doing pig squeals at full volume or worship Satan as a means of pissing off their parents as revenge for keeping them from getting laid before they graduated high school. Despite the fact that both genres have more accessibility to AOR fans than the others, there is a distinction, and it mostly lay in the approach to musical arrangement. You’d never catch someone playing guitar oriented heavy metal such as Dokken (back when they played metal, mind you), Dio, or Iron Maiden throw a saxophone or a brass section into a song, let alone 3 or 4 of them.

Human Zoo is a band that bends some of the rules when they introduce AOR to their brand of heavy metal, and the results come at the detriment of what would be a pretty solid album in “Over The Horizon”. When things kick off with the first full length song “Cryin” we get this really kick ass Jake E. Lee inspired riff and this viciously sleazy vocal delivery out of Thomas Seeburger, who sounds like a cross between Michael Olivieri (Leatherwolf) and Ian Gillian (Deep Purple), and an all out solid song that makes you want to bang your head like you might have if you were able to hear Ozzy play “Bark At The Moon” live. Next enters the title song with a solid late 80s Sabbath emulation meets a Leatherwolf’s “Street Ready” song and things continue to sound great. Then we get a more Rock oriented song in “Communicate”, which could pass for something by Deep Purple. Not quite as great as the first two songs, but things are definitely still within the realm of retro Dokken meets Scorpions faire.

So far everything seems to be going well, then all of the sudden it all just falls apart. “Want It” has a pretty neat little bass intro followed by a reasonably heavy guitar riff, and then that corny as hell horn section kicks in and all of the sudden I’m listening to some reject song from The Tonight Show band. The guitars are fairly heavy when they come in, but for the most part this song gets really vapid and never recovers. I figured that this was just a little brief experiment by the band in between rocking out on first listen, and then “Be The One” comes in and it gets 3 times as bad. Apparently Firehouse and Richard Marx recently got together and decided to compose one of the lamest power ballads of all time, and then proceeded to call in the guy from “Eddie And The Cruisers” in to do a really comical sounding saxophone solo. Newsflash Human Zoo, only fans of Kenny G and Bruce I-Can’t-Singstein are into saxophone solos, and neither is in your fan base.

The rest of the album is hit or miss, often leaning towards the latter. Sometimes you get a fairly decent mid-tempo rock/metal anthem, and others you get that stupid saxophone either blurring out a fairly decent guitar riff or headlining the performance on some sappy ballad. I have no idea why a metal band would employ a regular saxophone player, particularly considering how much it gets in the way of the guitar compared to most other wind instruments. Maybe they made their name playing at Americanized pubs where people listen to nothing but David Hasselhoff and old Bruce Willis songs. But regardless of that, between the semi-decent Quiet Riot styled songs like “Hit The Rock” and the stomach turning Tesla worship sessions “Lovin’ You” and “Endless Road”, this album just loses its identity completely.

If you like heavy metal with balls, this is probably not the place to look. I can’t really call this a heavy metal album, unless you want to qualify Poison as a metal band, which most self-respecting metal fans wouldn’t be caught dead even thinking about. Some of the songs may cross over into metal territory, but no one should be spending more than $10 worth of blood, sweat and tears for something that doesn’t go all the way.

Originally submitted to (www.metal-observer.com) on November 26, 2008.