July 30th 2009 "Freakshow" CD Review
By Maya Dawn Henderson
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This is real heavy metal Mate! It’s as loud and crunching as a sledgehammer to the balls. I was in awe at first listen of metal super group, FREAKSHOW’s debut release, Welcome To The Freakshow”on Retroscope Records. Putting the boot back in nostalgia, FREAKSHOW is; Frankie Banali (Quiet Riot) on drums, Jeff LaBar (Cinderella), lead guitar, Tony Franklin (The Firm, Blue Murder) on bass, and vocalist/guitarist Markus Allen Christopher (M!SS CRAZY). There is plenty of familiar guitar firepower and a stabbing-dagger lick that opens the first track, ‘Welcome To The Freakshow’, as grinding riffs sear through the eardrums and rip the senses. Markus’ peeling vocals have epoch Robert Plant quality. The next track, ‘Everyone’, is the group’s elected single, featuring maximum, over-the-top wrath and roll that sounds better when it’s louder. ‘You Who Wins’ twists and turns before blowing up into a Sunset Strip wallop. The swagger is there from the get go on ‘It’s Really Over’, where the guitar is fat with menace and Banali’s snare drum swings with anvil force.
Speaking with Franki Banali, I asked how FREAKSHOW came to be. He explained how the Bay Area-based, M!SS CRAZY singer, Markus Allen Christopher had approached him to play for what he’d originally thought would be a solo record. Markus is largely responsible for the creation of this musical monster. He impressed Frankie with a well done 4-song demo. Jeff LaBar and Tony Franklin came on board next. “This band was initially just a band on paper and was never in the studio as a whole.” They worked in shifts. First Frankie went in with Markus, then Jeff LaBar, and lastly Tony Franklin, who added his bass just before Markus recorded the vocals. The pre-production was done in less than a day. They went into the studio the next evening where Frankie laid down the drum tracks to six songs in a six hour session. “The whole production was done in record time”, he said. “The sound is different from what each of us has done in the past, yet there is still a thread of our musical histories, while maintaining the essence of what we each brought stylistically or individually.”
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You’ve got to be dead from the neck up and the waist down to not completely rock to the tangled riffing and blast off choruses in ‘Four Leaf Clover’ and ‘Looking Back At Me’. The album’s triumph lies in the player’s command of dynamics, from the ebb and flow sequencing to the arrangements that are the role-model of hard rock clarity and punch. ‘Mindgame’ has unexpected vocal harmony kicks. The structurally diverse ‘Mistreat Me’ has a melodic chorus and the whack of Frankie’s first snare drum accent seems to jump right out of the CD and into the middle of the room. Jeff LaBar is the phoenix who has arisen from the ashes to emerge amongst the electric guitar gods, in ‘Ripper’. This song sounds like an anthem in the making. It ends with fade of chugging guitar riff. Somewhere deep inside the mix on FREAKSHOW’s album, is a slight shimmer of Oriental Rock. On the acoustic, ‘Mistaken’, Jeff LaBar strums over Banali’s organic drumming on timpani, shakers, conga and cymbals. All this subtlety draws the listener in, focusing on a more engaging vocal texture from Markus Allen.
Desperate new crazes for rock come and go but FREAKSHOW smashes through all that soft flab and career on as rock outlaws. Let’s put it this way, I’ve played ‘Welcome To the Freakshow’ 87 times so far, and if that isn’t a recommendation of the highest order, I don’t know what is. Listen to them at:
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www.myspace.com/frankiebanali and www.myspace.com/freakshowrox