Review by Andy Hawes for MPM
Another World is Issa’s 8th album, released on 7th June 2024, and continues in the vein of her previous releases with a powerful AOR/Melodic Rock sound overseen by Nitrate and ex-Vega songwriting team Tom and James Martin.
As well as writing everything on the album, the Martins have also taken responsibility for the production and mix.
This means that what we have here is a well-written and well-produced album which harks back to the 1980s glory-days of AOR, full of huge vocals, anthemic hooklines, saccharine-sweet keyboard layers, chunky guitars and sparkling solos and if that’s your bag, then there’s a lot to enjoy here.
Opener ‘Armed and Dangerous’ has a huge chorus hook and mighty guitars, but seems oddly lacking in the melody department in the verses before ‘All These Wild Nights’ roars into the stratosphere on a swirling smorgasbord of tingling keyboards, powerful yet polite guitars and a series of quite staggeringly effective vocal hooks. Issa has always had an amazing voice, with a very wide vocal range and strikingly clean power in her delivery and she is certainly firing on all cylinders here.
Quite how one follows a track like this is hard to imagine, but Issa manages this in spades with the quite outstanding ballad ‘Only In The Dark’ which would have been very much at home in the hands of Richard Marx or Heart back in the day. Delicate, extremely melodic and full of aching atmosphere, this is an outstanding track not just on this album, but also when taken across Issa’s entire back catalogue.
‘Never Sleep Alone’ is a huge contrast to the delicacy of ‘Only In The Dark’, being a quite thunderous slice of Melodic Hard Rock with one of those chant-along choruses so beloved of late 1980s Hair Metal acts and Issa handles the high-octane vocal melodies with considerable aplomb, as guitars swirl and shred and drums pound relentlessly around her.
The AOR returns big style on the quite delicious ‘The Road To Victory’ which brings an almost Synthwave approach to the keyboard arrangements and it’s all too easy to imagine this glorious anthem behind the credits of any of those wonderfully kitsch 1980s teen movies of my youth. I make no secret of my love for this kind of thing and this is an excellent example of the current trend for tracks that have an AOR/Synthwave hybrid feel to them. Utterly sensational and as pink ‘n’ fluffy as the most enormous candy-floss! I absolutely love it!
The Synthwave keyboards make a welcome return in the much harder-rocking ‘Another World’ (where they add considerably to the huge guitar powerchord-based production/arrangement) and also in the much more AOR-styled ‘Kick Of Fire’.
I really do feel that it is in these more AOR tracks that the Martins shine most strongly in their writing and production, as the way that they combine multiple layers of keyboards with the guitars in these tracks is really something. Consequently, ‘Kick Of Fire’ is another massive AOR anthem with a 1980s vibe, but without sounding dated. Issa also shines on these AOR tracks; in the slightly heavier ones, I personally find that her voice is a little ‘buried’ in the mix.
The Synthwave/AOR vibe continues on the rocking ‘Got A Hold On Me’ which once again very ably demonstrates the excellence of the keyboard and guitar arrangements and uses dynamics and space quite effectively in the arrangement too, before the keyboard-led delights of ‘A Second Life’ provide a clever change of pace on a quite wonderful mid-paced slice of AOR, where interesting key modulations add interest to a very familiar chord sequence.
‘The Hardest Fight’ continues the previously established themes of Synthwave-influenced keys and big guitars with more soaring vocals and hooky melodies before the album closes with another extremely classy AOR anthem in the shape of ‘Lost & Lonely,’ which brings back the 1980s movie soundtrack vibe in quite stunning fashion.
Another World is without doubt a worthy addition to Issa’s Frontiers Music catalogue, being a solid and pretty consistent album. To my ears, the softer and more AOR tracks are where it shines the brightest and these are the tracks I’ll be coming back to. There’s certainly plenty here for you if AOR is your thing.
TRACKLIST:
1 Armed & Dangerous
2 All These Wild Nights
3 Only In The Dark
4 Never Sleep Alone
5 The Road To Victory
6 Another World
7 Kick Of Fire
8 Got A Hold On Me
9 A Second Life
10 The Hardest Fight
11 Lost & Lonely
Listen/Buy “Another World” HERE
