True Bearing

After an EP and a spot on a recent collection of Canadian hard rock and heavy metal, Freeways produces their debut, True Bearings. With a sound located right at the turning point from mid-70s hard rock to the twin-guitar heavy metal that NWOBHM would unleash on the public, their retro sound has touches of Pentagram, Deep Purple, and early Manilla Road. It would be hard to call most of these tracks "heavy metal" unless you were reviewing True Bearings in the 70s, the era from which this album gets most of its sound. Eternal Light, Eternal Night starts the album off with a chunky mid-tempo two-guitar line, thick and overdriven, while the title track and Sorrow (Love in Vain) sound more like Pentagram as imagined by Trevor William Church. Jacob Montgomery's vocals are a little too angelic for the tough guitar sound they use -- it feels like they need a rougher or heavier voice on the mic when the guitar riffs start crunching --, but he does very well on the on the softer songs and on the bluesy Dead Air. Where they nail this the most is on the production, which sounds amazing; somehow, without any overt attempts at a lo-fi atmosphere, they got a picture-perfect late-70s-style mix, reminiscent of a Blue Oyster Cult or Thin Lizzy album (both influences of theirs) from that era. Along with Traveller and a few others, Freeways proves itself a strong addition to the recent Canadian heavy metal scene. Bandcamp: https://freeways410.bandcamp.com/album/freeways-true-bearings.