With a line-up featuring vocalist and bassist Glenn Hughes (Deep Purple, Black Sabbath), blues guitar prodigy Joe Bonamassa, keyboard player Derek Sherinian (Dream Theater, Alice Cooper) and drummer Jason Bonham, son of Led Zeppelin’s John, it’s inevitable that Black Country Communion will be labelled a supergroup, even if they’ve made it clear they would prefer not to be.
The title of this aptly-named second album may be spectacularly unimaginative, but then perhaps there just hasn’t been the time to think of anything better since, remarkably, this album comes less than a year after the self-titled debut – not bad going for a band who were initially reported to be suffering from internal friction. What’s more impressive is that this album has improved upon the first effort, sounding bigger and more self-assured in every way.
As with the first album, the songs are very much a sum of the members’ previous output, namely blues-rock combining the magic of the mid-70s with something of a contemporary polish. Avoiding the more sprawling feel of Them Crooked Vultures for a notably more concise approach, this is nonetheless frequently as epic as it is catchy, with a definite nod towards Led Zeppelin on soaring and exotically-tinged songs such as The Battle For Hadrian’s Wall and Save Me.
