Didn't know if it has been posted on another thread but here's another review:
https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/reviews ... sky/48173/
"Walk the Sky review by Alter Bridge
Posted 6 hours ago
travislausch
travislausch
Sound: 8
Lyrics: 9
Overall Impression: 8
Reviewer's score: 8.3 Superb
Users' score: 7.8 (9 votes)
Alter Bridge: Walk the Sky
3
Sound — 8
Alter Bridge have had a commanding position in the modern hard rock scene since the mid-2000s, and with as much success as they've had, they've largely stayed true to their formula through their entire career: good hard-rocking songs with simple melodies, good guitar riffs, Myles Kennedy's soaring vocals and Mark Tremonti's virtuosic guitar solos. Even though they've made mild attempts at experimentation here and there, giving them an almost prog-metal edge in certain spots, they've largely kept this confined to single tracks and never really did any more than dip their toes into it. On "Walk the Sky", the band's sixth album so far, a bevy of experiences from their main band, Tremonti's solo project, Kennedy's recent solo album and his stints as frontman for Slash's solo band have informed a band that's been around long enough to be considered "veterans" of the scene, and they promised a somewhat more left-field record for their newest effort.
Listening to the record as a whole, though, one finds that not much has changed in the fundamentals of how Alter Bridge crafts their sound, despite differences in the writing style, with Kennedy and Tremonti bringing largely completed songs to the table rather than collaborating more organically. The riffs, vocal melodies, and song structures are not going to be anything new to a long-time Alter Bridge fan. Where the real difference lies is in the production style, which sees the band expanding on their sound with the addition of layers of synths and other keyboard sounds. A lot of the time, it's very subtle and almost gets lost in the mix, but they made it obvious in places where it was needed, like the introductory track "One Life" where it's mostly only a lone synth accompanying Kennedy's vocals, or the track "Godspeed" which mixes Alter Bridge's usual style with an almost 80s synthwave aesthetic. Sometimes, it's barely even present at all, like the single "Wouldn't You Rather", which features an epic hard rock sound that could have just as easily fit on any of their other albums. Lower tunings (possibly even Tremonti digging deeper into exploring 7-string guitars as he did on the band's previous album "The Last Hero") also pop up all over the record, being most obvious on the track "In the Deep", one of the album's biggest riff highlights. As usual on an Alter Bridge album, the best tracks are usually the ones that display a greater range of dynamics and tonal shifts, and there are plenty of these kind of songs here, like "Indoctrination" bringing to the table a dark, doomy riff and one of the album's most bombastic choruses, and the Tremonti-sung "Forever Falling", combining a very melodic acoustic intro with one of the album's most thrashy metal riffs, and capping it off with a great melodic chorus and a great outro solo. The band's proggier explorations come in on the tracks "Walking on the Sky", which is one of the album's most melodic and "epic" with some great dynamic guitar parts and vocal interplay in the bridge, and the album's closing track "Dying Light", which is the longest on the record and comes about as close as any track on the album does to capturing the "Blackbird" vibe with its slightly more technical and melodic sound.
There's a lot to love about the sound on this album, but there are a few issues here and there, like the mixing job, which is rife with clipping distortion, and leaving some elements like Brian Marshall's bass and Scott Phillips' drums feeling a little buried. And while Alter Bridge's songwriting has always been great, one can't help but feel like 14 tracks at an hour long does make the record feel a bit like a slog to get through in one listening session. A few of the tracks on the album don't do anything so vastly different from the others that they'd be missed if they were skipped in favour of the highlights, and in a day and age where albums actually seem to be getting shorter once again (we can probably blame that on the resurgence of vinyl), having anything more than an hour of music, especially when the band leans so heavily on one particular style, seems like a bit much. That isn't to say any of the tracks on the album are bad, per se, but just like "The Last Hero", it's an exhausting listen if you're trying to get through it in one sitting.
Lyrics — 9
Alter Bridge has always done a great job of making the sentiments of their lyrics seem very heartfelt and a bit more genuine than a lot of other bands singing about the same topics, which often include depression, loss, love, and isolation. While the band is never really direct about the subjects of their songs, this makes a lot of their lyrical content a bit more widely relatable, but it never feels like the band is doing this at the expense of good poetry, with a particular favourite example being in the soaring, epic "Walking on the Sky": "You have wandered in the storm/Are you fearless anymore?/Though you don't need to escape/All these questions still remain/The question still remains/Do you feel alive/Tempting your fate on the line?/Pushing death to the fray?/Making one last great escape?". Even when the band waxes political, it never gets to the point of being direct about its targets or even really pushes an agenda, and one can really infer any meaning they want out of lines like this from "Pay no Mind": "Indifference, a lasting curse/Resilience, your blessing in disguise/The millions you stand to hurt/Still willing to stand right by your side/But time/It will unravel and expose/Us for the fools we are".
Vocally, Myles Kennedy remains on top of his game, his soaring voice undiminished by the ravages of time. If you've been a fan of his vocals since the band's first album, you'll hear no loss of skill or emotion on Myles' part. What is actually surprising on this album comes in the song "Falling Forever", where guitarist Mark Tremonti takes the lead vocal spot, and shows how much he has improved as a vocalist since the band's early days, with more practice at singing since starting his solo project starting to show when he steps up to the mic in Alter Bridge, holding his own quite admirably against Kennedy's chorus harmony vocals.
Overall Impression — 8
It's still the Alter Bridge we know and love, but just a little bit more mature, and featuring just a few more layers. The band has mentioned toying with the idea of bringing in a keyboardist to perform these songs live, but if that got people thinking this would be an album dripping with electronics, or a more proggy version of the band with synth solos and orchestral chord stabs, the truth is that this is just Alter Bridge with a few more synth pad layers here and there, nothing so fundamentally different from the band's usual style that long-time fans need to worry.
The band's songwriting and musicianship are still completely intact, and it's a real testament that after six full-length albums that they can still put out material that sounds as good as anything else in their discography. It isn't perfect, however, as the album is a tad overly long and there really didn't seem to be too many dramatic twists and turns from song to song: no real "ballad" tracks and while there are some very epic-sounding songs, none are quite as standout as "Blackbird" was on the album of the same name. It's all very standard-sounding fare for the band, nothing we haven't heard from them before, but overall that's not necessarily a bad thing. A little more variety or a couple of tracks being left off might have served the album well, but that doesn't mean there are any genuinely bad songs on "Walk the Sky", and I still feel confident recommending giving this album a listen. "