I’m going to be honest with you, dear reader. On Friday, December 1st, 2023, at Manchester Academy, they could have had just about anyone on before The Almighty’s original lineup, and I doubt I’d have really cared. Such was my excitement that night.
That all being said, it was Balaam and the Angel who were there, and in my review of the night, I said: [it is] “absolutely clear that they’ve still got – to paraphrase one of their songs – something special.”
I might have added, “Even if it’s not absolutely certain what it is.”
For that feeling is all over their first four new songs in 30 years, just as it ever was when they were in Kerrang in the 80s when I was a kid, and you’d read they were opening for everyone from Aerosmith and Kiss to The Mission (the latter makes more sense than the other pair).
“Dancing Senseless” is the kind of dark, late-80s-sounding stuff that they’d become synonymous with. The lead, though, is pure rock n roll. It won’t just be MV, surely that thinks of The Cult (who they also toured with).
“We bend and break all the rules,” sings Mark Morris. He might be singing about the band. Even more so when the splash of synth hits.
The disorientating electronics continue on the title track. The hook line “how could you believe that God is on your side” is a window into its darkness, but also its expansive ambition. Even down to the spoken word passage with intones that “communities count the cost.”
The frantic bass of “Feel The Silence” belongs to a different time, maybe, but it still belongs in 2024. It’s quite a feat that all these manage to pull off. They wouldn’t have been out of place 40 years ago, but certainly aren’t now either. There’s a breathless energy with which Morris delivers the vocals.
The feeling that it is proudly a band of outsiders is right there on the last one, “After Life,” too. There’s a near-prog opening before the opening line: “Not everybody can be the image on the cover of a magazine.” Perhaps they can’t, perhaps they never wanted to be—who knows? But we can say this: this is Balaam and the Angel’s first new music in three decades. And “Forces Of Evil” is very much the work of those three brothers on the Cannock council estate who wanted to form a band after the Futurama Festival in Stafford, but it retains a freshness that adds to their legacy.
Rating: 8.5/10
