[Click play above to stream the premiere of Freedom Hawk’s ‘Seize the Day’ from their new full-length Take All You Can. Album is out Sept. 23 on Ripple Music (Bandcamp preorder).]

Reliability be thy name. For over 15 years, Virginia Beach heavy rockers Freedom Hawk have dug into a style that has only become more their own with time, offering songcraft that’s straightforward in structure and almost invariably led by its two guitars, while also digging deeper into their own presentation of ideas and methods and remaining unflinchingly honest in their purposes. Such is to say, when guitarist/vocalist T.R. Morton opines, “We all need rock and roll,” in the love song of the same name, you believe he means it.

Take All You Can is the four-piece’s sixth long-player and second for Ripple Music behind 2018’s Beast Remains (review here), as well as their second with guitarist Brendan O’Neill, whose addition to the lineup has clearly resulted in some shifts in style, pushing an already-there penchant for NWOBHM-inspired heroics — recontextualized into driving fuzz, naturally — more to the forefront in songs like “Take All You Can,” the centerpiece “Never to Return” and the never-not-be-soloing (not quite but you get the point) “From the Inside Out,” while allowing the band to explore atmospheres and moods that feel new at the same time. To wit, the aforementioned “We All Need Rock and Roll” arrives with a mellow grunge strum and spacious lead overtop and unfurls itself in a not-inactive fashion — Mark Cave‘s bass and Lenny Hines‘ drums assure there’s never a sacrifice of groove — and it’s not until Hines starts on the cowbell that the band signals the shove to come. And the two guitars get together, raise a toast of what is presumably celebratory homemade mead, and reaffirm said universal need, but so much to their credit, they don’t abandon that opening progression.

To be clear, “Age of the Idiot” and “Take All You Can” open Take All You Can at a fervent clip. The lead cut brings raucous shove and vitality as one would hope, and the title-track behind it prefaces the ’80s metal swagger of “From the Inside Out.” The arrival of “We All Need Rock and Roll” likewise is a preface to the expansion of sound that follows “Never to Return” and “From the Inside Out,” as Take All You Can wraps its nine-song/45-minute run with the salvo of “Skies So Blue,” “Comin’ Home” and “Desert Song,” transitioning from the dead-ahead urgency of the centerpiece and “From the Inside Out,” unfolding at more of a middle pace across the build of “Skies So Blue” while bringing hooks instrumental as well as vocal and a groove that is neither staid nor wanting for motion, nestled right into the vibe and where it wants to be as the band so often are. “Comin’ Home” pushes further along similar lines while broadening the atmospheric side, finding a more tranquil place from which its verses emanate, and keeping even its chorus consistent with this spirit, somewhat melancholy but treating its declaration of the title-line as a point of victory if the guitars are anything to go by.

Cave‘s bassline under the soaring guitar makes it — credit to Ian Watts, also of Ape Machine, who mixed at The Magic Closet in Portland, Oregon (Chris Goosman at Baseline Audio in Michigan mastered) — but the shift is so smoothly done by the band that it’s easy to follow along into the mellower terrain, which even without the dead-giveaway clue of “Desert Song” gives some hint of Pacific Coast purveyors like Yawning Man or Brant Bjork while filtering those impulses through its own, be it the harder riff of the chorus or the solidity of the structure beneath the jam. Freedom Hawk have done more than dipped toe into this kind of mood during their years and across their six-to-date LPs, but for a band defined in no small part by a nothin’-too-fancy, rock-like-they-used-to-make heavy riff ethos, the movement between “Skies So Blue,” “Comin’ Home” and “Desert Song” comes through as particularly bold; the group’s reach revealed all the more on repeat listens.

Thinking further of the shifting dynamic within the band, it’s noteworthy that they recorded with O’Neill at the helm and input from everyone, rather than an outside engineer. Their 2021 single, “Liftoff” (premiered here), was perhaps a test of method and there’s no sacrifice of production quality for going fully DIY for the first time on a full-length outing. Rather, “Desert Song” arrives at the conclusion with a sweetly fuzzed-out pastoralism, the bass and drums with just an edge of East Coast shove as Freedom Hawk even at their most subdued have always maintained, and demonstrates plainly to the audience where it’s coming from and the outward ride it’s ready to take. It’s not rushed, but neither is it really slowed down, but it serves as further evidence of the band to do whatever they want around a four-plus minute runtime and make a song out of it.

And whether that song is “Age of the Idiot” — the socially conscious lines of which are a misdirection to some degree of Take All You Can‘s more personal aspects, as best as one can tell without the benefit of a lyric sheet — or “Never to Return” or “Desert Song,” the purpose is the same. Freedom Hawk have never wanted anything more than to write the best material they can, record the best versions of the songs they can, and play them in front of human beings as often as they can.

It’s a simple formula, and to look at “verse chorus verse solo verse chorus end,” that’s a simple formula too on its face. The depths Freedom Hawk bring to Take All You Can remind that just because something is accessible, that doesn’t mean it lacks personality or individualism. Longtime listeners will recognize much of what Take All You Can has to give, but those same listeners should likewise be aware of how the band has grown and are still growing as veterans, and as one of the American Eastern Seaboard’s most vital presences in heavy rock.

If you need rock and roll, as I’m told we all do, trust well that Freedom Hawk will be on hand to deliver. They certainly do in these tracks.

Freedom Hawk, Take All You Can (2022)

Freedom Hawk on Facebook

Freedom Hawk on Instagram

Freedom Hawk on Bandcamp

Freedom Hawk on Twitter

Freedom Hawk website

Ripple Music website

Ripple Music on Bandcamp

Ripple Music on Facebook

Tags: Freedom Hawk, Freedom Hawk Take All You Can, Ripple Music, Take All You Can, Virginia, Virginia Beach

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2022 at 9:52 am and is filed under audiObelisk, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.