Faith and Fire
Accelerator

April 2007
Released: 2007, Metal Heaven/Border Music
Rating: 2.5/5
Reviewer: Anders Sandvall

The Riot members Mike Flyntz and Tony Moore are releasing a new album under the new name Faith and Fire. The other members of Faith and Fire are Danny Miranda (currently on tour with Queen) and John Micheli (Rainbow, Meatloaf, etc).

Faith and Fire’s musical style is ordinary hard rock/metal with a groovy flavor, though the music isn’t very unique in general. It’s a pretty generic album with pretty generic music. All of the songs are written by Flyntz and Moore, who should at least get credit for writing the material. It’s a good mix of hard rock, heavy metal, and ballads. The guitar and the lead vocals are the brightest aspects of the album, taking the material to a level it wouldn’t have been able to achieve on its own.

The songs that stand above the others are “Radio Superstar”, “Fallen”, and “America”, which are all faster metal tracks with speed and dazzling guitar playing by Flyntz. Other songs worth mentioning are “Ready”, “Faith and Fire”, “Avenue Z”, and “Accelerator”, all of which are guitar-based heavier hard rock tracks with nice guitar parts and amazing lead vocals. The 3 ballads featured aren’t very notable and I think they included two too many.

ACCELERATOR is a good album that works in small amounts; it’s conventional hard rock which Riot fans are surely going to like. Maybe this album will grow on me in the long run, but it’s too plain for my tastes; it has a few nice songs, but that’s about it. Once again, Flyntz and Moore save the album - without them it would have crashed and burned.