TNT – A Farewell To Arms

The legendary Norwegian Heavy Rock band TNT has released yet another new album, and this time it’s a release that puts itself miles above the last two records, which were rather disappointing. A Farewell To Arms takes you back to the golden era of TNT, bringing some strong Melodic Metal. The record is not so polished as Intuition and Tell No Tales. It is quite dirty production-wise compared to the two aforementioned albums, and it is a bit more heavy as well.

The song ”Engine” is the one that starts the show. It’s quite a new experience from TNT and the opening riff sounds like it could have come from Black Label Society. Then, it turns into a great shuffle by bringing in some very tasty hook lines. The song really marks that TNT is back on track where they belong, playing strong Melodic Metal. The rest of the album keeps following in the footsteps made by the opener. Songs like ”Refugee,” ”Barracuda,” and ”Come” represent the heavy side of the album, with some energetic riffs, fast tempos, and catchy hook lines. However, the title tracks “Engine” and “A Farewell To Arms” are the very highlights of this record (the term ‘title tracks’ is used because the album has one title for Scandinavia, Engine, and one for the rest of the world, A Farewell To Arms).

Vocalist Tony Mills delivers an incredible performance on this album. He has created some very strong vocal lines and sounds even better on this album than the previous two. However, Ronni’s never-ending ”machine-gun-playing” and the constant digging in the ”bag of old tricks” gets a bit annoying after a while; you’ve heard him doing these things so many times before. He has become a parody rather than an original nowadays, and that’s a shame because his sound was quite unique during the 80s and early 90s. It’s a big relief hearing that he still writes some tasty acoustic songs after overdosing on machine-gun wanking and twin guitar solos. The instrumental ”A Signature On A Demon’s Self Portrait” and the album-closer “God Natt Marie” is the proof of that! His guitar sound, however, is nothing short of awful and has a fatal effect on the overall production of the album. The drum production is also quite bad, actually.

All in all, Engine/A Farewell To Arms is TNT’s step towards what many fans would call the right direction. Too bad that the production took the album downhill, because it could have been a killer. There are some very strong songs on the album, but also some fillers. And, it seems like the unthinkable has happened! Diesel Dahl has actually thrown away his tambourine, which kept destroying TNT’s material for years, especially live. That change is absolutely welcome!