Kris Barras broadens his horizons on Death Valley Paradise, but not by much

Anthems? Big riffs? Belligerence and fist pumping? It's all here on the Kris Barras Band's Death Valley Paradise

Kris Barras Band: Death Valley Paradise album art
(Image: © Mascot Label Group)

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Former cage fighter and now hard rock singer/guitarist Kris Barras hasn’t changed his stance much since swapping the ring for the stage, and musically there’s plenty of belligerence and fist pumping going on. But he’s getting better at it. 

He was starting to make a breakthrough with 2019’s Light It Up, his band’s second album, and has made use of the enforced break to write a bunch of songs with Blair Daly, who has worked with Black Stone Cherry – who they’ve toured with regularly – plus more with Bob Marlette (Alice Cooper, Rob Zombie), Zac Maloy (Shinedown) and Jonny Andrews (Three Days Grace), which has broadened their horizons while also giving them a consistent identity. 

After launching the album with two heavyweight tracks, they hit the anthemic single My Parade, which is an unequivocal statement of intent. 

Other standout tracks include the haunting Wake Me When It’s Over and the final Chaos that deals with some of Barras’s own struggles.

Hugh Fielder

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 50 years. Actually 61 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.

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