Recently caught-up with a couple of old CBC St. Kilda school mates Thanis Akritidis and Richard Reynolds for a pre-Christmas Malaysian meal at Chinta Ria Soul in Acland St. Was great to chat about simpler days and all that has happened since. Thanis and I were the big KISS fans at school, even when the band’s popularity was starting to wane in this country and we copped a lot of crap from classmates (Richard was more the studly Disco Stu of CBC rather than a hard rocker). Thanis took his love of hard rock very seriously, going on to write the regular Hard & Heavy column for Melbourne’s Beat newspaper, and fronting several bands, including Knight in the mid-eighties and Frozen Tears in the 90s.
Listening to Frozen Tears’ 1997 album, Silence of the Night, and you can see Thanis has taken his teenage influences into his music. Silence of the Night is a slickly-produced slice of mostly original melodic hard rock numbers, with a cover of the KISS classic Strutter thrown in. There’s some nice guitar work from John Powers to complement Thanis’ enthusiastic vocals, and some synth thrown in to give it all a bit of a classic 1980s feel. I’d personally like to hear the songs with a bit more meat on the guitar licks and less reverb on some of the vocals, but listening to Silence of the Night made me smile, and it’s always heartening when I see an old friend following their dreams and passions.
