The second album by the hard rock legends Barnabas gets the remaster treatment from Retroactive Records. Find Your Heart a Home takes Barnabas one last step towards heavy metal, while still bringing in some varied sounds from their last album.

Title: Find Your Heart a Home (Legends Remastered)
Artist:  Barnabas
Label: Retroactive Records
Time: 7 tracks/35:55 min.

Find Your Heart a Home showcases Barnabas growing more into the heavy metal juggernaut they would be become on the next album... but still not quite going into full head banger mode.

The opening title track starts off with a melodic piano intro that probably made fans back in the day wonder if they had sold out and gone soft. This was obviously just for a brief intro (maybe an intentional trick?) as the song quickly kicks in with both guns blazing. This track is followed by with the progressive-tinged near-metallic intensity of "The Conflict of Desire." Just two songs in and they are letting you know that they are not experimenting with sound as much as they did on Hear the Light. "Way to Destruction" is even a bit faster song than the two previous ones, but still more hard rock than metal. This number is followed by the biggest departure on the album: "Boogie Tyme." Yes, this is disco - but any disco with this killer of a bass line is awesome in my book. "Swordsman" is a keyboard heavy song, but definitely leaning more towards the mid-80s pop metal songs that also relied on keyboards. "Southern Woman" is clearly the album's power ballad, but a bit more on the progressive rock side at times than your standard rock ballad. Then the album seems to end short with the seventh track "Star" - a heavier song that is also a bit on the progressive rock side of things.

Don't let the presence of a short track list fool you: the 7 songs on this album total a slightly longer total time than the 10 songs on their last album did (due to the growing metal and progressive rock influences no doubt). Find Your Heart a Home was released in 1982 and was about as heavy as a band could get before they had to start wearing leather and studs. That, of course, was coming soon.

As with the other re-issues, the packaging and remaster job on this release is top notch. These albums were remastered from vinyl, so you do hear the occasional pop here and there faintly in the background - but not really enough to notice. The booklet again is well designed and full of lyrics, band pics, and essays. My only nitpick is that band member names are only given in the essay - a separate list of those credits would have been nice as well. As with Hear the Light, this album also has different band members in different pics: three in one, four in another, five in one. It would have been nice to get some historical stories from band members themselves to maybe shed some light on these changes (like I said in the last review, this was because these first two albums were re-issued a few years after the initial release on the band's new label, and the label wanted current pictures). This was the last album before they made the big switch to full on heavy metal one short year later with the next album, but it still showcases a great selection of early to mid 80s hard rock sounds.

(continued in the Approaching Light Speed review)

By Matt Crosslin (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) (February 23, 2018)