Iain Ashley Hersey
Vintage Love - Best of

Vintage Love, clever name for an album filled with reused songs, it is a best of album by this guy that I have never really heard about before receiving this album. He has however, gathered fifteen tracks of which one is a cover track by a little band known as Rainbow who does not exist anymore. The choice of this song is slightly strange because it is not really a favourite song of me or anyone else it would seem but it is there nonetheless and the song is called LA Connection. Hersey has three albums in his catalogue so he does not have the mightiest of pools to select from which is probably why he has added a new unreleased track just to make the most bitten fans want this album as well. I am honestly not that fond of best ofs and especially those coming after very few albums.

Musically it is melodic rock of a kind that is often known as AOR, with the melodies as the leading word when describing. The choruses are catchy and the song is quite well polished almost like the marble floor in a half-fancy hotel, one thing is a slight difference though and that is the vocalists’s quite unpolished voice which is not that common in the genre but not overly uncommon either. They actually have several singers which is something I did not notice at all band only learned about it while reading the promo info. The style of the band and the production does not really deviate from what else we have seen come out this year, it is musically quite typical of the genre and offers no big surprises in any way, the fifteen tracks are also rather similar seen in style and the variation is not what I call big and the level of surprises offered by this album is really low considering that all fifteen tracks and almost one hour twenty minutes adhere to the typical AOR style of which we receive several albums a month.

This is a good album, there’s no denying that fact but at the same time it is an album of which there are very many. Nothing ground breaking is to be found in this album but neither can anything bad be found in it, the songs are good and well written but only to the point that they well adhere to what is common practice in the AOR-genre. Nothing in this album really grabs my attention while listening, it is good but it flows by and then it ends without making any real impact. Sure the cover of Rainbow’s LA Connection is something to write home about, it is a good cover of a good song but that one is not really enough to make this album stand out.

I think this is a good album to use as a background, a good album to play when doing something other like perhaps writing this review or something similar. The only thing that remotely makes me stop and think is the cover song so I do not fancy this album for something to play and actively listen to, for that only really special albums are suited and considering that there are already many albums of the same quality as this one released already this year it is not a special album, it is good but so is a lot of albums we have seen released in the genre this year.

So when rating this album I can state that it receive the middle rating as it is a good album, nothing special or overly impressive but a good album to use for a background or just to push some silence away, it works brilliantly for that. An easily digested and good AOR album that does not quite reach the absolute best albums in the genre.