Jack Blades
Rock N Roll Ride

A guy named Jack with blades, a well known musicians perhaps mainly for his role as singer in Night Ranger but also for collaborating with Tommy Shaw in Shaw/Blades and Damned Yankees but also with other bands musicians known from many known things. This album a rock’n roll journey through many different styles of rock’n roll is Blades’ second solo album and it comes less than a year after his latest release with Night Ranger so if you are a fan of Jack’s work it is a good time for you. I think that there is no denying the skill as a musician for Blades, thing is though that the past is the past and the latest Night Ranger release was good but not overly impressive and good stuff in the past is no guarantee for good stuff now.

Musically it is quite diverse, not to say a bit fragmented but well held in check by a very good and solid production. Jacks vocal work is quite good as well, it works in those many different rock styles that the songs show, it is music touched by the Beatles, Tom Petty, a touch of Night Ranger and Bon Jovi is also to be found there. There are uptempo songs as well as ballads, it is a lot of variation on this album as I already said. This album has eleven tracks and these tracks will take 46 minutes to play through.

The songs on this album are all rather good, some are a bit typical and unimaginative but still quite good, some tracks are great like when they go Beatles or classic pop rock like in the tracks Anything For You and West Hollywood. These two tracks along with the tenth track Rise and Shine are the top tracks on this album, sheer brilliance I would like to say. The other tracks are rather ordinary, not bad, ordinary. This makes the album mainly a rather good album that you just play through and then forget about, more or less, there is an undeniable highlight in Anything For You.

It is not the ordinary songs that are still rather good that is the problem for this album, I would rather say that it is the fragmentation of this album, the incoherent nature of the album that is the problem. The production and sound keeps it well within a certain frame but the songs pulls in all kinds of directions all the time and you find yourself having a problem with this. But still all in all I have to say that this is a good album, despite the fact that it is a bit incoherent, I still have to admit to really enjoying when it goes really classic rock.

So in the end I must say that his album is rather good, bit incoherent and a bit too many tracks that are rather ordinary but on the other hand when it all falls into place then it is really impressive. Maybe he should have flattened the stylistic curves a little bit and gone for a more coherent sound and aimed more towards the Anything For You, West Hollywood styles of the songs, that would have been brilliant but it ends up being another one of those albums that is good but really nothing more.