Mike Paradine Group
Death in the Family

Mike Paradine who grew up in New Jersey and at the age of thirteen was diagnosed with bone cancer which lead to him having to amputate his left leg below the knee, who is now married with three sons is releasing his first solo album, he normally drums for ArcticFlame. To assist him he has found three additional singers and help from friends in the band he usually plays for but also the singer from Wolf and some others. Death in the Family is the title of this album which is said to be a personal one with songs about parties for serial killers and girls with machine guns and so on, the cover looks a bit religious to me but then maybe no one will reflect over that seeing that this is a digital only release. Personally I think digital only is bad although I get music sent to me so I really don’t have to bother with such matters but if I was a buyer this album would not be interesting to me as I enjoy the physical albums as computers crash and I would hate to waste space on backing up music files when I can have them on CD and just convert them to music files in case of a hard drive failure.

Anyway, this first album for the Mike Paradine Group can be said to be a very varied thing if you are of a positive nature, incoherent if you are more negative. The songs range so much in style within the metal/hardrock/rock genres that trying to give an accurate description of an overall sound is impossible as the soundscape is also fundamentally different between the songs. Moreover the four different voices accentuates this even more making this album feel like ten tracks randomly chosen from my “to review” playlist. Disjointed someone described it as and maybe that is as that person said, better than it being an album made up of songs sounding the same but not that much better. On a more positive note on this though you could say that there is something for everyone which could be positive although it will also mean that it will be fantastic for no one.

I think it is hard to just discard this album because it has not only gotten some really good reviews but it is also rather good despite it being so incoherent. There are some songs that are a bit boring but as a whole it works quite well and it would be unfair to just place it in the poor category just because it doesn’t cohere to how I want an album to be, it would have been better had the songs been connected in some way other than being personal for one guy. Still, when listening to it I can’t help but thinking it is quite good and if you are only looking for fifty minutes of non demanding musical relaxation or background this is an excellent choice.

So in the end it may not really be an album in feel when listening to it but a collection of songs and inspirations for one person, and as such it works well and I think having it as background when working with different thing is a perfect use for this album. I did however not fancy it at all when just sitting down listening to it as it felt incoherent and just like random song choices that could have been from anyone so it is a bit of a Jekyll-Hyde kind of album as it on one hand is really good but on the other really boring. I think though that we do often use music as a background while doing something else more often than we just listen to music and therefore I think this is a rather good album, most songs on it are certainly good.