Zar
Live Your Life Forever

A very spacey name this band has, Zar, sounds like a character out of a cheesy sci-fi television series. Zar is the bearded old grey haired man from the planet Kvark in the Andromeda Galaxy, he flies around in his small spaceship to different areas and ends up doing lots of different adventures, meeting alien species, killing enemies and all of that stuff. Made badly by germans with actors speaking poor english. Of course it is not that, it is a band which lived from 1990 to 2003 and is now split-up, they lived a bit longer than that of course but those are the years in between which they released albums. This album is a rerelease of their debut from 1990 which featured singer John Lawton who is most likely most known for being the singer of Uriah Heep for a short while. A Short lived singer in Uriah Heep but also short lived in this band doing only this album which is one with a pretty dull looking cover artwork.

Originally it was released in 1990 and it sounds like that, not one of those timeless productions that blows anyone away year after year, this sounds like 1990. It sounds old and outdated on the production side and the songs are melodic rock/metal ones with catchy choruses, a bit of energy and all of that. Lawton sings really well, his performance is excellent and the musicians are good overall but the production gives us a soundscape that is worse than the original Star Trek series. That means seriously outdated and more like a fossil from a time long gone than something to listen to and enjoy. Short and to the point with nine tracks and less than 40 minutes of playing time, but it should have been seriously remastered before being released again.

The opening track is rather brilliant, it is catchy and enjoyable. The songs that follow are good but I cannot really overlook the sound issue, I don’t like albums with poor sound and this album has that. It probably wasn’t poor in 1990 but at that time music sucked anyway and it wouldn’t have been too hard to rise above most, this doesn’t and sounds like a average product of that time. Albums produced today in the genre just sounds so much better and this album doesn’t really have anything that makes it able to compete with that. Nothing but the opening track that is excellently catchy and really good but one track can’t make an album just like a chapter can’t make a book or the word it can’t make a review in Hallowed.

So, maybe there is a point in rereleasing this album, I just don’t see it. Maybe for those of you who likes to listen to music of the late eighties, you will probably find this album rather amusing. It starts brilliantly but it sounds much too dated to really entertain me so it is another album that lives in the past.

HHHHHHH