Angelica
Thrive

So, Frontiers puts out another album with an artist backed by their ordinary gang of writers, producers and musicians, Flores producing and Säll along with amongst others Del Vecchio is writing. The cover artwork is one that shows you exactly what you are going to hear, and the photo of the girl is not that brilliant either. Angelica Rylin is normally heard in a band called Murder of My Sweet and she had a dream to make AOR and now she has. She names Robin Beck as well as the singer in Heart as inspirations, she has not that much reminding me of them in her performance. And a question appears quite early when getting into this album, why?

Musically we are dealing with music written by a committee to be as inoffensive and as uncreative as possible, good for background seems to be the main goal of the writers. Decent sound, well the sound is actually very good and very nicely polished, although this particular album would probably had been done a service by being a bit roughened up. Angelica the singer has a bit of radio friendly pop music style, not that brilliant and not even close to any of the better female singers of the genre. The songs are the standard selection and they sound a slight bit tired, maybe uninspired. I would say that if you look for something fresh and unique, this is not it. I think this sounds like almost any other AOR band out there, the music is just done according to a format and not according to someone’s musical vision.

This is an album which best feat is that it isn’t bad, the opening song is quite nice and catchy. That is until you realise that it sounds like anything else in the genre, a typical catchy AOR song. In fact the entire album feels so typical of the genre that I have a hard time really managing to make it through as it just isn’t good enough for me to really care the slightest about it. It may be good for elevators or taxis but listening to it is a quite dull and unfulfilling experience, I think this album lacks character. An album does not need to come up with something new, reinvent the wheel or anything but it has to have character and this hasn’t. It has ten inoffensive tracks without personality.

I think dull is a good description, a typical album from Frontiers who seem to be lacking in musical ideas. The same seem to be possible to say about those who have written the songs for this album, sure it is not bad but neither is it particularly good. The answer to the question I posed earlier in this review is that I don’t know, I can’t see a valid point of this album. Sure the usual suspect of over positive reviewers has good things to say about it, but that is to be expected from people who’s role seem to be to please the labels with positive reviews. Nah, I think you can safely overlook this album that is as exciting and as different as a Volvo on a Swedish road.

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