Dan Reed
Transmission

Transmission is the third album by Dan Reed as a solo artist, but he has also managed an acoustic album under his own name. In the past he sold a pair of million albums under the DRN (Dan Reed Network) moniker, so we are talking about a man with a vast amount of experience when we are talking about Dan Reed. In this new album he is exploring the darker pastures of humanity and tries to make sense of trying to find light in the midst of the chaos. He reached his financial goal through pledge music in less than two weeks and that can be said as impressive although the press sheet never mentions what the target was so he could have had twenty dollars as the target for all we know. For me though, such things does not matter as the only thing I am concerned with is the quality of the album, the cover is not that exciting so I hope that what’s inside is more exciting.

Soft rock that is very melodic, kind of reminds me of the Mark Spiro album I reviewed some years ago. Inoffensive music that probably might appeal to most people in some way, the sound is alright and the vocalist works pretty well for this album. One could argue that there is a slight lack of originality in this album, and that the one-hour playing time is a bit on the long side considering that this kind of music is fairly difficult to vary in a large enough scale to last for one hour. I think that we can describe this as a good quality production, I think that Dan Reed and his band manages to put together an album that has a strong sound.

I also think that it is a good album, solid sound and solid songs. It is inoffensive enough to not scare off the wide audience, but it is probably not offensive enough to really appeal to anyone either. It is a good musical distraction, but not really something that grabs my attention. This puts the album out of the higher ratings considering that you have to be either amazingly good or very good with lots of originality to go with that quality and unfortunately Dan Reed doesn’t really have any of this. Sure this album is not bad and I doubt the buyers will be very disappointed with the album because in the end it is fairly good and well made.

There are thirteen tracks on the album and none of them really stand out, sure they are alright but with one hour of tracks that sound pretty much alike you tend to grow a bit tired with it as it plays towards the end. I think that this album will have difficulty to stand out in a very crowded musical landscape and, even though it is pretty well made it is quite forgetful and too anonymous to really deserve a higher rating on our scale.

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