Altzi
All Eyes on Me

Sometimes when I read other people review albums I am about to review, or have reviewed, I get very confused. I sometimes wonder if I am missing something, like with Altzi that seems to get unanimously great ratings from reviewers. I just can’t understand why, it is rare that I am as bored with an album as I was when I wrote the review of this album. Perhaps it is my method of playing albums around a dozen times before reviewing them, preferably over a longer period of time as well, while other reviewer play the albums once or twice. I cannot see how anyone giving this album a rating of eight out of ten, or more, can have listened to this album more than twice as one gets bored with most of the songs the second time around and starts hating some of the songs the third time.

It is melodic hardrock with catchy and accessible songs, easy to like from the first go, and then almost as easy to grow bored with and hate after another spin. Kind of like most albums on greedy labels who doesn’t really care about music, like Frontiers. Like many Swedish singers Altzi is a great vocalist with a voice that is great for this kind of music. And he has managed to enlist the help of several great guitarist to play solos throughout the songs on All Eyes on Me, his debut album. The list is impressive, unfortunately these guests add nothing but bland solos to the album – that is a bit of a moot point. The album itself is well-produced, the sound is good, the variation is more or less the expected even though fourteen songs is a bit more than the norm.

All Eyes on Me has this problem that it offers nothing of consequence, it is just another one of those. An album that sounds like any other, but it is not even too good to be considered bad – Altzi is a too good singer to sing on an album this boring. I find myself really just wanting it end, I want to finish writing the Swedish review so I can turn off the album to change to another album that I don’t really like but at least it makes me less bored than this one. Eventually I turn off before I am done as I cannot take the torture anymore, my ears are bleeding. It is not that the album is bad, it is just so bland that after a few times I am so bored that I don’t listen to the songs, and eventually I am so sick with them that I want to throw it all to hell and send anthrax in the mail to Rick Altzi for releasing it. But objectively it isn’t quite bad enough for that, just don’t listen to it more than once.

In the end I am still nowhere near understanding all the positive reviews for this album, what am I missing? I am listening and I want to vomit, it is that boring. The only positive is the great vocals by Altzi, but they crown songs that are so without relevance that I would be ashamed to have wasted the resources to make them. Apparently there are others who thinks differently, but I would be surprised if they argued against my view that there are at least a couple of thousand albums in the genre that are better than All Eyes on Me.

HHHHHHH