Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Strangeways
Label: Dangerous Dog Records
Released: 2011
Length: 55:01
Rating: 2/5
Strangeways are unbelievable with the moves they’ve been making over the last two years! A classic AOR band from Scotland, who carved out a place among the unforgettable torchbearers of the genre with noble creations from the golden age of the eighties, as embodied by their first three albums, put out their comeback album “Perfect World” (2010) last year. It’s light-years away from what made Strangeways who they are and kept them recognizable on the rock globe. Both stylistically and in terms of sound production. It’s an album that sounds like it was cut by some cheap, alternative-rock-minded band desperate to catch every trendy wave at all costs, not Strangeways.
“Age Of Reason” fixes that impression in part, but Strangeways are still very, very, very far from what they should be putting out! That is, from what’s demanded and expected of them. What hurts most is that a good bunch of the songs on “Age Of Reason” have potential. A really nice foundation, a nice template, nice starting frameworks that Strangeways could have used to deliver an outstanding melodic rock album, one that would belong in the higher league of 2011 releases in this genre. But nothing of the sort happened.
The band decided to keep the production of “Perfect World” on the new album too. And that’s exactly the kind of creative “suicide” that doesn’t fit the demands of pure-blooded AOR/melodic rock at all, where only a few albums manage to hold on to the AOR charisma when you try to “modernize” the sound. One of the few, if not the only album released in 2011 that pulled it off is the comeback album from Beggars And Thieves, ” We Are The Brokenhearted”, which absorbed the new sound completely and so feels genuinely fresh, inspired, different and hugely captivating, since it clearly radiates every characteristic of a healthy AOR attitude.
With “Age Of Reason”, though, Stangeways are sinking into the league of bands desperately scratching around for “novelties” – whatever that means for each of them – and in doing so they’ve undermined the artistic credibility they earned in the past. There are quite a few examples of bands from the golden age of the eighties putting out subpar albums in the new era. One after another. Some of those “sages” are, say, Kingdom Come, others are, say, Hardline, a third group is Giant,…
The new Strangeways album carries a stripped-down sound, but the guitars are smeared to the point where it’s literally hard to make out what they’re playing. Keyboards and guitars literally overlap in the mix, and in any given song you can hardly tell which is which. At the same time, the songs have an occasionally interesting structure that runs through all this playing, but with the alternative production approach it can’t come to life no matter what. Terry Brock, that fantastic vocalist, sings his heart out, which means the production of the guitar riffs is too weak for him. This misguided production direction is confirmed right away by the opener The Sentinel, which has an interesting lead guitar riff that nevertheless never breathes and never comes alive. Most of the songs on the album are also slow and calm, and they come across very much alike. They’re simply smothered by the one-dimensional, generally crackly production. Among the slow songs, Playin’ It Over has really great potential, while the listener is almost lulled to sleep by the mid-tempo songs, because the album is full of them. You wake up with the rock-paced Frozen, which, again, goes nowhere under that crackly production. The drum sound is totally flat and empty too. To caricature it a bit, any sound engineer with even a pinch of resourcefulness would undoubtedly have made a far more decent drum sound in the studio using Q-base, even if it were completely synthetic. It’s an album that truly goes nowhere, with the final nail in its coffin hammered in by yet another mid-tempo dirge called Long Road, placed at its close.
It’s chilling to realize what has become of, and what’s left of, such a once-excellent AOR band as Strangeways were. We don’t know what’s going on in the heads of the key players behind the band’s basic sound direction for the new era. “Age Of Reason” simply confirms once again that Strangeways have seriously strayed “off the path” and wandered into a dead end of stylistic and sonic solutions that don’t suit them at all. Other bands do this far better and do it credibly, but those are bands from completely different genres. The question is whether the guys will cling to what the last good album of their career, “Walk In The Fire” (1989), had to offer, but that’s the band’s only way out, because the last two albums prove that the members fail to build “experiments” into the core essence of the band in a way that would let that essence evolve and the band grow creatively, mature and develop over the years. So we’re left to console ourselves by listening to singer Terry Brock’s solo studio album “Diamond Blue”, which is a manifesto of one of the best releases in the melodic rock field in 2010. Let’s hope, of course, that this wasn’t Brock’s last solo album, especially given the high probability that after this latest studio slip-up it’s hard to expect any healthy moves from Strangeways in their future creative “feats”. All in all. A slightly better album than “Perfect World”, but that plays no role at all this time. Picking the better of two bad studio products. Not a pleasant job, believe me. Unless they return to the eighties sound, they’d better call it quits right away. Or change their name.
Lineup
Terry Brock – vocals
Ian J. Stewart – guitar
David “Munch” Moore – keyboards
Warren Jolly – bass
Jim Drummond – drums
Production
Strangeways
Track list
1. The Sentinel
2. Run
3. Playin’ It Over
4. As We Fall
5. Call
6. End Of The Day
7. Alive Again
8. Silver Moon
9. Frozen
10. Long Road
