Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Sunstorm
Label: Frontiers Records
Release: 2016
Rating: 3/5
Sunstorm is a project that would never have gotten this much attention if one of the most distinctive AOR voices around hadn’t taken over vocal duties. That voice belongs to Joe Lynn Turner. This is the guy who, through Fandango, entered the league of unforgettable moments in rock ‘n’ roll history, then built on his career with Rainbow, Deep Purple, Yngwie J. Malmsteen’s Rising Force and, last but not least, a string of excellent solo studio albums.
Anyway, »Edge of Tomorrow« is the fourth studio album from Sunstorm. On the first three, Joe worked with a German-American philosophy of tackling the melodic side of hard rock. This time around, apart from American Turner, Sunstorm are built by Italian musicians. Besides Frontiers Records’ »girl Friday« — that’s producer, multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger Alessandro Del Vecchio — the name Simone Mularoni will take your breath away. He’s an outstanding guitar virtuoso, whom some of you may know from the progressive metal band DGM. Del Vecchio and Mularoni wrote most of the material for the fourth Sunstorm album, while two Scandinavian musicians, Daniel Palmquist and Soren Kronquist, chipped in their own ideas as outside collaborators.
The result is a different album. In production, in arrangements, in performance. It still leans toward the »eighties west-coast« AOR approach. So it’s closer to Survivor, thanks to the solos and guitar harmonies that drive the songs, and, as the opener Don’t Walk Away From A Goodbye hints right away, even to Journey. Mularoni occasionally does a good Schon impression. But all things considered, it’s the weakest of all four albums. Sadly. Even the predecessor showed that the team around Dennis Ward had run a bit dry creatively, so you couldn’t really expect Turner and a new crew, who were supposed to bring some freshness, to end up delivering the least interesting Sunstorm album yet. There are simply no songs on it that »grab« you, that pull you in. Don’t get me wrong. Turner delivers what he has to and knows how to. He’s excellent, as always. What the album simply lacks are songs that take over with their choruses and crawl under your skin. That’s why, for most of its running time, the album is, to put it mildly, boring, though not exactly soul-crushing.
The realization that the songs are even too alike hardly comes as a surprise. The packed schedules of all the musicians, including Turner, who had barely wrapped up his project with Rated X, make it impossible to focus meticulously on the project at hand. Hence the sloppiness you can notice on this album, for example, in the layered vocal harmonies. In places they’re simply missing, though they’d have fit the arrangements nicely, or they’re buried far too deep in the mix. And this creative orphanhood naturally results in an album with too many similar songs and too little variety, in other words, too little dynamics. Funnily enough, the biggest pleasure is listening to Mularoni’s guitar snippets, even though they play a completely subordinate role in the compositions.
Okay. All in all, this is still a good, let’s say solid, album that’s creatively poor and lacks real charisma, and not even Joe Lynn Turner can hide that, no matter how hard he tries to deliver his vocal maximum. Maybe Turner should start writing his own songs again. So let’s give it time.
Sunstorm – Ege of Tomorrow (official video):
Line-up
Joe Lynn Turner: Lead Vocals
Alessandro Del Vecchio – Hammond organ, keyboards, backing vocals
Simone Mularoni – guitar
Nik Mazzucconi – bass guitar
Francesco Jovino – drums
Production
Alessandro Del Vecchio
Track list
01. Don’t Walk Away From A Goodbye
02. Edge Of Tomorrow
03. Nothing Left To Say
04. Heart Of The Storm
05. The Sound Of Goodbye
06. The Darkness Of This Dawn
07. You Hold Me Down
08. Angel Eyes
09. Everything You’ve Got
10. Tangled In Blue
11. Burning Fire
