Label: Nuclear Blast Records
Release date: September 3, 2021
Production: The Night Flight Orchestra
Album length: 51.28 min
Genre: AOR revival / Arena Rock revival
Rating: 9.0/10
The Night Flight Orchestra, the Swedish septet sworn to the building blocks of the eighties AOR legacy, with the obligatory pinch of cheekiness and parody, dropped the second chapter of their romantic saga at the beginning of this September. The saga was kicked off by part one, the album “Aeromantic” (2020, RockLine review), a romantic concept unfolding between two people on endless flight routes somewhere around, say, the mid-eighties (at least judging by the music). By now it’s been clear for a good while that Soilwork fans must either be very angry at two of the band’s members, or else every last one of them started listening to AOR alongside their melodic death metal.
So nothing changes, not by an inch. On the new album too, The Night Flight Orchestra present themselves as perfect imitators of the eighties, where catchy guitar phrases are always accompanied by high-flying shimmer and waves of synth pastels, and the choruses crawl under your skin in no time. The band draws from the wide arsenal of “melodic rock sweets of the eighties” at their disposal, and vocalist Björn Strid’s recent stint in the At The Movies project helped too, where a sprawling crew of musicians killed time during lockdown restrictions by playing cult AOR classics of the eighties.
What’s incredible is that in a relatively short time, a year and a half, the band again found a good 51 minutes of very credible, convincingly repackaged and production-updated music, which they shaped into a whole twelve polished slices of AOR revivalism. This is more than obviously becoming an ever more popular target niche for plenty of musicians and bands, especially from the Scandinavian corner.
“Aeromantic II” thus deepens, widens and cements the chosen musical direction, which is nothing other than that aforementioned ride on skillfully recycling the classic AOR days of the eighties, but the crew does it so professionally and slyly that there’s nothing to hold against them. As already noted in past RockLine essays on The Night Flight Orchestra, you can tell that behind the band’s names stand musicians who still bleed underneath the skin, i.e. metalheads. At the very latest when David Andersson’s guitar keeps eagerly burying itself in guitar solos within mid-eight passages.
“Aeromantic II” doesn’t lag behind its first part in any way, which means the band hasn’t run out of creative fire and managed to carry it over to the material of the new album too, which knows no misfires. In a rather short span of time, the band passed a pretty tough test with flying colors. In what they do, they’ll always be open to the charge that they can simply “freeload” on rehashing inventions that aren’t theirs, and yet. The Night Flight Orchestra earned their doctorate in this long ago. The songs hold up. Production, arrangements, performance. Everything is exactly where it needs to be.
Individual tracks aren’t even worth singling out. Each stands on its own, with plenty of variety and ideas, which is very important, since that’s what keeps the flow of events on a high level the whole way through. Every song is weighed down with the signature charm of the eighties, and in each one you’ll recognize one of the acts who dropped a string of evergreen hits in the eighties or otherwise shook up the tops of the charts back then The album is full of theatrical musicality and pomp. In fact it’s bursting with both, and fans of the ultra-musical side of rock and metal will have a hard time resisting it, while fans of the band have had this album in their collection for ages. Yes, even a disco moment is deftly slipped into the story, as you’ll notice in You Belong To The Night. In short, The Night Flight Orchestra thought of everything again. In what they do, few come close today. They’re top-notch tightrope walkers of recycling what’s already been said, and as it looks, album after album they’re becoming true wizards of their craft.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Violent Indigo
2. Midnight Marvelous
3. How Long
4. Burn For Me
5. Chardonnay Nights
6. Change
7. Amber Through A Window
8. I Will Try
9. You Belong To The Night
10. Zodiac
11. White Jeans
12. Moonlit Skies
13. Reach Out
Lineup:
Björn Strid – vocals
David Andersson – guitar
Sharlee D’Angelo – bass
Sebastian Forslund – guitar, percussion, synths
Jonas Källsbäck – drums
Anna-Mia Bonde – backing vocals
Anna Brygård – backing vocals
