Friday, February 8, 2013

EDGE: "Heaven Knows"

Rating: RRR
Label: Escape Music 2013
Review by Kimmo Toivonen

Edge is a new Swedish AOR band with a sound comparable to Treat, The Poodles and Return. If you're a fan of "scandi-AOR", you'll probably like this, but whether you really love it is another thing. I am a fan of the genre indeed, yet I'm not completely sold on the band's material. It's good, but that final touch which would make it great is still missing.

Vocalist Jonas Forss has a voice that sounds like a mix of Jakob Samuel (The Poodles) and Knut Erik Østgård (Return), a high-pitched raspy one. I'm not the biggest admirer of such voices, but I think his voice is suitable for this material. There's plenty of lively keyboard work on the album, melodic guitar playing and most of the tracks are pleasantly uptempo, so there's plenty to like. And I do like this, but not as much as I hoped I would. Maybe it's the fact that while listening to this album, I get a strong feeling of "I've heard this before" - the songs are just so typical examples of polite Scandinavian AOR. Maybe a bit more "edge" wouldn't have been a bad thing... Pun intended.

Anyway, tracks like "Little Girl", "Right Now", "I Could Never Live", "How Long" (with the reclusive, rarely heard guitar player Tommy Denander making a surprise appearance)... well, pretty much all of them are good melodic rockers. A couple of real standouts would have been nice to lure me back, now I'm afraid this album might end up being overshadowed by the other releases of 2013. A decent start, hopefully the band steals the show with the album number two.
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