 Green
- "Life" Frontiers Records 2003 Want some ingredients of classic hard rock touches and AOR mixed together. Keyboards and guitars are equally building the sound of band's musical expression. Ultramelodic? Absolutely yes! Melodic clean powerful vocal lines, spiced nicely with rougher passionate ones. In terms of production, instruments were clearly divided and you can enjoy in stark contrasts between melodies that are driven by instruments and where also bass guitar plays very impressive role. Songs are mostly mid-tempo with special groove, while this band loves very much to compose ballads. So opener Mr Kite, than I Gotta Run and I Still Love are groovier hard rockin' vocal pieces. A lot of room has been left for ballads such as Conscience, Sometimes, All Is OK, Can You Feel The World. Guys are very talented young musicians, keyboards are very versatile and we can hear everything from synthesizers, mellotron and grand piano. Keyboard arrangements are nicely adapting to structures of songs. Also singer approaches soulfully. He has only one problem. Vocal lines that he chooses are assembled together on a very clumsy way. This also concerns the way he pronounces words in verses. Well, as far as I am concerned, I should shout my mouth immediately, 'cause I am not a native English speaker, but anyway, I must make a little warning here. So there is still a lot to improve in future. Basically this band knows to compose very nice motives and perform very well their stuff, however singer is most important article in making a contact to listener and they should pay attention for their English language improvement. Guitar is great. Whenever guy decides to do a lead break, he magnificently works it out. Pay special attention for his imaginative melodic ornaments in some passages. Guitarist is obviously Jimmy Page's fanatic. Surely a highlight on a record is atmospheric drama caught in tenth song The Storm Inside, with genuine soloing of pure seventies Led Zepp's crunchy guitar sound (at one moment solo reminds on a part of opening lead break in Zepp's masterpiece Since I've Been Lovin' You), and fantastic contrasts brought by progressive continuing with keyboarding driven in vein of good old Dream Theater and their "Images And Words" album, what proves once more this guys are not fooling around. Throughout the record band delivers great fluid communication between keyboard and guitar soloing. This concerns also while doing melodic twin harmonies. Band tries to picture a concept "one day in a life of ordinary man". Therefore, they included also some pure moody instrumentals like The Work with obscure psyche guitar breaks to make it sound more real. Good job. Also they achieved convincible result in Hawaii penned dreamy acoustic instrumental Escape with nice conversation between percussions and folk guitar. Album is very cerebral with mostly mellower songs. Some might miss a lack of aggression, but these guys are brilliant in their sophisticated ultra melodic approach. Record is good yet nothing groundbreaking. Actually offers an interesting music for all lovers of AOR and hard rock traditional flavors. We can expect more in future from this band. As I said very well skilled musicians with good feel for songwriting. An improvement is bloody needed in choosing right combination of words in vocal verses and in English pronouncing which are actually both the only disturbing moments of a record.
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