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Journey: Generations
Journey - Generations - [Frontiers Records]

2006-02-27

There's no denying Journey's importance in the annals of hard rock music, the band has created quality hard rock for more than thirty years, and is still considered one of the most successful rock bands ever to exist; Their brand of high profile, melodic AOR led to sales of millions of records, with even their 1996 comeback album, “Trial By Fire”, breaking the million albums sold limit.

This is their 12th release since their inception in 1973, and again, there's no Steve Perry around; Perry may not be the world's greatest vocalist, but something always clicked when he was around, and without him there's a definite feel of something that's missing.

Since their vocalist is out of the equation, vocals are mostly handed by new comer Steve Augeri, formerly of hard rockers Tyketto and Tall Stories, with some songs sung by the band's legendary mastermind, Neal Schon, some by its keyboardist, Jonathan Cain, some by its bassist, Ross Valory and some by the drummer, Deen Castronovo, the put a long story short – everybody sings.

This leads to the album's main problem – it doesn’t sound like an album by one band, its sounds like a hard rock collection; the fact the band doesn’t do any kind of fresh sounding or modern sounding material is to be expected, but to use so many different vocalists just makes this sound confused and jumbled, and no amount of talent and professionalism can make up for that.

There are some redeeming features, some good rock anthems in the form of “Faith In The Heartland” and “Believe”, but these are drowned in a sea of cheesiness in the form of songs such as “Butterfly (She Flies Alone”) and “Better Together”, I mean, come on! Just the titles smell of cheese!

Anyway, old time fans of the band might enjoy this, but to me it was as unneeded as a bottle of fine wine and stale cheese.


Alon Miasnikov



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