| CD REVIEW Journey |
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Band : Journey Wow man, what a tremendously great new Journey album!!! Why we come along with a review of the album when the band has already returned to the US after a European tour? Hey, like we could actually help that...for some reason Frontiers (or rather their Belgian distributor) saw it fit to send us the album after the facts. Well, actually we got it like two weeks ago, but with a shitload of other releases that had precedent, we only got around to do the review now! So, you may be wondering, whàt exactly makes Revelation such a good album? Well, the new singer, of course! After loosing their previous one guitarist Neal Schon got online for days on end, searching Youtube for suitable vocalists, and literally going through a couple of hundred of candidates...looking for someone who could bring the classic songs from the Steve Perry era with a similar texture to his voice, and a tenor voice, but someone who would be able to bring smething of his own into it. And with Arnel Pineda that person had definitely been found! Even on the current album there's a plenitude moments where one dreams of the old days, and one becomes convinced that Pineda will indééd be able to sing many of the Journey classics flawlessly! But Pineda is not a copycat, and on the album he indeed shows that he isn't on several occasions! As for the material on the new album, it was again written by Journey composers Schon and keyboarder Jonathan Cain, so you can expect the usual combination of more Rock oriented songs and ballads, with a couple of in-between songs to boot. On the insistance of producer Kevin Shirley (who's also done 1996's Trial By Fire and 2000's Arrival), the band put down an instrumental in"The Journey (Revelation)" (the first since 1980's Departure), which closes off the regular edition in the US. Europeans get a 12th track with bonus song "Let It Take You Back", and with the 2-CD slipcase edition, you can already have a foretaste of Pineda's versions of such classics as "Don't Stop Believin'", "Faithfully", "Any Way You Want It", "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)", "Lights", "Open Arms", "Stone In Love", and 4 other songs the band re-recorded with their new singer. I would love to direct you to some website where you might be able to hear some material with the new vocalist, but band itself has only a couple of songs (and videos) featuring Perry at myspace.com/journey. For the moment, I'm still giving the album a "moderate" rating, but I will be out to get myself that slipcase edition...and who knows, that may well change my opinion in order to add Revelation into my year-lists! 96/100 Tony. |