Label: Frontiers 2012
Review by Kimmo Toivonen
The seventies' soft rockers Player have reformed and are working on new music. This digital-only EP is the first taste of what's to come, featuring two new songs and a remake of their US#1 hit "Baby Come Back". Player 2012 features the original members Peter Beckett (guitar, vocals) and Ronn Moss (bass, vocals) along with Rob Math (guitars), Johnny English (keyboards) and Craig Pilo (drums).
I've never been too familiar with Player, apart from the hit single I've only one of their albums ("Spies Of Life") quite a few years ago and I seem to remember it being very soft westcoast rock. Beckett's early nineties' solo album "Beckett" I do own and like. Ronn Moss is more familiar to me as "Ridge" in the Bold and The Beautiful, a soap opera which is very popular over here in Finland for some strange reason...
I didn't really know what to expect from the band after all these years. I was hoping for something more in the vein of Beckett than the Player of old, and to a degree, that's what I got. "Too Many Reasons" is a very decent AOR track with a harder edge than the old Player material. The remake of "Baby Come Back" is still hardcore "yacht rock", but the more organic arrangement adds a bit of roughness to it. The "titletrack" "My Addiction" is actually the weakest of the three, a lazy pop rocker with an unimpressive chorus. So... if these songs are anything to go by, I'd say there's a 50/50 chance that the new album will be a good one. Then again, that's usually the case, right?
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