Label: AOR Heaven 2014
Review by Kimmo Toivonen
Tony Niva and his merry men have recorded their fourth album of pink and fluffy metal. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it being pink and fluffy! ”True Metal” people will despise me for calling this ”metal” at all and maybe they’ve got a point, but frankly I don’t give a damn. This is Cotton Candy Metal, sticky sweet and lightweight, but delicious and addictive! :)
Okay, I got carried away a bit but there’s some truth to the nonsense above. Niva’s music is indeed sweet, airy and instantly likable. Tony’s high-pitched vocals may not be for everyone, but in my opinion they really suit these songs. They just wouldn’t be the same without his soaring vocals.
So what do we have here? Well, there’s plenty of uptempo material with catchy melodies, a few ballads and songs that are somewhere in between. My favorite track is ”Coming Back To You”, the album’s closing number which is a mid-tempo track with some surprising elements. It features probably the heaviest riffs on the album, yet the melodies are pure pop or even schlager (is it ”dansbandmusik” in Sweden?). The song brings back memories of my childhood, when occasionally I had to endure Finnish schlager music at home or in the family car… I still have no desire to listen to Kake Randelin or the likes, but apparently the kind of melodies they were singing appeal to me when given a hard rock ”makeover”. I’m slightly worried.
Other highlights include the high-energy, uptempo tracks like ”Crush”, ”Magnitude” (the previous album’s long-lost title track?) and ”Lost And Found”. I also like the gloriously melodic ballad ”Travel Back In Time”, ”Only You”, ”The Reason Why”… actually the only song I tend to skip is the second ballad ”All By Myself”, which is just a bit too sweet even for an old wimp rock fan like me. Granted, some of the faster tracks tend to sound a bit too similar to each other, but at least they’re all pretty good.
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