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Most of the times my first encounter with
a brandnew album starts in my car when I drive to work. Here I’m all by
myself and don’t get disturbed neither by my wife nor the children. I
was surprised at what I heard yet as I put several new discs in my
player I didn’t know who it was I was listening to. I was so curious
that I parked my car in order to get the disc out noticing it was the
debut by this new Dutch band (I am) One. New isn’t exactly the right
word as they have been together since 1997. The opening chords and
arrangement immediately made me think of Saga. In other words this band
perfectly fuses prog elements with a more catchy, more contemporary
approach. True, opener ‘The arena of time’ contains parts which could be
seen as damn good AOR. The guitar which opens the second part to me
sounds a bit like Jadis’ Gary Chandler which certainly is a good
reference. Comes ‘Osiris arises’ which is what you would get when you
were to fuse Scorpions and Toto I guess. Actually this song together
with ‘The ship of Re’ make up a 21’35” long epic called ‘The gates of
industry’. The second part opens with some brilliant acoustic guitar
whilst the rhythm incorporates electronic percussion as well. It’s very
original and effective larded with astonishing guitarsolo’s.
With bandmembers who have played in all
kinds of bands needless to say this fivepiece knows what they’re doing
in order to deliver great compositions with the right amount of
virtuosity without going over the top. So please welcome ‘Hold on’, one
of the shorter songs on this disc which could do rather well on radio.
Also in ‘Running all the time’ you can hear that this band has a lot of
experience delivering yet another catchy song although I would have
loved to hear a real steamy Hammond here instead of the organsound they
use. Also I wouldn’t mind the lyrics to be a little more interesting. A
sentence such as : ‘my neighbours live right next door’ surely is way
below par ! The people that live next door are always your neighbours !
With the name Bon Jovi strongly mentioned in the band’s biography I
don’t think the band should be too serious about their link with AOR as
their music is far removed from anything Bon Jovi has ever done. Just
listen to ‘Not good enough’ as an example. Especially the vocals are a
bit hard to digest here when they try and reach the higher regions.
It’s like the band is at it’s very best
when they play the longer songs where they have plenty of time to
experiment. So my enthousiasm cool’s down a little as the album evolves.
The final song ‘Silence of the universe’ contains some experiments with
multi-layered vocals which don’t work all the time. Also the beat is too
predictable which I don’t really like. So in the end it’s as if (I am)
One is like a two faced monster. On one side you have the pure proggy
bits which can be situated inbetwen Saga and Jadis, whilst on the other
side there’s the more direct sections with which the band tries to
obtain a place amongst mainstream US-hardrock bands. I guess as a debut
album this certainly is a fine album yet for a second album these guys
will have to chose which direction to take. However if you look at the
site of the band’s bassplayer Jo Jansen you will see that he currently
plays for no less than six bands which all play completely different
music. It certainly won’t be an easy decision to make !
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