Saturday, August 5, 2017

TEN: ”Gothica”

Rating: RRRr
Label: Frontiers Records
Review by Kimmo Toivonen

After a few years elsewhere, Gary Hughes has brought his TEN ship back to Frontiers. The initial hype was that ”Gothica” would be a milestone album for the band. I don’t know about that. It is a good album but not necessarily among their best ones, not in my books anyway.

I have no complaints about the production or performances and I understand that a lot of time and effort has been put into these songs. I admire Hughes’ poetic style of lyric writing, he’s clearly a well-read man and most of these songs have more to offer than the usual AOR relationship lyrics. There are a couple of songs that stand out as future Ten classics, namely the nostalgic, light-hearted ”In My Dreams” and the epic ballad ”Paragon”. I like many of the others too, but there are a few tracks I just can’t connect with, namely ”Jekyll And Hyde”, ”Welcome To The Freakshow” and ”La Luna Dra-Cu-La”. Especially the choruses don’t work for me.

RRR would not be enough for this but I’m not sure it deserves RRRR either… so let’s make that fourth R a small one.

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