Departure
Hitch a Ride

Have any of you been to Disney world? Or some other amusement park where you can take a roller-coaster ride? And did you like it if you've taken one? If yes then I'm sure you'll like 'Hitch A Ride' too, because this is a real roller-coaster ride you've hitched your ride with. It's been long since I heard album with such a jagged quality line and hence you're constantly thrown all over the place from this ride.

Departure release their first album in over a decade and their fourth release is a key-oriented hard rock album for adults. If you heard the first three albums you know what we're talking about here, though I think 'Hitch A Ride' is somewhat heavier than the previous. Perhaps it's the new found heaviness is what makes this album so uneven in quality? You really have those brilliant songs that shines like damp gold in bright sunshine by the lake (like No Where To Go and LuvSick), only to fall down some sort of bottomless well as you reach the next song (like You Don't Need To This Anymore and Roses). Suddenly you're thrown to the right by a song like Waiting For The Rain To Come and then rapidly to the right the moment that song ends by Soldier Of Fortune. And where we end up is quite impossible to say.

I think that Fly, This Is My Time and Without You are the best songs of this album, but both Travel Through Time and Oustide Looking In, which are the two songs surrounding this trio, are really bad - probably the two worst songs. 'Hitch A ride' is really brilliant and good when it's at its best, but these moments of euphoria are often short as it soon drops heavily to the bottom and most of us probably have time to experience severe death anxiety before the ride turns back upward again. I think the worst thing is that it's not a isolated part or sole performance that has gone wrong, it's the entire songs that just are bad. Overall I think that both production and everyones performance sounds really good and the new voice coming from Andi Kravljaca works really good. But even he sounds as terrible as the rest in the songs that doesn't work.

Had this been an EP with six or seven songs it would have been such a good album that I would have difficulties describing it, but in the current shape I think this hitchhike hitched a few tracks too many. It's like it had planned to hitch a ride from Miami to Atlanta and ended up in Toronto… which isn't exactly what one wanted. Sure, the album is good but the negatives equals the positives and therefore we end up right in the middle… four!

HHHHHHH