F.E.A.S.T.
Strong Wild and Free

Strong, Wild and Free is what they are, the Italians in the band with the quite silly name. The album called the same as I wrote to open this review text is the second one from these guys and the songs are the creation of a guy named Fabri Kiareli who along with his band mates are said to have done more than 100 shows in the northern Italy and stuff like that which I do not feel like writing down here, one song is written by Stevie Wonder and ironically that one is one of the two best songs of this album. They are said to belong in the melodic rock genre, a genre that is filled with excellent albums and an overall good sensation seen over the genre in its entirety which today means that you have to make something exceptional if you want to be noticed. So what about this album then, is it exceptional or is it just one of those albums?

The answer is that it is a little of both, it is a bit typical but it has some own traits as well in that it has a fresh modern sound but at the same time it is very recognisable as it is very clear to anyone listening from where they “borrow” their musical components. Another thing is that albeit the album is quite varied it still feels a bit stale and not too varied which I think is due to the long playing time, over one hour it is which will always be a too long a playing time for an album of a genre that isn’t a kind of progressive rock opera or something similar to that. Nevertheless, you can still be good even if you don’t know how to kill. And the sound is very good as is the vocalist and the performances, I would say that you get a sense of a band who knows what they are doing.

Knowing what you are doing is not the same as doing something good as music is both about skill and creativity and the ability to write something interesting. This ability is something this band shows that they have, once. Ten times they do what almost every other melodic rock band does and one time the good song is written by someone not in the band. Thing is though that there is a bit of a but to this, but if you have not heard a million melodic rock albums this sense of this being heard before too many times might not appear to you but I hear at least five or six and sometimes more albums like this a month, which makes it around a hundred of them a year which in the years hallowed.se has been on the web equates to around five hundred such albums. I would say that such numbers makes it difficult to get excited anymore about such albums but there are upsides to this album, big ones.

Two upsides to be exact which is the two songs called It’s Not the Same and the Wonder penned Dancing to the Rhythm, with the first one being the better of the pair. I really like these two songs and they show that once in a while they actually hit the marks, if they only could have done a little more often I would have been impressed with this album. Now I am a bit ambivalent but it has its upsides and downside and they equal one another out making it an approved album and not much more than that. I think that with a little more killing it would have been better than approved but it is difficult to listen to a melodic rock album for over an hour no matter what the name of the band is.

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