Miss Behaviour
Ghost Play

Swedish quintet Miss Behaviour complete their first quartet of albums with their new offering Ghost Play, an album in paranormal realm with a legion of songs playing for a gazillion seconds – the second part of the first sentence is plain wrong, in case you didn’t understand that. The title sound exciting, the album certainly looks like this band’s albums of the past judging by its cover. It also sounds like they have done in the past so no ghastly surprises here.

Though I usually don’t think bands that surprise are ghastly, I think that it is great as you always want a novel feel to each new album you hear. The only real impression this album makes is that it makes me think of a Radiohead song called No Surprises, something much more exciting than this album, and way more surprising as well. This album feels like it is written to appeal to what fans of this band want, and that may be what the band wants as well but it isn’t really that interesting as they have already done it three times before and they did it better last time.

Sure the album is good and it will probably get high praise from reviewers and fans but if we stop to think for a moment it is really hard to see a point to something that is more of the same as before, especially when it isn’t better than before. Though I did really like the last album Double Agent and this one isn’t too shabby either, the tracks Pain and Passion and War Inside are really great. But I do think this album suffers from the fact that it often loose tempo between songs, it is like the tempo just dies several times over. The variation and lack of originality is a bit of a problem, why couldn’t they misbehave and annoy genre purists and make something completely crazy and ghostly? I would have liked that.

It feels like they are a bit too cautious, perhaps even cowardly and that reflects in an album with the typical selection of songs for the melodic hardrock genre, catchy and well produced, easy to like but ultimately rather forgetful – it gives no alarms and no surprises. I had hoped for more, I think they are capable of better but not if they keep painting by numbers like on this album.

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