Sunstrike
Ready II Strike

Sunstrike are ready to strike again with their new album, an album that has an attractive cover just like its predecessor. A predecessor that wasn’t overly impressive but still a fairly good album that added one more album to the big mainstream of albums within the AOR genre. The band also seems to be avid readers of the classic “AOR For Dummies” that seems to be required reading for many bands within this genre. This is a new album so none of their past really matters now, so what can I say about this album?

Musically it offers no surprises, classic AOR with catchy choruses and lots of melodies they design their music to dazzle the fans of AOR. Excellent production of course, it is what you can expect from an album within this genre, the same variation of songs, the typical vocalist and everything – even a little over 40 minutes of playing time. No surprises is probably the understatement of the century coming to this album, as I can’t recall their previous effort I can’t say if it is more or less non-surprising than that but non-surprising it is.

It is a fairly good album, kind of like most in the AOR genre. It is also an album I would describe as fairly insignificant album as it doesn’t really stand out from the rest of the music that populate this genre, I would have liked to see this band grow some kind of personality. But they do what they do well and it is easy to take to the album, more or less as easy to forget it though so it is clearly a middle of the AOR-road album. Those who liked their previous album and those who like AOR will probably find this album relatively agreeable even though I doubt that anyone will hold it very high on the top ten lists when the year is being summarised.

All the songs are pretty good but none of them really stand out, the album turns out to be quite alright but at the same time it can be described an album that is just adding one more to the mainstream and making the percentage of great album within the genre even smaller. I think that Sunstrike really needs to find their own voice, this works fine but if they want to be something other than a band that just is too good to be bad but too bad to be good, they need to be less predictable if they want to make something really exciting. Ready II Strike is good enough but does not quite strike a chord with me.

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