One Desire
s/t

When I first heard One Desire I thought that they were a Swedish band because their melodic hard rock/AOR sounds very Swedish. Little did I know then that they are a Finnish band with members that for the most part has Swedish sounding names. This is their debut album and it is called the same as the band, a band that was born by drummer Ossi in 2012. Now they are a quartet with André known from Sturm und Drang doing some great vocal work. The artwork has a big logo on it, I like the logo but the cover itself isn’t very interesting – but what about the music, is it my one musical desire?

Well, it is melodic rock/hard rock/AOR with all that it entails, great sound and catchy choruses, strong melodies and some excellent vocals. We get the normal selection of songs with some ballads, some rockier tunes and some anthemic ones, there are no surprises in terms of style and songs. Fans of the melodic rock music will probably adore this album, it has everything needed to appeal to them – and not only that, they also keep it short and sweet with a playing time of about 40 minutes.

It is an easy to take in and easy to like album with infectiously catchy tunes that you just want to sing along with. The thing is though, that the album does grow repetitive and I tire of it after just a few plays. It feels just like one more in a long line of similar albums, they walk down paths much too well travelled by millions of bands already. That is of course a show of strength for this genre but it makes it very difficult for any new album to really make me very interested, so many really good albums just get put in a shelf just to be forgotten and gather dust for millions of years. This is one of those albums; I doubt it will be remembered one year from now and even less so some years from now.

Sure it has the brilliant opening track Hurt that is a really great highlight, but the album as a whole is just too generic and fails to make that much of an impression on me. Then again, I don’t doubt that fans of this genre will enjoy this album because of its infectiously catchy songs and so on. Hurt also shows that there is much potential in this band, they just need to make their music a bit less generic in order to really make a difference – their music doesn’t exactly change the world, so to speak.

If I had just one desire for an album I wanted to hear, this album would not be it – there are so many more interesting albums out there. That doesn’t mean this isn’t great and the argument made by opening track Hurt can’t be dismissed so easily.

HHHHHHH