The Cascades
Phoenix

Phoenix is said to be an appropriate title for this new album by The Cascades who last year put together the first song composed by the original members in over ten years. It marks a rebirth for this band celebrating thirty years this year, and those thirty has generated a handful of albums. This new one has a nice colour scheme, a pretty ordinary artwork and a nice digipak format. It has a trio of musicians who has been around for a while and probably knows a thing or two about how to make gothic rock music.

Phoenix has some catchy gothic songs, it has the dark and very gothic vocal stylings of Mr Wild who sings in a fairly typical way for a gothic singer. Fact is that the album sounds like a fairly typical gothic rock album with the standard selection of songs, a bit long perhaps and they could have cut it down by two or three songs. No real surprises, nice modern production but a style that has been around for a long while – lets just say that they make gothic rock music according to the format and press the typical buttons.

I would claim that Phoenix is a good album with good songs, not outstanding songs but good ones. The opener is perhaps not as good as the album’s general quality, I would even describe it as somewhat boring. Station No. E is probably the best song, along with the cover song Diane. Phoenix is a solid album that pushes the right buttons for those who enjoy the gothic rock genre and of course to those who enjoy The Cascades. So for the targeted audience this is probably an album well worth checking out, it probably won’t go wrong for many of us even though it may be a bit genre typical for the average listener to really take notce.

Phoenix works really well, I think that it is a solid album by a competent band, quite likeable. There are however other albums with the same title that are shining more brightly, I guess you could say that the wings are not as fiery on the firebird of this trio as they are on some other rockers’. But with that said, I still think that is an album that will work quite well in any record collection.

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