Frontline
State of Rock

Old albums rereleased is something we get to deal with every now and then, and it seems as the AOR/melodic rock genre is the genre where most albums are being rereleased – at least when you judge by what we here at Hallowed receive. It is German band Frontline that sees their debut album State of Rock Being remastered and rereleased with two bonus tracks that were originally heard on the Japanese issue of the album. It is the guitarist and founding member Robby Böbel who does the remastering of this album that started the story of Frontline in 1994, a story that ended with the album Circles in 2006.

Killer vocals and production isn’t really descriptions I would use to describe this album, it was released in 1994 and you can hear that. It sounds quite dated it hasn’t aged fantastically well and I would say that the ones with a nostalgic disposition might find this quite exciting, authentic nineties I guess it can be described as. Not real musical surprises, they didn’t break new ground back then so even less so now. But it is a quite varied album for the genre even though we are getting a fairly typical selection of songs, perhaps they could have added some pace to some of the songs because the album feels a bit on the slower side overall which might be detrimental to the reach of it.

An album of entertaining songs and an overall entertaining feel, like an old person telling stories of the past and while it may feel dated and a bit tired I think the quality of the songs makes it quite good. Then you could of course have some questions about the necessity of releasing old albums again when there are so many albums in this genre being released all the time, the new ones hardly needs to compete with obscure old albums – especially when they aren’t amazing. But as this comes in a limited edition it feels like something mostly aimed at fans who are looking to complete their Frontline collection or things like that and it is good enough to be listened to for a while even though it may not be a particularly memorable album.

You could describe this as an album for fans and those who likes to be a bit nostalgic. I think this is very good nineties AOR/metlodic rock album, but it feels a little bit dated and it isn’t the most exciting album I have heard. The conclusion will have to be that Frontline made a very good debut album back in 1994 but I think the passage of time hasn’t been too kind to it.

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