Reach
The Great Divine

Swedish band Reach return with their second album, an album called The Great Divine. It is a band with a history stretching back to 2012 and the first album saw light of day in 2015 and is said to have been successful for the band and has some endearing quotes in the press sheet to illustrate this. Much is done about the trio’s live playing experience and abilities and again I tend to wonder when promotion agencies will understand that live abilities has nothing to do with the potential quality of the album and should be more of a footnote than main body of text in the press material. Good thing though is that I got to learn that some guy from H.E.A.T. produced the album and also who did the mixing. But what about this album then? Is it worth spending one’s hard earned money on?

It is melodic hard rock music with a fairly modern sound, really good vocalist and a good production overall. The song selection is fairly typical for a rock album of this type and the only surprise is probably how lame much of the verses and stuff that aren’t choruses are – this feels like an album where they have focused extremely much on the choruses and very little on the other things. The ten tracks plays for little over 40 minutes so the album is short enough to get away with not being overly varied and it gets even better since you are somewhat swept away by the strong choruses, at least in the beginning.

Good stuff in general, an easy album to like and take to. I think it will go down well with a rather wide audience much because of the strong choruses, which makes for pretty good songs that should go down with fans as well as the always-positive Internet reviewers. While the choruses are fetching and strong, I think the rest of the songs feel a bit underworked and unimpressive so one could harshly describe it as an album with strong choruses and dull verses. That makes the album a bit less impressive than it could have been, it could have had a better depth and songs that were strong on all parts of the songs. Nevertheless, I think that we can conclude that it is a solid production, good but not overly impressive.

How about it then? Is it worth having? I would say that if you are a fan of this band, then you would like this album a lot. If you like melodic hard rock and the AOR sort of thing the chances are good that you will like it as well, but from a critic’s standpoint I find the album lacking that little bit extra and while I find it a good album it is not one that I would buy or keep. The Great Divine is a solid but also quite average album with good choruses.

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