Arctic Rain
The One

Frontiers records is a label with many great albums in their stable, many years ago they released many excellent albums. They have grown a lot over the years and much of the music they release have become pretty generic over the years, I remember Pride of Lions and their excellent debut, they have kind of done the same journey and their latest album I just reviewed was pretty dull and generic. Arctic Rain starts out pretty generic, this album called The One doesn’t excite with novel ideas and fresh songs. The first time I heard this album it was obvious that it was a Frontiers album even though I didn’t know that it was at the time, but it sounds like most Frontiers releases. That might not be so strange as Pete has been part in writing for many of the artists of those releases.

The One is a typical AOR album with catchy choruses and strong production, pretty good vocals, kind of like those albums that are being released hundredfold each month. Clearly inspired by stuff of the eighties or such, they borrow their songs from past heroes, if you are diplomatic you might say that they pay homage to those guys, but they are certainly not creating anything. I find it to be quite difficult to write much about this album, or this band, all it makes me think about is how generic most of the stuff released on Frontiers records is and how they started out all fresh and exciting and then vacuumed up some grander names and then all of a sudden they became a big and tired label releasing one or two great albums and hundreds of lacklustre ones – this is one of the lacklustre ones by the way.

It isn’t a bad album; it is just very boring from a creative standpoint. But it probably presses the right buttons not to scare away the AOR fans and many will probably get this album, then play it a few times, give a nod of approval and then forget about it. I bet you that those who bought it on release day has forgotten that they own it already, albums that lacks novelty cannot really shine as much as albums with originality. I think they are skilled craftsmen, but they aren’t good artists. It is like they use that book I often refer to; AOR for Dummies, or the newer book The Frontiers Sound for Dummies, it is like those paint by numbers things. Like so many other albums on Frontiers, how can you claim that anything is good if you cannot tell it apart from anything else?

I cannot say that I am impressed by what I am hearing here, but it is a decent album for background noise. You can compare these guys with any AOR band, and there is a high likelihood that there are many fans of the genre that will find this album agreeable. I have seen some positive reviews, and I can see how you might like this if you haven’t heard much music in your life as the craftmanship is very good. But in the end, I think that this is one of those albums that feels like a giant waste, a polished production of what is essentially meaningless drivel. Think of how much resources that are wasted to create physical versions like vinyl records and CDs of pointless and generic stuff like this, it is difficult to imagine anything as pointless as albums like this. The best thing would be not to buy albums like this so that the labels would eventually stop releasing them, at least they could have released it only on digital so that the waste would have been less. It might not be bad, but I recommend that you do not bother with this album as it is a waste of time and money.

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