She Bites
Joyride

Joyride, that makes me think of a Swedish band that was pretty successful some time ago and much of their music is still really enjoyable to listen to. The press sheet compare these guys to said band, as well as Starship and Robin Beck; the latter is probably the most similar, they are more towards the AOR style than the pop rock. It is their debut album and it offers eleven tracks, and the title track isn’t a Roxette cover.

Classic AOR and perhaps Dante Fox and similar artists to them would have been a better comparison to this, but the promotion agency named the ones listed as similar in the upper field and I always use what the labels list if I can. The album builds on catchy songs with distinct choruses, pretty good female vocals and decent variation. The sound is a bit nostalgic I think, not as polished as some of the releases that I hear nowadays. And it is not very original, they kind do the same thing as most of the bands in the genre do – it will sound very familiar to you if you have heard a few albums in this genre, a Sugababes cover is slightly original though.

Joyride is a fine album; the title track is really enjoyable and there are more songs that are really fine here. But it is hard to overlook the fact that it is a very predictable album overall, half the first song and it is quite easy to accurately predict the rest of the album and that is less brilliant. If they had pushed the right button it might have been more exciting, I would have liked to see the singer more challenged, they should have pushed her voice to the limits and dared to challenge the listener as well. Because if you don’t you are kind of doomed to be forgotten, unless you can make something extraordinarily great, but that doesn’t happen very often and it doesn’t in this case. So, while there are some enjoyable stuff here, it isn’t really an album that will make much of a dent in the world of music, certainly not as much as another album called Joyride.

In the end it is a solid effort, perhaps to be seen as something of a studio joyride. It can be enjoyed for a while but the lack of originality and fresh ideas will have you grow a bit tired with it and in the end it will probably be forgotten. Perhaps an album to play on a streaming service and not one for the record shelf, it is fun to listen to for a while.

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