Autumn's Child
Angels's Gate

Angel’s Gate looks like an interesting place, it is the second album by Mikael Erlandsson’s band Autumn’s Dream that is a sort of follow up to his previous band Last Autumn’s Dream that decided to take a break in 2018. A band with some strong guys from the Swedish melodic rock scene, who did a pretty generic AOR-album for a debut. But Erlandsson has done some greater stuff in the past as well, so his works isn’t instantly dismissible. So, like always I hope to hear something fresh and exciting when starting this new album, the cover bird is more exciting than the one on the debut album.

No surprises really, it is classic AOR or melodic hardrock in veins of classics like 10cc, Supertramp, Journey, Toto, Foreigner, ELO and many others. The songs are quite catchy and Erlandsson sings really well, I think the production is quite great as well. But it is just what I kind of expected, or feared, there are no surprises, there is no novelty, no sense of fresh thinking, kind of like an album that was written and recorded in about three hours by some excellent musicians. Compared with the previous album it is about the same, the songs are fewer this time and they have different titles, but that is probably the only difference.

If you like me consume many albums you will want every new one to offer something that feels fresh, new, something you haven’t really heard before. I return to albums by W.E.T., Eclipse, Survivor, the first Pride of Lions, Styx, Rainbow and such bands when I just want to listen to something I like in the genre and not review something, this is not an album that will ever be considered again, as soon as the final paragraph is written it will be deleted. Not because it is bad, but because it offers nothing that haven’t already been done better by some other bands, another thing that makes it an album I will not return to is that it lacks a strong hit song, the ones closest feels like copies of something else and then I’d rather pick the original that still carries some sense of novelty.

Erlandsson is clearly gifted and he is productive, too bad he isn’t very creative and just reuses the same elements all the time – it would be better for everything if musicians released fewer but better written albums instead of releasing the same thing over and over. I like this album; it is easy to like and has been fun to play for a while, but it is hard to see the point as I can easily think of two better albums in the genre already released this year (there are probably more). So, why buy this one when there are thousands of better albums released in this genre already?

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