Michael Kratz
Tafkatno

Tafkatno, at least he gives the album an amusing and different name, but does that mean the same for the content of the album? It is Dane Michael Kratz who gives us his third album, a guy known as drummer for the band Kandis but who also has a couple of solo efforts, like this one. It doesn’t look amazing. But it has gotten quite a few spins anyway as you can never judge the book by its cover, even though it is more often the case that the cover tells you exactly what you get – so how about this one?

Melodic rock, westcoast is a word often used to describe the kind of music we get here. Eleven tracks are on offer, and it starts out with a pretty generic song of the style, and it is quite representative of the album in general. It contains the expected ballads and more hit-oriented songs, the surprises are quite few. It is largely a generic melodic rock/hard-rock album with catchy choruses, polished production and most things you can expect from something within that genre. The variation is decent and offers no surprises, the playing time is sensible and not too long.

There are some excellence on this album, How Can a Man at the end of the album is really great and catchy, and tracks three and four are also worth mentioning. But besides this trio there isn’t much that makes me stop and take notice, most of the album just pass by. I notice the highlights I have mentioned but otherwise I am not really caring about what Kratz has to offer. And I kind of doubt that it is an album that will make much of an impression, I believe it would be more ideas needed to achieve that.

Sure it is a decent album when you look at it all, there are even some greatness, but it isn’t really an album that makes an impression. It doesn’t really stand out from the flocks of other similar stuff, Kratz plays it safe and therefore he will probably fail to impress on a larger scale. If it is worth your while? I guess the answer is both yes and no, it depends on how you like to look at things, but if you prefer the melodic rock/AOR/westcoast style it is certainly worth looking at as it presses the right buttons to be a good offering in that genre.

HHHHHHH