Band:
Ola Salo (V, Kb & Ac. G)
Martin Axén (G)
Jepson (G)
Leari (B)
Sylvester Schlegel (D, elec. D & program.)
Jens Andersson (Kb, perc)
Discography:
Racing with the Rabbits (EP 1996)
We Are The Ark (2000)
In Lust We Trust (2002)
State of The Ark (2004)
Recording info:
Jonas Nydessjö (String arr.)
Marco Manieri (Prod., eng. & mix)
Thomas Berger & Björn Lindgård (Master)
Oskar Humlebo (Add. Prod.)
Guests:
Jens Lindgård (Trombone)
Petter Lindgård (Trumpet)
Sven Andersson (Sax & clarinet)
Filip Runesson (Strings)
Måns Block (Perc.)
Mauricio Canivilo (Perc.)
Christopher Dominique (Piano)
Elisabeth Fornander, Oskar Humlebo, Maria Lilja, Simon Koudriavstev and Kristian Pehrsson (choir, V)
This Swedish glam rock band fills their music with bing and ding, thoughts and hiddes motives, yet it’s easilly listend and uncomplicated in every way. Just Clamour for Glamour, to quote one of the songs from the previous album – just the way a glam band should play!
This album, however, is not just straight ahead rock ´n´roll with glamour and glitter, it’s more than that. What The Ark does on this album is mixing their traditional glam rock with lots of influences from other directions, making the album deep and well varied. It’s totally lacking of overall structure. Here and there it’s some scent of gospell, of jazz, of blues, boogie woogie and so on – but doing this without making the album feel straggy or splintered as it ought to do when you have an album with so many different characteristics as this one have.
It would take me lots of pages filling this review with exact descrpitions of how this album sounds, every song just have their own uniqe identity. What you might say is that it have a tendency to point more for a softer kind of rock or rocky popular music. Yet, theres plenty of examples with songs that isn’t even in this neighbourhood.
I especially like the closing Uriel, that is a song where vocalist Ola Salo (with the palindromish name) sings much darker than he usualy do and bring out the beautiful melodies in the song.
For me, this appears to be an almost given album for the record collection. It’s so rich, yet continious and so much The Ark but also very much more. It’s soft, pop-oriented rock but not as simple as that only and I can’t help but feeling this is The Ark at it’s very best. Salo is a pefect front-man and a very good singer and great songwriter. The band is great live and this is their best album so far – if you buy it you won’t regret it! Maybe if you like the hardest of the extremest, this might be a little to soft for you, but for most people ’Prayer for the Weekend’ is an album that really moves you.