EMBRACE THE STORM

I had a lot of expectations when this came out, and most of them were met. Arjen showed he could write in a straight forward rock type of way, which he had done little off in the past. He was able to show off my favorite female vocalist Marcela Bovio wonderfully, and her performance just takes the album to wonderful heights at times. Lori provides good guitar solo's, overall not as good as they could have been, but not bad either. In all my one major complaint is a shock is it is the first time I have been able to say it aboot anything Arjen has done... if you hear one song you've heard basically the album. Each song has it's own characterists of course, but a general musical union throughout the album, mixed with poor production by Arjen's standard left the album monotone. Still, there is a lot of excellent music there, and vocals to die for, and so this album gets a 4/5.