ARRIVAL

Journey

Prog Related

2.76 | 53 ratings

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If you're a fan of the Steve Perry "legacy sound" JOURNEY (and I'm sure that many of you around here are)... you may have considered checking out the band's post-Perry material.

ARRIVAL is the band's first album after Perry moved on, and it's basically a collection of safe straight-forward melodic Rock... with very little indication that it is actually JOURNEY (and not just another generic act of the genre).

First-- The band (literally) lost its distinctive voice when they lost Steve Perry. Obviously, this challenge was going to be difficult for the band to overcome... but they did find an acceptable replacement in Steve Augeri. Unfortunately, he is just "acceptable"... and for a band whose primary identity was its vocals... "acceptable" is almost unacceptable.

Second-- The overall production of the album reflects the grunge-style trend of the time. So instead of getting BIG choruses, prominent keys, and biting guitar leads... you get grounded vocals, minimal keys and walls of muddied guitar chords.

Regardless of all that-- The songs themselves are not necessarily bad. However, I can't say that a majority of them are very memorable or distinctive in any way either.

Strangely enough, I actually prefer these compositions over the ones used in the band's last Perry-era album TRIAL BY FIRE. If only the two albums' songs were switched. Maybe the combination of Steve Augeri AND a post-grunge sound was simply too much for these tunes.

0 stars on the Prog-ometer

2 stars on the Personal Taste Meter

(For this site, I suppose this regrettably equates to a 1-star rating... although it probably deserves slightly better overall.)

PS: The band's 2008 album REVELATION (with new vocalist Arnel Pineda) manages to come much closer to capturing the band's beloved "legacy sound".

altaeria | 1/5 | 2011-4-15

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