EXPERIMENTS IN MASS APPEAL

I'm giving myself a hard time last few days. This has to be the 5th or 6th review where the rating is causing me almost literally headaches. This could even be the worst of all those cases and again I'm caught in the middle between 3 and 4 stars. And that's already surprising looking at the average for this album so far. I would even be the first (of 24!) to give it three if that would be the verdict. But even now I'm writing this I'm not quite sure which it will be. So I will give ratings for each song with short description once again and see what comes of it:

1. The title track is a song with alternating soft and sweet parts and on the other hand several pretty rough passages. Good opener, though a bit monotonous towards the end (3,75*).

2. Same description actually but here the rough parts are extremely loud compared to the soft moments. Not a good song to play if you want to fall asleep. Original approach (3,5*).

3. Good song with pleasant rhythm as main feature (3,75*).

4. This one could have been on their debut (Milliontown) contrary to the first three. Bit of a ballad this but also here too monotonous near the end (3,25*).

5. The absolute highlight for me. Very catchy song with a great keyboard riff that keeps coming back all the time. Also the chorus is very nice (4*).

6. Not really a stand out song, average for Frost* standard without being really poor (3,5*).

7. Supershort ballad, nice but no more (3*).

8. Pretty rough and rocking track, not really special, just good (3,5).

9. Biggest disappointment for me. Appears not to be an interesting epic like I hoped for but one of those hidden track kind of things I usually hate. First 6 minutes are pretty good than a ballad-like part after a pause and last few minutes are completely uninteresting with the album fading out disappointingly (3,25*).

And this last almost makes me punish them by giving it three stars out of sheer disappointment and frustration because I had hoped for something that might have come near the fantastic epic on their debutalbum but the opposite was the case here. And another disappointment is the lacking of a few of those great guitar solos by John Mitchell like on Black light Machine. They are absent at all on this album. So it would have to be three stars you would think after so much negative comment and still ... there is something about this album that makes it hard to approach it all negative. Somehow it's too good for that. It breathes some sort of class, it's not boring or unoriginal at all and at least they have the balls to try something new compared to the debut.

In the end I'm caught between disappointment and admiration. And I don't often do this but this time I let the general opinion play a part in my judgement and give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, my personal average for this album is with a very slight edge above 3,5 so I'm entitled to give them 4 stars but I'm not convinced and consider their debut much much better. The only advantage this album has compared to Milliontown is that this one is more consistent. The class difference between the songs on the debut was much bigger. So 4 stars in the end for this, I'm letting them off the hook.

EDIT: I have to reconsider here. Above stated still goes for 100% as far as I'm concerned but after many more listens it doesn't get any better, rather worse. The songs appeared not tenable for me so since it already was 50-50 for 3 or 4 stars I will have to round down in the end.