ALIVE AGAIN: THE BREATHING SHADOW PART IV

The decline of Nightingale goes on. If Alive Again proves one thing it is the apparent lack of Dan Swanö to come up with anything original and challenging. It is a collection of uninspired, formulaic and commercial songs. The previous album at least succeeded to be better then Asia's debut, but this one is possibly worse.

The thing that bothers me with Alive Again is that it fools the fans by implicitly promising a return to old glory, thematically the album hints at the first two Nightingale albums and even reprises some themes of it, but musically this is as far from those albums as possible. The great atmospheric rock has been abandoned and replaced by neo-prog and AOR clichés, and in comparison to the similar albums around it, this one pales in songwriting as well in execution. Mostly, the material consists of bland pop songs, performed with electric guitars in order to sound heavy, but they can't be fooling anyone really. Even tons of heaviness wouldn't be able to cover the liquid cheese at the core of this album.

Apart from the intro and the outro which rehash some of the music from the older albums, there's only average and unexciting music here. I think I've heard about 80% of all albums featuring Dan Swanö and this is sure the weakest of all. For neo-prog listeners only.