THE LONELY HEARTBEAT

One more obscure recording of Sweden´s most important prog figures to rise in the 90´s. But before Stolt would conquer the prog scene with his Flower Kings, and after he left another seminal prog band of the 70´s (Kaipa), he had a real awful time during the 80´s. Well, almost everybody in prog had a hard time through that period. And mr Stolt was no exception. If on his previous output (1985´s Behind The Walls) it seemed that some big recoding tycoon decided to make him a pop/new wave star, this time around it sounds like someone thought he could be the swedish version of new R&B artists who were having radio hits like Robert Cray and Steve Ray Vaughan.

So this time we have an uneven collection of songs that goes through pop, blues, jazz, R&B and gospel. Even a the Dire Stratis style is thrown in for good measure (on Shine and Ring Of light, for instance). While the overall quality of the songs is much superior to his previous effort (an easy task, I should say), once more several tracks are marred by the typical 80´s production, with those cheesy, ever present plastic synth sounds and drum programming. However, I reckon he was beginning to find his voice: his singing is much more focused and convincing now, and he does sound like Roine Stolt this time. His guitar solos are also excellent. The guy really had the chops to face the challenge of pedaling in the aforementioned styles without making a fool of himself. But don´t expect anything prog here. He was yet to find his own way in 1989.

All in all I didn´t find The Lonely Heartbeat not even nearly as bad as Behind The Walls (again, it was expected). If you like 80´s FM radio friendly rock and R&B, chances are you´ll probalby enjoy this album. But if you´re looking for something prog, just skip all his entire solo discography during that decade. it´s amazing how he would eventually appear with such masterpiece of symphonic prog as The Flower King in a little more than four years after such dubious work that this CD surely is. Besides, he has recently proved he could release a much stronger album in the blues/hard rock style recently (2010´s Wall Street Voodoo), with lots of personality and without the pop elements found here..

Rating: in this site, this is for completionists/collectors/hardcore fans only, in that order. 2 stars.