STRANGEWAYS — Age of Reason (review)

STRANGEWAYS — Age of Reason album cover Album · 2011 · Hard Rock Buy this album from MMA partners
2/5 ·
Time Signature
End of the day...

Genre: melodic (hard) rock

Not quite an album to grab you by the balls and punch your teeth in, "Age of Reason" can nonetheless be an enjoyable listen - if you are in the mood for it. The music is overall quite mellow and melodic, and melancholic - much like Jagged Edge's "Fuel for your Soul" from 1990 (but less interesting, I must say).

I quite like tracks like 'Frozen', 'Run' and 'Sentinel' which, while not track that blow one away, still have some nice hard rocking qualities to them (interestingly, 'Run' manages to combine blues based hard rock, AOR and U2-like rock) and are quite appealing.

My problem with this album, however, is that I think that there are way too many ballads on it, most of which strike me as being quite bland and nothing out of the ordinary (I do like 'As We Fall' which has a nice 90s alternative rock feel to it). What's more is that virtually all of the ballads are are organized consecutively, which means that there is a considerable stretch of music which is bereft of energy, and I think that most metalheads and hard rock fans are not interested in that.

So, for melodic rock this is not a bad release, and fans of rock ballads should love it, but the hard rocking tracks are simply to few and far between, I think, for the majority of of metalheads and hard rock fans to enjoy the album in its entirety.
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Time Signature wrote:
more than 2 years ago
Well, I like good ballads - and there are some good ballads on this album. But most of them do strike me as being pretty bland.
Stephen wrote:
more than 2 years ago
I'm interested to check on this, mainly because some said that they're trying to comin' back to the old days, but since they're basically AOR band, the main appeal are the ballads / slowtempo songs. However, the last album is a disaster, but hopefully this one is better :)

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