nivjourney Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Crossroads Moment took a while to grow on me,
> because I had to re-order the tracks, deleting a
> few horrendous songs along the way, but the songs
> that were left made a good album.

What order did you end up with?

Here's what I've got....
Battersea
Dream Higher
Crossroads Moment
Alive
Behind the Music
Lost
Love the World Away
'Til the Morning Comes
That's Why I Sing
Friends We've Never Met

Once you get rid of the excess, you end up with a pretty darn good album.



> You can't tell me that you couldn't lift Jimi's
> voice from any of the songs on Never Too Late, and
> replace them with any other project singer on
> Frontiers and have people go "wait a minute, this
> sounds too much like a Jimi Jamison song, what's
> it doing on this Terry Brock/W.E.T/Joe Lynn
> Turner/Issa/Johnny Gioeli, etc album?!"... They
> wouldn't, because it all sounds the same, without
> any identity after a while...
> Niv

That in itself is a major problem with the melodic rock scene at the moment, and I think it's going to get worse. There are few writers around, and you end up with multiple variations of an Eric Martennson album....

with Erik on Vocals.....Eclipse
with JSS on vox....WET
with Toby on vox...Mercury's Down
with Jimi on vox...Never Too Late

The music style changes somewhat (Eclipse and the Jimi album don't really sound alike), but the writing style is distinctly Erik Martennson.

It's been done before (the Gary Hughes albums with Bob Catley, the Magnus Karlsson albums with Allen/Lande and Catley, and Mike Slamer albums with various singers in Steelhouse Lane/Terry Brock, and others), and one producer handling just about everything that is released, but it seems to be happening with more frequency in recent years. Now you get albums like the Issa one recording covers of "obscure" melodic rock tracks.

The scene is having issues. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here, but I think it will get worse instead of better. In the meantime, I think it's time to accept that separate identities for each artist are going away. There are only so many writers and so many producers, and this intermingling is hurting the scene as a whole.
Kevin