Sole Syndicate – Last Days of Eden
Release Date: 20th November 2020
Label: Scarlet Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Rock, Melodic Rock, 80’s Rock.
FFO: Europe, Journey, Extreme.
Review By: Paul Franklin
In a band I’d imagine you have to be really careful when naming your songs. You need a title that will sum up the meaning and feeling of the song, and in the international market you need to be sure it doesn’t cause offense in another language. But, most importantly, you need to be careful that you don’t call it something that might come back and bite you. Sole Syndicate rather foolishly decided to call one of the tracks of their new album Have You heard It All Before, to which there is unfortunately only one answer……Yes, we have…lots of times!
The members of this Swedish five-piece grew up listening to the most famous melodic rock and metal bands of the 80’s. However, in the last thirty odd years, it doesn’t appear that they have listened to much else. Last Days of Eden sounds like it could have been dug up from a time capsule buried in 1989, the glossy production, the vocal harmonies, the clean cut riffs all have that distinctive 80’s Euro-rock sound. The musicianship is not in question, all the band play well and the singer has a good (if unremarkable) voice, it’s just all a bit safe and predictable. It’s paint-by-numbers rock. Every track sounds like the token ‘Rock’ track that makes it into The Eurovision Song Contest every couple of years. Pain is Only An Illusion starts to do something a bit interesting with an almost Disturbed like opening, but it loses it’s bottle halfway through and retreats back to it’s ‘safe place’.
Having said that the vocals were favourable, the lyrics themselves are another matter. One assumes the band were gifted The Bumper Book of Naff Rock Clichés and slowly working their way through it page by page. Particularly culprits are the least emotive anti-war song Brothers with the insightful “The battle that will show us who is good and who is not, but everyone is on the losing side”, and the cringe-inducing We Came To Rock which declares “Like the heat of Arabian nights we came to rock, In the cold northern lights we came to rock”.
Not bad enough to get angry about. Not good enough to get passionate about.
Oh..and on a personal note, can we please now stop using random numbers to replace letters in words. It was cool for a short while back in the day (and comes in handy for passwords), but now it’s just annoying and a bit juvenile.
(2.5 / 5)
