PowerPlay

All Those Years

Written by: PP on 21/01/2016 22:10:23

Some of our most senior readers age wise may remember a classic rock band called PowerPlay that had a small following in Copenhagen around the turn of the 90s. Dubbed as "westcoast rock" or "AOR" (album oriented rock), PowerPlay were founded in the late 80s and spent a few years playing local venues to a modest response, which eventually led them to a record contract in 1991. That album was meant to be recorded in 1992 and released in 1993, but the group disbanded before any of that could happen. That was in 1992, folks, and already back then PowerPlay's sound was starting to feel outdated as the wheels of stylistic evolution within the music scene kept rolling forward with grunge and hard rock taking over. Finally, the band reunited 20 years later in 2012 to play a few shows and to record an album that never was.

That album is "All Those Years", and from the opening moments, it's clear that it arrives about 25 years too late, stylistically speaking. It's a piano-based classic rock album that basically insinuates the earth stop revolving and time stood still since the glory days of Journey, Boston, etc. But it's a long time - decades - since those groups drew arena-sized crowds, and even their medium-size club shows today are essentially caricatures of the former larger-than-life rock star persona-driven shows that books and screenplays were written about. The classic rock genre is so played out in 2016 with a couple of decades' distance to the last truly seminal album that one is inclined to think all of the good material this genre has to offer has already been written. Let's just put it this way: "All Those Years" isn't making a very good argument against that trail of thought.

In what is a hopelessly outdated soundscape stylistically, PowerPlay attempt to recreate the conditions that made classic rock, or just rock as it was treated as back then, great: Big, ambitious soundscapes with simple riffs extended to eternity, 80s style guitar distortion, and clean vocals drawing from heavy metal vibrato every now and then, otherwise relying on high pitch wails that suggests the singer's balls never dropped, to use a cliché expression. At the same time, a song like "Cry Freedom" is so ridiculously safe and cliché in its all-ages faded back female backing choirs and guitars that any serious music fans are likely to roll their eyes and think "why?" to themselves. The opening track "City Of Life" is catchy enough, but let's not kid ourselves here: Boston and Journey did it much, much better. Otherwise, the record has one pattern repeating through its ten tracks: why would you ever listen to this, when you can listen to classic records by identical-sounding bands that are so clearly better? The 70s and 80s are never coming back in their original constellation, but PowerPlay stubbornly refuse to believe such sentiments on "All Those Years".

4

Download: City Of Life, Climb A Mountain
For the fans of: Boston, Journey, Toto, Yes
Listen: Facebook

Release 04.09.2015
Target Records

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