BAD HABIT
[Hear-Say]
Frontiers Records 2005
www.frontiers.it

What’s the 4-1-1?
The Swedish rockers have reformed and release their first brand new studio album since 1998’s Adult Orientation. The album contains two bonus offerings. The first is the video for the single “Walk of Life” as well as a video studio report during the making of the album.

Genre
Hard rock / melodic rock

The Good
The band has a great sense of melody when it comes to writing their songs. There’s the great single worthy song “Walk of Life.” It has a great hook that draws in the listener. There are some pretty smoking guitar solos on the CD. The solo in the lead track “To Love You” and “I Swear” go so far as to elevate the actual songs above what they would’ve been without it. Hal Marabel and Sven Cirnski really work well together on the six-string attack.

The material on the album is well mixed between the three main song styles. You have a few power ballads, some mid tempo songs, and some really take no prisoners rockers. I think the band is most powerful when it’s doing the more rocking material. Besides “Walk of Life,” the best songs on the album are all hard rockers like “Alive,” “Take Control” and “I Can’t Help Myself.” These are also the songs that stand as the best vocal performances from singer Bax Fehling.

The Bad
The main thing about this album that really bugged me was four of the first 5 songs. I was incredibly irritated with the vocals. It felt to me that Bax Fehling sounded strained in trying to reach the levels required for “To Love You,” “I Swear,” “All That I Want,” and “Reason.” It was rather irritating. Strangely enough beginning with track 6 (“Alive”), it was like a switch was flipped and the vocal work became far better. However, those four tracks had me dreading the rest of the album at first.

The Verdict
This is an overall solid melodic rock release. Longtime fans of the band are going to be very happy when they get their hands on this album. There are some issues with the vocals in the beginning of the CD, but they get smoothed out later in the record and it would appear that Bad Habit is rather successfully back!

Did You Know?
During the split of the band, guitarist Hal Marabel founded another project called Arena (Sweden). He also worked as Communications Projects manager for a pharmaceutical company. Bassist Patrick Sodergren initially went by the name Stevie Rose.

Rating: out of 5

-- Jay Roberts