The Sounds
Dying To Say This To You

THE REVIEW

There are things that are scary. Like waking up one morning and discovering that there's a vocalist with a voice that's a mix between Avril Lavigne and Ann Wilson (from Heart) who sings disco-pop-rock "angry girl" songs from the '80s with an unsettling triteness and banality. It's Maja Ivarsson, the frontwoman of The Sounds, from Sweden with fury. A beautiful girl, undoubtedly. And that's the only positive thing one can say about her.
I should write a serious and precise review, but I can't. I'm scared, I'm really scared that with the repeated listening necessary to do things right, one of these insipid little songs might stick in my head, and I'll find myself humming it with satisfaction. I swear. It's stuff for thirteen-year-olds, but from when there were no cell phones, no rap or hip hop, when there were "Pop 84" jeans, in short, when we were naive, when any black leather garment was rebellion. Okay, I'll stop. Let's get back to the music.

Second effort of a group formed by five members (the classic rock formation with added keyboards/synthesizers), the album opens with "Song With A Mission", straight from the '80s AOR, where the height of rebellion is given by a guitar feedback thrown there between a refrain and a verse. At first glance, it seems like an intriguing track, but the overwhelming sense of déjà vu cuts any chance of redemption short. Continuing with the listening, we begin to be flooded by 4/4 tempos, classic verse-chorus-bridge-verse form, lyrics expressing simple concepts like "hey handsome I'm a girl, you can use me as a doormat, but whether to give it to you or not is my decision because I rock!" or "what can you do that's how it was meant to be, oh how bad I feel, I would almost go shopping".
Working with skip on the MP3 player, here's one of the tracks to save: "Tony The Beat", which until the refrain with syrupy synths arrives, is decent, then it drifts into something worthy of the soundtrack of "summer" films with Jerry Calà that air in the summer at 3 in the afternoon. Another skip to get to "Night After Night", a very banal ballad carried by piano and guitar arpeggio, which highlights all the limitations of the singer's voice, showing a vocal range of 1 octave, when the norm is 3. The nice thing (ahem...) is that the same track rearranged in a more rock key (present as a bonus track), doesn't look bad, but at the same time manages to transform into something even more anonymous.
Towards the end of the album, we encounter the '80s electro-disco of "Hurt You", where thanks to the almost complete absence of the frontwoman's voice, a different air is breathed: if you like certain sounds, it's not too bad. And we've reached the end of the album, time for judgments!

To describe how glossy and polished this album is, I necessarily have to use a harsh analogy: it's like a virgin with 3 Prada-branded hymens.
A recommendation: make sure these five scoundrels are not allowed to keep making records!