Shakra - Power Play

Here we go again with a band that always seems to be lacking that spark that would help them catch fire and break-out. The same can be said on Power Play their ninth studio album but it is a huge record to be sure. The band are produced well and the vocals are impactful on most tracks. The one thing that gets a little boring is their guitar tone which is almost always the same but has a strange distortion effect that sometimes sounds too solid state and cold. Almost like a tiny speaker was being used and then it was manipulated with anything but high end digital software effects.

The sound is very noticeable on "Dear Enemy" where the guitar tone is at its absolute worst. When it comes to straight up song writing quality the band hit a couple of songs for doubles. One of them being "Save You From Yourself" that is a solid AOR tune with a little more dynamic crunch that usually gets ironed out on AOR albums for a more smooth sound. This album keeps some of the dirt and grit which does make the whole album a better listen.

Thomas Muster and Thom Blunier pull off some decent solo's and some nice riffs but in the end we've heard all this before and more often better. That is evident on "Don't Keep Me Hanging" which could be any number of bands who take the gallop and pomp chorus cheese to much higher heights. John Prakesh makes his second album as vocalist for the band and I think he's a good vocalist but he isn't going to set the world on fire with any cool gymnastics or deep growling passages that a couple of the tracks could have used.

As with much of the self produced albums we are receiving the band members just don't get how important an outside producer can be and this album shows that in spades when you take a song like the gawd awful "Stevie" or "Because Of You" one is just shit lacking everything and should have never made this album in its current form. But with some more dynamic acoustic guitars in the mix and a pull back on the distortion overload that is layered on the song "Because Of You" could be a very good song. The overt attempt to have a massive production sound on the backing vocals also removes all the organic sounds that add a measure of organics to the sound instead of processed Soundforge compression and wanna be Def Leppard with not even 10% of their recording budget. 

The bombastic groove that drives "Secret Hideaway" just makes me want to click to the next track because it is just not done right. This song screws up the intro effect they are going for then a wimpy odd pre-chorus/bridge section that is lost in a mess of mediocrity. By the time your in the chorus the song has fallen into the same old distortion sound issue with a blah wah peddle solo that I've heard for way to many years in this paint by numbers manner. Sure the band has some chops but they bury so much in over producing their songs and not trying different stuff like about some strings or a sax solo or even a moog synth now and again. Hell pick some acoustic guitars and put some crazy effects on them. This band will wallow in obscurity forever because they refuse to let go of the dull production techniques of yester-year.