Album Review: Jeff Scott Soto - Wide Awake (In My Dreamland)

Over the last few years, Jeff Scott Soto has been a busy guy. He has made two albums with Sons Of Apollo, one with his own SOTO band, one with W.E.T., and a solo album. The results have been, let's say, mixed. The fact of the matter is none of those outfits have great songwriters in them, so while there have been some good songs here and there, they don't work as entire albums you would want to sit down and listen to. Soto is far from the only singer who needs help getting enough good songs together, and perhaps this time he has managed to do that.

What's different for this album is that he has teamed with Frontiers Records' in-house songwriter, so there is a certain level of quality to be expected. There is also a downside to this, however, as he has written so many songs for so many bands I have covered, his style is incredibly played out at this point. Soto is signing on for a better album, albeit a more generic one.

That's exactly what we get. If you've heard any of these melodic rock albums being churned out, you know exactly what this album has in store. There aren't any surprises, but that's ok if the songs are still good. They are, although they aren't at the level I would call great. It's perfectly fine melodic rock with a little extra vocal charisma from Soto, who continues to sound far better singing anything and everything other than Sons Of Apollo music.

The string-heavy ballad "Without You" is a dramatic piece that I enjoy, but I also can't help but compare it to the extremely similar "You're Not Alone" from the first Revolution Saints album, from the same pen, with a similar vocal, which is a far better song. It's a simple fact that after writing hundreds of songs you either start repeating yourself, or you run through all your best ideas. Both seem to be happening, which is why the genre has felt stale this year, in particular.

Toward the middle of the record, we get a couple of songs in "Paper Wings" and "Love Will Find A Way" that raie the bar. That section is the best the album has to offer, with both of those tracks being strong efforts that stand out from the others. The latter, in particular, has a chorus that has a familiar echo. It's probably the best moment on the entire album, and it's a song I would certainly recommend checking out. If there were a couple more at that level, we would be telling a different story right now.

As things stand, this album is another middle-of-the-road Soto album. It's not as good as the fabulous W.E.T. album, but it's also not as rough around the edges as the dreary "MMXX" from Sons Of Apollo. It fits comfortably in the mix with the rest, which means that despite the change in writers, the end result is much the same. Soto deserves to have an album to himself that is befitting his voice, but this isn't it. This one is fine, but it could (and should) have been much more.