Album Review: Sunstorm - Brothers In Arms

If they are going to keep repeating themselves, I'm going to keep repeating myself. Look, I'm sick to death at this point of these labels and bands pumping out so much of the same stuff. It's too much, and it really has been dragging down even the good stuff as of late. It's hard to enjoy one of these albums when I know there's another one exactly like it coming out next month, and another one from the same project coming out the next year. There's no breathing room, and any excitement is flat-out neutered by the simple accumulation of music.

Sunstorm got rebooted as a vehicle for Ronnie Romero last year, which was ridiculous enough, but now they're back one year later with another album. Maybe this is a means to justify trotting out an old name for something that doesn't actually have a fuck's worth of connection to the 'legacy' contained therein, but if you're asking me to be excited about another assembly line album fronted by Ronnie, so soon after the last dozen of them, there's not a chance I'm going to be.

There's an irony to the album being called "Brothers In Arms", considering that the name Sunstorm was yanked away from the only person left from the band's initial heyday, to be given to a guy who has been on enough records at this point he shouldn't need the boost. Funny how the only actual person Sunstorm is connected to got left behind. Not very brotherly, now was it?

But the big problem with the album is the staleness of it. Everything is pleasant enough, and Ronnie sounds better singing this than he does the heavier metal he has always been miscast for. However, the in-house songwriters pump out dozens of albums every year, so if you can find the difference between this and all the others, or hear melodies that haven't already been used many times over, you're a far more obsessed fan than I am. I know playing basic melodic rock is never going to be an original thing to do, but so much of what comes out on this label is written by the same handful of people that the albums have different names and covers the same way bottled water puts so many brands on the same old tap water.

In fairness, if you're asking why I'm even bother to talk about this album if that's the way I feel, it would be a good question. The answer is that I don't have a good answer, other than being rightly annoyed by it all at the time I sat down to listen to the album. I was hoping something would catch my ear in a new way, but it didn't. While I found the music enjoyable enough, I was also utterly bored by the label's cliches coming out again and again. Albums like this are musical comfort food, feeding us the empty calories of songs we've already heard so many times before. It might satisfy us for a brief moment, but there's nothing I'm going to remember about this record, which is for the same reason.

It's like going to a home improvement store and grabbing a handful of paint chips all in the same color range. If you sit and stare at them long enough, are you going to remember what any individual shade looks like? No. They're all going to blend together under one basic color, and eventually you're going to be so sick of them you wind up going in a different direction. That's what Sunstorm is facing, and while these songs are fine, they aren't anywhere near good enough to rise above the 'familiarity breeds contempt' concept.

I'm just being honest.