Album review : STARDUST – Kingdom Of Illusion

Frontiers [Release date: 16.06.23]

Hungarian band, Stardust kick off their album with ‘War’ as the opening track. Given current events, there was always someone who’d climb on the bandwagon.

Lets move on.

There’s a welcome familiarity to Stardust’s melodic rock, you can hear echoes of Europe’s best contemporary AOR bands – like Eclipse, HEAT and WET.

Flushed with the adrenaline of protest, the band go on to target the most popular of emotions, with ‘Fire’. It’s a pulse quickening melodic rock song, intense and passionate, with a welcome emphasis on melody. It could have been recorded 40 years ago, and that’s a big part of its appeal.

Up there with the best sentimental, chest beating ballads of the eighties, ‘Make Me Feel Your Love’ is a memorably melodic evocation of hard rock heartbreak, daringly backed up by a cover of one of Cinderella’s most popular ballads (64 million hits on Spotify), ‘Don’t Know What You Got Till It’s Gone’.

Elsewhere the heart stopping hooks and catchy choruses are liberally sprinkled… a thundering, bass heavy soundtrack is sweetly loosened by dancing keyboards on ‘Losing Me’; the frenetic ‘Heroes’ is lyrically strong, with fine axe soloing giving it further momentum, and the Blue eyed soul/ westcoast rock of ‘Sarah’ demonstrates a secure melodic sensibility, a willingness to show that they are more than eighties AOR wannabes.

We’ll hear more of this band, of that there is no doubt. ****

Review by Brian McGowan

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Power Plays w/c 9 December 2024

In this sequence we play ‘The Best of 2024′ GRTR! reviewer selections

Featured Albums w/c 9 December 2024

09:00-12:00 The Best of 2024 (Melodic Rock)
12:00-13:00 The Best of 2003-2024 (Melodic Hard Rock)
14:00-16:00 The Best of 2024 (Singer Songwriter)