Album review : PAUL LAINE : The Long Road Back

Frontiers Music [Release date : 25.09.26]

There’s a lot of traffic right now on The Long Road Back from the Eighties. The AOR genre just refuses to die.
GRTR’s AOR Guru, Andy Nathan, who travels the world in a search for the best of the genre, will attest to that.

We made reference to the music’s longevity on the recent No Static At All compilation review.

For the uninitiated, Canadian Paul Laine’s original claim to fame was that of a member of Danger Danger, who he joined in 1993. From there, Shugazer, Dark Horse, Jet Set Junkies and latterly, Defiance.

He turned out to be something of a rock music renaissance man, a successful solo vocalist, music manager and vocal arranger (for The Scorpions and Poison to name but two).

How his Country Rock band, Dark Horse didn’t hit big with 2014’s Let It Ride must remain something of a mystery.

He’s working again in partnership with old DD bandmate, Bruno Ravel. Together, they’ve written and produced this album. Their professionalism is transparent… it’s immediately obvious that everything is cleanly recorded and immaculately mixed.

And it’s also clear that they’ve written these 11 songs to the image of the AOR era. Each one is plugged into the history of the genre. ‘Don’t Let Me Go Tonight’ is doing a fair bit of rockin’ with the radio, and the meticulous ‘Someday’ mines the motherlode of AOR in much the same manner as the Netherland’s Terra Nova once did.

And naturally, the songs reverberate with Danger Danger type double entendres. The winner so far has to be “I see you looking like a beauty queen, I’ll put out your fire with my gasoline …” from ‘Save Me Saturday Night’.

Other songs are built around the innocence of youth and its pitfalls, “you took the bait and she’s the hook” from ‘Her Name Is Trouble’, a song with a memorably different chorus.

And so The Long Road Back is played out in much the same way as it started. With some exceptions. ‘Heaven And Earth Collide’ and ‘Kiss Me California’ have more of a contemporary feel, sharing plenty of stylistic and narrative DNA with bands like Imagine Dragons and Florida Georgia Line.

Given Laine’s past, this was perhaps inevitable, and maybe a signpost to the future, who knows. ***1/2

Review by Brian McGowan

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