The album was released in December 2016 but you must excuse me if I managed to write about it just now… I’ve just found the right time to do so, since I tend to separate the listening session with the reviewing one. Of course I’ve listened to the album many times since the release date.
Let me start with some basic info for any AOR fans who might not know about Andy Rock. He is the founder and guitarist of the Greek band Wild Rose from Thessaloniki. He is a multi-talented musician who is also a lyricist, guitarist and the man behind the music production of his new solo album, “This Time”.
The rest of the info is available online, so let me start writing about the music. In the past, Andy mentioned that his favorite artists were Bon Jovi, Richard Marx and Michael Bolton, which is really obvious in most of the songs of the album. The singer of “This Time” is the dearly departed David Saylor who suddenly left us earlier this year. David’s beautiful vocals fit just perfect with those melodic well crafted songs and so does the backing choirs and vocals of Chris Siloma who is also the manager of Andy and Wild Rose. After all the Rock-Saylor collaboration had already passed the test in the second and third Wild Rose albums.
My idea of a review is not to analyze each song separately, but to share with you how this album made me feel. I don’t mean to sound extreme but I am pretty confident after all these listening sessions, that “This Time” and “4” by Wild Rose are the best Greek melodic rock albums of 2016 and maybe of the last decade too. I’ve listened to “This Time” repeatedly and everything sounds so well played in my head that I couldn’t find any flaws. While I was listening to it, many musicians from the 80’s came to mind. This album lifted my spirits higher as well as my pride for the Greek hard rock bands. Well done Andy and let’s hope for a new album soon, with an amazing singer such as David Saylor.
