All 41 - The World’s Best Hope

All 41 The World’s Best Hope cover
All 41
The World’s Best Hope
www.facebook.com/All41band
2017
7
Unfortunately manning a project with talented writers and performers doesn’t automatically mean success or indeed “greatness”. On paper All 41, another one of those projects born in Frontiers’ “dungeons” by its president Serafino Perugino, seems like it should work an AOR Frankenstein made up of the talented Terry Brock on lead vocals (Strangeways, Giant and other projects), Robert Berry (3, Alliance) on bass and lead vocals as well, Gary Pihl (Boston, Sammy Hagar, Alliance) on guitar and Matt Starr (Ace Frehley, Mr. Big) on drums with the aid on Alessandro Del Vecchio on writing etc., as one might have expected.
 
The whole AOR style follows all the mannerisms you might expect and you couldn’t flaw any of the musician’s performance wise really, other than remark that Brock doesn’t sound ultra-excited or exciting on the material, but I doubt it’s his fault. Most of the material is pretty dull, with few exceptions, ie the almost “dynamic” for an AOR track “Cyanide”, the decent ballad “Mother Don’t Cry” the duo of “Show Me the Way” and “Walk Alone” that show some backbone and maybe the melodic “Don’t Surrender (To Love)”… it’s not that the rest is terrible, but the entire album doesn’t feel like a highlight, but more like an exercise in AOR that didn’t go bad, but doesn’t up blowing up your mind as in theory it should… a potential problem with all these “bred” up projects that sometimes hit the bulls eye and others miss the mark, by a wide margin… this time the dart has landed somewhere in between…