Jaded Heart - Guilty by Design

Jaded Heart must have found themselves in quite a predicament. Having been at it for some twenty plus years now, they must have found it difficult to go on, ever since their original singer Michael Bormann left, several albums ago, but they soldiered on with a new singer in Johan Fahlberg and a relative departure from a more melodic style to a progressively harder style… running parallels with several other German bands that didn’t manage to really get top billing but kept on putting out albums. Jaded Heart have changed labels often and this release finds em downsized from Frontiers to Massacre…
 
Without having something really “bad”, Jaded Heart’s 12th effort is devoid of any catchiness, being a by the numbers melodic metallic rock release, with choruses that rarely feel like you could relate to… man I was hard pressed to find a song I sort of liked “Remembering” may be an exception. There’s the odd nice melody here or there, but frankly it’s all quite bland and predictably from a songwriting perspective and unfortunately, while Fahlberg is not terrible, he lacks in charisma and seems unable to make the songs work, despite his best efforts. Several albums after Michael’s departure, I find it hard to follow Jaded Heart anymore as they hardly remind the excellent band they used to be.