(This review was originally published in 2005.)
Audiovision is a new Swedish band (or project?) centered around Narnia’s frontman Christian Rivel and Lions Share’s guitarist Lars Chriss. The rest of the band is made up of Mikael Höglund (Thunder, Great King Rat) on bass, Thomas Broman on drums and finally; Andreas Lindahl (Loch Vostok, ex-Platitude) on keyboards. For some reason, a whole bunch of guest musicians have contributed to the creation of this CD. To mention a few: Michael Andersson (Cloudscape), Mattias “IA” Eklundh (Freak Kitchen), Mats Levén (At Vance, Krux), Mic Michaeli (Europe) and Carl Johan Grimmark (Narnia).
The debut effort “The Calling” (that consists of nine own-penned songs and one The Sweet cover) is in my ears a fairly good mix of hard rock and heavy metal that fans of Narnia probably will enjoy listening to more than others. By the way, after having listened to this CD for some time I’ve discovered three things. First of all, the performance of all involved musicians is simply very impressive. I definitely can’t find anything to complain about. Second, the production is a demonstration of true professionalism. Every single instrument is heard clearly on every song, and that’s something that can’t be said about all releases of this genre – no, surely not. Last (but not least?) is the songwriting aspect of this album. Damn, it almost pains me to say this, but here it goes: The song material itself isn’t that convincing. Actually there’s not one single song that remains in my mind (nor heart and soul, for that matter) after repeated listens. The only thing that leaves some sort of lasting impression is the wonderful chorus of the third song (and to some extend also the chorus of the second song – I’m man enough to admit that) but that’s also it, and that’s far from enough for my taste.
Now don’t get me wrong here, I still don’t consider any song on the whole record even close to being bad, but, I don’t think that any song is really great either. My personal recommendation to Christian is as follows: Stick with DivineFire, there is no coincidence that DivineFire sells better than Audiovision in Japan.
Peter Eliasson
