This earlier,
AOR styled iteration of
Soul Doctor recorded '
No Retreat, No Surrender' in 1987. It was never released.
As in
Soul Doctor, the central core of the band was vocalist, Tommy
Heart and guitarman, Chris Lyne, thus the band name. So, when the public demand to release the material began to gather momentum, the band's pedigree made it harder to ignore.
The reissue is a good example of how some
AOR has a definite shelf life. Its demo quality sound simply underlines the music's long past sell-by date.
Heart emotes for all he's worth, but he's too often stranded in an uncomfortably high register, on clunky, plodding songs that take too long to go nowhere.
That's not to say there aren't some half decent songs here.
'
Starlight' - so good they featured it twice - is the best thing on the album, by a considerable margin. Elsewhere, the music works best where the band keep it simple.
The formulaic, keyboard driven
'Broken Promises' and '
Stay With Me' aren't half bad, the latter hinting at what was to come for
Heart with
Zeno and Fair Warning.
Of the remaining tracks, only '
Empty Eyes' makes a decent fist of the production's limited stab at technical complexity, but it's a case of too little, too late.
The band folded the following year, with the band's members dispersing throughout the rock world, only to regroup in 2000 as blues rock band,
Soul Doctor.
Written by
Brian Sunday, July 12, 2009
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