a-ha Album: “Stay on These Roads”

a-ha's third album, and their last synth-pop venture, is a complete success! Their maturing sound, which becomes evident on their next album, peeks through a bit here and delivers wonderfully. Too bad a lot of people missed out on it. Highly recommended!!!

I built this review title from the title song where it says: " stay on these roads, we shall meet , I know..."

This is the first entire A-ha album (1988)I listened in my life. I bought its LP only for 86 american dollar cents nearly (calculated from the brazilian money) this week. Luckily, this record was well preserved.

It was far from being a waste of time: Despite the weaker tracks,this one has very few mistakes, enough to be considered masterpiece.

Looking at the sleeve,we can see that this norwegian trio had the appearance of a " boy band" like Backstreet Boys or New Kids on the Block. But they don't all that chorographies or playbacks as typical group of this genre.

A-ha proved it: this cd has lots of keyboards (this habit makes me remember Roxette), soft and enjoyable vocals in addition , many beautiful melodies ( on tracks 2, 1 ,6 ,7 and 8).

It may attract you: tracks 1, 3 and 9 were radio friendly. I used to listen them when I was a child without knowing what A-ha was.

In Hurry Home,the topic is a woman that doesn't earn money sufficiently coming back home after a hard day's work. This track is good too. Touchy! (the only song with a guitar solo that made me remember David Murray's style, from Iron Maiden)and You are the one are typical love themes talking about attraction, fascination.

Tracks 6 and 7 (some vocals made me remind Ice House, who sing a piece called No promises, an 80's hit)are pretty good for relaxing. I liked track 7 so much that I repeated it several times (very sweet and elegant).

The songs that have more "filler" attributes are You'll end up crying and This alone is love ( however,I like the chorus. The band used the musical note rise in the end, just like Stratovarius in "The kiss of judas" ,the Bee Gees in "You win again", Garbage in "Run baby run" etc.)

Yeah, like I said in the title: A-ha ,we shall meet again in other album. You convinced me.

One of my three favorite a-ha CD's! The other two are "Hunting High and Low" & "Scoundrel Days." At any rate, the up-tempo highlight of this CD is the James Bond theme, "The Living Daylights". I was so disappointed that the film makers used a different rendition of this song for the movie - the one on the CD is a MUCH better version, hands down! The two slow songs, "This Alone is Love" and "There's Never a Forever Thing" are absolutely beautiful, in my opinion - wonderful vocal range for Morten Harket. The rest of the songs don't shine as much as these three, but they are all wonderful.

I have all the a-ha CD's and while their newer music includes some wonderful songs, the older CD's, as a whole, hold more interest for me - maybe it's because they make me feel nostalgic and take me back to the end of my high school days. Who knows, but one thing's certain: a-ha's music is a refreshing breath of fresh air in these times of spoiled teenage pop divas who only shake their "assets" and haven't a lick of musical talent, and profanity-laced, roaring guitar rock (not that I don't like some of that stuff, but whenever I want to chill and get a little musical perspective, a-ha ends up in my player).

The album Stay on these Roads show a determined and ever changing facets of a-ha. Once again they prove that they are capable of more than just a ditty pop group. Our world is ever changing as is our music. It is nice to see that a band like a-ha does not tend to stick to the same formula of writing just to stay number one. Stick with the hard work guys.

This item doesn't even deserve a star! Its worthless, and had I known that it has only 2 songs that are extended remix, I would never have ordered it. The other 2 orders, the "Bob Marley & the Wailers" are way soothing, but this particular A-ha LP is just garbage. I wish they had informed me that it wasn't the 'Stay on these Roads' Album, so that I could have opted otherwise.