What? A Swedish band that sounds like they survived for decades on nothing but DOKKEN, JUDAS PRIEST, IRON MAIDEN, and other 80s rock/metal bands?  With clean vocals, heavy melodies, and enough sythesizers to keep a RUSG album fully stocked, this album harkens back to a time right before excess, drugs,  hairspray, make up, and spandex became the "norms" of the metal scene. Having lived through that age of metal, I have a hard time with this release. It's nostalgia for a cleaner-lived, pre-CINDERELLA metal scene disturbs me. No, we did not live on SURVIVOR, and EUROPE before our  "Slippery When Wet" re-education.

Someone wake up Stan Bush! Sweden is taking over his genre too! As if claiming it explicitly, "Once And For All" rings with that slow, but steady pacing, and synthesizer flourishes that artfully guided us through 80s era love ballads, and feel-good anthems, with just a touch of crunch. While this is the general stylistic tenor of the entire album, "All About Us" takes the listener out of the lane established by the first track, with a more up-beat tempo, and higher level of aggression than the rest of the fair on this release.

"All I Need" seems like a song about a metal front man who is a few heart-breaks, and a significant bout with some substance of abuse short of knowing what he really needs in life...to escape the musical modalities of the pre-glam era. Someone get him a gaggle of groupies, a few gallons of Jack, and a pile of mysterious white powder, STAT! From the graceful piano intro, to the basic rhythm, and themes, it verges on power-ballad bombasity, while lacking that extra half a testicle that would be required to convince the listener. For all it's faults, I was impressed by the strong galloping at the finish line.

For all their desire to stay off of the paths beaten by other bands, "Fool For Love" sounds like the band scrapped the walls of JUDAS PRIEST's recording studio for genetic material, mixed it all together, and grew this clone from the remnants. It's for that reason that I put "Religion" as probably my favorite of this album. Most of this album seemed like JUDAS PRIEST B-sides, and Halford/Bush collabs from the 80's. "Religion" on the other hand brought us at least up to the 90s on the strength of it's synths alone. A chunky, and melodic tune, it starts as in a fugue of religious-angst, but grows more daring, and bold as the song progresses, like the mind of an aspiring adept, as his resolve firms around his new vision.

All told this was an enjoyable album. My personal preference quips aside, the song structure was sound, the band's angle is cohesive, and easily-approachable, the production is top-notch, making every note crisp, and discernable, all culminating in the feel of an "original" effort. In music the tendency to rely too heavily on the influences of our predecessors, and/or contemporaries (if not blatantly rip their works outright) is ever present. Although I thought for sure every permutation of some of these rhythms had been explored, it seems STRYKENINE has established at least a few acres of new turf with "Strykenine i."