Hope you enjoyed your listen

Tokyo Road – Absolutely genius opening, with only a spine tingling music box and a female voice singing what appears to be a Japanese nursery rhyme which sets the song up beautifully; but it isn’t too long before a typical riff kicks it aside. The story to this song is a bit unclear to me: it seems to be about the protagonist being sent to war in Tokyo, but quickly becoming disillusioned with it, and instead of fighting having the time of his life getting drunk and screwing prostitutes. The thing is though, unless the war is World War II, it can’t be a real war, unless the point is that the protagonist comes from Tokyo and has been sent to war elsewhere, which is possible I suppose. Or it might just be another metaphor for being on the road; in which case the whole Tokyo concept just confuses me. Anyway, as a whole, this song is a bit lacking. It follows the hard rock sound of In & Out Of Love, but is far too mid-paced to make it work properly. The lyrics in general aren’t great either: although there are some clever phrases (“Snorting whisky, drinking coke”); as a whole the writing seems rather undeveloped. The vocal production is again substandard, especially noticeable on the flat backing vocals in the chorus; which is a poor chorus anyway. The guitar isn’t too special either: there’s a lot of bending and an outro solo that are pretty good; but for the most part the guitar is uninspired, with the tone and the tempo being completely at odds. There are however two absolutely great bits in this song: the introduction; and the incredibly atmospheric bridge with tinkling synths, huge drums, mesmerising guitar, and an intimate vocal performance from Jon as though he’s just telling you this story in a bar somewhere. It’s difficult to review songs like this: they’d be fairly poor; but a few moments of genius make it hard to rate them as such, so I’ll split the difference and call this an average song.

3/5