When an album is a fairly vanilla and ‘safe’ offering with no surprises, it’s somewhat difficult to get excited about it and unfortunately, City Of Ashes’ Rise album is an average release, hovering awkwardly between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ spectrum – it’s just not a release that manages to invoke a strong reaction in either way.
All the songs seem to be constructed in the same way to one another, with not much variation from one song to the next, and whilst there’s no faulting the musical performances themselves, it all just feels a little uninspired. It’s one thing to find a style and format that works for you, and to run with it, but with Rise it almost feels like City Of Ashes have gone a little overboard – everything is so similar that it just feels like you’re listening to the same song eleven times.
It’s a shame, because there’s definitely potential, and the vocals in particular are great – there’s a wonderful smooth, melodic tone to them, and are powerfully delivered, but as a whole you can’t help but want more as right now, this is an album that sounds more like background music than a fully-fledged release to get involved with.
5/10
