Gotthard – #13

7/10

Sometimes you listen to a new album in the melodic hard rock category and think to yourself “this is quite all right” but also wonder why you don’t think it’s anything more than just all right. Not one bad song on the entire album, but still it kind of leaves you cold. You start to wonder wether the problem is within yourself, and that you have a hard time seeing the power of the individual tracks because you have heard so many albums like this over the years. But then, a certain album comes along takes quickly makes you realize just what all those albums before had been missing.

#13 is one of those albums. When you hit the first refrain in opening track Bad News, you instantly know how to sing along with it. And it just keeps on going, and all throughout the album you get more and more of just what all those albums before were all missing: songs that stick.

This album may not be a blockbuster, there has been many Gotthard albums like it before and there probably will be more. But hell, it is obvious that these guys still know their craft and know it well. Melodic hard rock these days just doesn’t get much better than Gotthard! So even if this album probably won’t give us new classics like Anytime Anywhere, Heaven or Lift U Up, we still get great and memorable songs like Better Than Love, Everytime I Die, No Time To Cry and Marry You. And that is good enough for me!