This is easily as good as the second album by a lot of the big Hair Metal bands, but no harm next time on aiming to be as good as their first.

Bulletrain is a Swedish Metal band that has been around since 2006. Despite having been around for the best part of a decade, their debut full-length release, 'Start Talkin' only came out a couple of years ago with this just their second album in that time.

The band's influences are worn very much "heart on sleeve"; solid guitar riffs, cowbell about less than thirty seconds in and the lyrical content of 'Memory Lane' tells us immediately that the roots of this Rock are firmly pinned in the eighties. Skid Row-style vocal and guitar-squeals fly around like there's no tomorrow. The band is on the heavier end of the Hair Metal spectrum, like the later Seb Bach/Skid Row albums or Every Mother's Nightmare.

The vocals and musicianship are quite good, but the band could do with drafting a good song-writer along, someone akin to Desmond Child, to provide the full package. 'We Salute You' is one of the band's current best and reminded me of Reckless Love. There's a riff in another song, however, which seems to be a bit more than a homage to Randy Rhoads and obviously it's never a good idea to allow admiration to lead to too close a faithful reproduction without acknowledgement.

Overall, not a bad album, but to really get attention this band will need to concentrate on getting a bunch of better songs together. This is easily as good as the second album by a lot of the big Hair Metal bands, but no harm next time on aiming to be as good as their first.

Dawn Osborne