Here we have the latest release from Intelligent Music Project, a project which is always indicated as being Bulgarian given that the person behind it Milen Vrabevski MD, who composes many of the songs. Twice they have appeared on the Eurovision Song Contest, even though many of those who record are not from that country including Simon Phillips, Carl Sentence (Persian Risk, Nazareth), Richard Grisman (River Hounds) and John Payne (Asia) who are all English. Alongside Carl and John we also have on lead vocals Joseph Williams (Toto) and Bulgarian Slavin Slavchev who as well as being lead singer and bassist in Julian’s Laughter was also the winner of the 2014 season of Bulgarian ‘X Factor’.
This is the eighth album from this project, and some of those involved have returned multiple times, with Simon Phillips back for his sixth appearance, John Payne for his fifth and Joseph Williams for his fourth. But and it is quite a large “but”, there can be multiple issues with projects, and we hear most of them on this release. Most importantly there is just no soul within this recording – it sounds like a load of session musicians turning up and working their way through songs which they have little or no relationship with and are unlikely to have much involvement with once the session was over. According to Wikipedia the lead singer of the band is Ronnie Romero, who is still the first musician listed on the IMP website, yet he was not involved with this recording. It also lists the rest of the band, who at that point are all Bulgarian, so I am not sure why the recording instead uses a core of overseas players. It is quite possible this would be much more solid if a band were brought together to perform the songs on a regular basis, but as it is this all feels very one-dimensional as there is something missing. For fans of lightweight American-style melodic rock.
