Label: MTM Music

Tracks:

1. Take It Easy 4:27
2. Hippest Flop 4:49
3. A Supposed Tour 4:41
4. Biggest Mistake 7:50
5. Imaginary Friends 5:51
6. She/Male 4:47
7. Relationships (The Long One) 20:50
8. a. At The Altar
9. b. Svetlana
10. c. No Perspectives
11. d. Second Thoughts
12. e. Mr. Unfaithful
13. f. Gamophobia
14. g. Little Beauty
15. h. And They Lived Happily Ever After
16. ...Catherine 3:43

Musicians:

• Jerry Sahlin (vocals, vocoder, synthesizers)
• Ola Andersson (guitar, backing vocals)
• Peter Asp (bass, percussion, backing vocals)
• Herman Samin (vocals, keyboards, backing vocals)
• Tomas Erlandsson (drums, percussion, keyboards, backing vocals)

And also the collaboration of The Acting Orchestra's, featuring two violins, one viola and a cello.

When I contacted this Swedish group, the guitarist Ola Andersson informed me that A.C.T'svmain influences were the groups City Boy, Electric Light Orchestra, It Bites, 10cc, Saga, Queen, Dream Theater and UK, and really, all these ingredients are those that we prune to find in major measurement in their music, to which I would add IQ in the first album Today's Report, and Kansas and Styx in this second album.

So we have to imagine A.C.T's style as a conglomerate of all these groups, with an enough American sound, featuring the extraordinary vocal melodies, gently sung by a singer very similar to Francis Dunnery (It Bites), sudden constant changes and the stylistic variation inside every song and powerful hard guitars, though I would not call this progressive metal. In spite of the changes and variety, A.C.T's style is easy enough for listening, mainly thanks to the pop air of the melodies.

In this second album we have also a final suite, as in the first one, in addition to 6 short songs, and a nice track in a very different line, hidden at the end of the CD, composed and interpreted by the drummer.

Personally my favorite track is "Hippest Flop", a topic with fantastic melodies like It Bites, which is really brilliant IMHO, only for it already is worth to have the disc. The rest they are also of very good level, as the powerful "Take It Easy", "A Supposed Tour" where Dream Theater's influences are obviously clear, the longest and complex "Biggest Mistake" where also we can appreciate clearly the sound of City Boy, It Bites and other bands like the aforementioned ones. "Imaginary Friends" also with excellent melodies and also in the line of constant time changes and melodies. And certainly the suite "Relationships", where we have all the ingredients of the whole progressive, complex track and with differentiated well parts, where they are estimated you influence principally of City Boy, Kansas, Dream Theater, It Bites, Saga and Queen. The short tracks are IMHO undoubtedly better than those of the first album Today's Report, whereas the suite is in the same level of the first album one.

Definitively, a great album, undoubtedly better than the first one, of, probably, the band with a happier and positive sound of the current scene of the progressive rock, a group about which, surely, we will hear in a close future.

Rating: 7/10

Ferran Lizana