Fair Warning (2) – Fair Warning

German hard rock band Fair Warning released their eponymous debut album in 1992. From euphonic riffs and soaring vocal performances, the album's long-forgotten contents are superbly executed, with every song hitting its mark and its hooks lingering favourably in the mind for at least a while after segueing into the next. Despite being the antithesis of what was emerging in the hard rock firmament, "Fair Warning" performed reasonably well in a commercial sense. Having appeared on the horizon just as grunge was impacting the mainstream rock charts, the band gained most of their following and brief success in territories many other AOR acts avoided due to the misconception that enthusiasm for such a niche genre was confined to the States, where rock music in all its multitudinous forms was appreciated to some degree. In actuality, Europe and Japan had a thriving community of hair metal fans who ed most bands within the rock domain. Well, at least until Nirvana started to dominate the airwaves on a much wider scale.

As was the case for their equally talented contemporaries, Fair Warning came up at the most inopportune time and failed to make a lasting impression, but what they produced is top-tier AOR material that should have been far bigger than it was. Its soaring power ballads - "Longing For Love," "Long Gone," "Hang On," and " One Step Closer" to name but a few - are as good as it gets for the genre, and with a pleasing mix of harder-rocking offerings to temper the more melodic tunes, you can easily listen to it all the way through without skipping a single track. So long as you do not expect to be hugely intellectually stimulated, there's a lot to be satisfied with herein.

Rating: 4/5