TEAR DOWN THE BORDER

The Border to Mainstream Rock?

The provocative cover and the promising album title lets you get very curious but what follows is innocent though. I'm aware of that - the band released the album at a time of great political changes - the disbanding of the Soviet Union. They are good musicians without any doubt and the production is professional. But this is not more than a mediocre Rock album - far away what I'm expecting from Art Rock.

There have been produced hundreds (thousands?) of efforts like that and I cannot find anything exciting and really unique. So it sounds like the band had decided to make a tribute album to rock bands like POCO, BON JOVI, TOTO and similar. Simple guitar riffs and keyboard patterns, perfect english vocals (with some exceptions f. e. on Tear down the border) - are this ingredients for reaching the charts?

Only the opener Coming Back To Find You is a good one, a very interesting ballad compared to the other songs. Better tracks are also the following How Can I Call It Love - dedicated to Poco fans, Judgement Day with a shouting refrain and Play With Fire which has a nice groove.

A russian band produces american mainstream rock with a provoking album cover and title. Not very straightaway - surprising anyway - convincing noway ...

Road to nowhere

Second half of the 80s became a hard time for bands like AUTOGRAPH and DIALOG. Both changed their direction, both made the same mistakes and, in the end, disbanded. Due to perestroyka new generation of bands, often less professional as musicians but more actual lyrically, with songs about social problems, found their way to wide audience. From other hand, lots of Western music (including bands like BON JOVI, CINDERELLA, DEF LEPPARD) became available and popular in Soviet Union.

So AUTOGRAPH changed direction and started playing mainstream rock. First step on this way was the album "Stone Land". Old fans like me were disappointed, but at least the band found some new fans. Then, on the wave of interest to everything coming from the USSR, AUTOGRAPH extensively toured abroad and recorded the album ''Tear Down The Border'' in English (only the title track, which is a reworked version of ''World Inside'' from the previous album, combines English and Russian lyrics). The result is an average album made by professional musicians. There are tons of such albums around, even recognizable voice of Arthur Berkut can't save it from being mediocre.

''Tear Down The Border'' did not make AUTOGRAPH famous in Europe and States. And when musicians returned home after long touring they found out that they are almost forgotten in their native country. No wonder that soon AUTOGRAPH disbanded. The road to international success was the road to nowhere.

If you'd like to listen to AUTOGRAPH's best, try to find ''Autograph 1'' CD with their prog records from 1980 - 82 or get the band's excellent reunion jubilee concert ''25 Years After'', available both on CD and DVD. I can recommend ''Tear Down The Border'' only to die hard fans. 2 stars.

OK, you got me. From the title cover I though that this could be good story about dissolution of CCCP. Sadly, only thing which is happening is average rock and not much more. Only thing keeping me from giving this one star is that one star is deserved for extremely horrible things and this is not the case, this is just grey average without any suprising moments.

Title track "Tear the Border" is quite a melodic one with parts sung in Russian language (is it?), next track "How Can I..." has saxophone inside. But that's just not enough. I'm very disappointed by mediocrisity of this album. It has not interesting moment for me, almost no reason to listen to it (except when I ... no, there is even no exception).

Big mistake in their music. Could be so great, so far it's just appaling. 2 stars.