Journey: Trial By Fire

It's true: There's a new Journey album, out 10 years after the release of the hit-filled Raised On Radio. Fans of the band have spent the last decade making do with a greatest-hits CD, a box set and a poorly received Steve Perry solo album, and now there's suddenly 71 minutes of new material. And frankly, it's amazing how interchangeable Trial By Fire is with its distant predecessors: Perry still wails and warbles and whoa-ooh-oahs, and his lyrics are still packed with burning hearts filled with desire, cries of love heard in the night, and so on. Neal Schon still plays long, boring, antiseptic guitar solos. Even the high-concept, computer-generated cover art looks exactly like past high-concept, computer-generated Journey cover art. In other words, and here's a huge surprise, Journey has made another horrifically bloated, overlong, unpleasant slab of glossy AOR pap. The only difference between Trial By Fire and any other Journey album is that the band's '70s and '80s material holds some historic cachet: "Open Arms," "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'" and many more conjure up images and memories from their respective eras. This stuff doesn't.