Adult Orientation

Adult Orientation is an album whose title is a pun on the name of its own genre: adult-oriented rock, or AOR. Released in 1998 by the German label MTM Music, it is where the perms and the flashy 1980s stage clothes disappear. Some mocked the new look — short hair, plain clothes — as resembling the boy bands of the day, but the songwriting had actually tightened. Pony Canyon issued it in Japan, and Nexus reissued it there in 2005 with an extra track. Japanese listeners rated it especially highly, and it has kept its place in conversation as a landmark of Nordic melodic rock. "Shine Your Light on Me" opens the door, and "Heart of Mine" and "Everytime I See You" follow with sharp hooks. The six-minute "If I Could Do It All Again" settles in; "Lost Without You" and "Suddenly" are the centrepieces. From the lightness of "Girl," the quiet "Forever" closes all thirteen. It works through good placement rather than flash, and the sound has not aged in a quarter century. The band, though, was exhausted by the sessions. Hal Marabel later recalled that with little label support behind them, they wanted to do other things for a while. "A while" stretched to seven years: Hear-Say would not appear until 2005.