01. All The Way
02. Sails
03. Veins
04. Tears in the Sky
05. It Ain’t Easy
06. Gypsy Dice
07. In the Still of the Water
08. Into the Light

Verdict: 8

Artist: Lugnet
Album: Lugnet
Release date: 15 January 2016
Label: Pride & Joy Music

Just by looking at the album cover of Lugnet you suspect what you will get. The psychedelic logo and the centrefold Christina Lindberg, complete with the classic eye-patch (She has by the way inspired Quentin Tarantino quite a bit). There will indeed be quite a bit of seventies sounding hard rock here draped with plenty of Hammond organ. Anything else would would surprise me greatly.

And sure enough, Lugnet deliver exactly what I expect. The overall sound is very real and organic, just as it would have been captured live, raw. The sound is like any recording back in the seventies, tube compression all over the place, fat and rich. I simply sounds fantastic!

Lugnet has attempted to reinvent the wheel to compete with the distinguished gods of metal, an endeavour they obviously fail in.

But behind the gimmick there is a skilled band performing their hearts out and Roger Solander is one hell of a vocalist. He land somewhere between David Coverdale (Deep Purple), Paul Rogers (Free)  and Dan McCafferty (Nazareth) with his singing style and he impress for real. If this dude can pull this off live... I will look out for this band for sure. The overall feel is high energy, riff based hard rock that we learned to love the first time around some forty years ago.

Lugnet has achieved a solid good album well worth a listen and some of the tracks would have been classic rock tracks if not for the fact that they were written a few years too late. "Veins" and "Sails" stick out as slightly stronger than the lot. The album was produced by the band in various studios in Sweden, mixed by Lars Chriss (Lion's Share) and mastered by Micke Lind at the Masterplant in Stockholm.