release date: Sep. 20, 2013
format: digital
[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,58]
producer: Arno Krabman
label: Inside Out Music - nationality: The Netherlands
Track highlights: 1. "We Live On" (4 / 5) - 2. "Treat Me Like a Lady" - 3. "She" - 6. "Forgive Me" - 7. "You Will Never Change" - 8. "Mental Jungle" - 9. "Shooting for the Stars"
2nd solo studio album from Dutch artist Anneke van Giersbergen, former vocalist of the gothic metal band The Gathering. Producer Arno Krabman also plays guitar and is co-composer of the majority of the songs. The album follows 1½ years after her solo debut Everything Is Changing (Jan. 2012).
Drive is the first album I have come across by van Giersbergen and it's mostly a really nice encounter. It's not extremely original but rather energetic with loans from Madder Rose (tracks #2 and #4), Echobelly (tracks #2 and #3), Skunk Anansie (tracks #4 and #6), Alanis Morrissette (tracks #3, #5, #9 and #10) and with bits and pieces from The Cranberries / Dolores O'Riordan, which is mostly to say: it's alt. rock but also with a certain amount of hard rock, and (thankfully) not the type of gothic metal, which she apparently played with her former band, The Gathering. Quite often van Giersbergen tend to sound like a clone of Dolores O'Riordan and Alanis Morrisette, which frankly isn't all that bad, and the comparison only serves to give an idea of her vocal qualities without implying that she doesn't stand on her own two feet.
The track "Mental Jungle" features Turkish hardcore, industrial metal vocalist Hayko Cepkin (who also co-wrote the song).
The first two rocking tracks and track #7 are easily the best with the remaining songs sounding a wee bit like some of the aforementioned artists or like cloned on other pop / rock hits - however, it's rather well-crafted as the music is catchy and pretty good background noise when hoovering the house. That is: it's music meant to be played loud, and van Giersbergen demonstrates a strong, clean and full-bodied vocal that makes it all worthwhile.
Anneke van Giersbergen has played with various other artists, often lending her voice on a few songs and performed with artists representing very different scenes. After Drive, she contributed with vocals on heavy metal artist Devin Townsend on his four consecutive albums The Retinal Circus (2013), Z2 (2014), Sky Blue (2015), and Ziltoid (2015). In 2015 she also stood behind The Diary, a double album released in collaboration with Dutch multi-instrumentalist Arjen Anthony Lucassen under the name of The Gentle Storm, and in 2016 she collaborated with Icelandic indie-folk band Árstíðir on the classical / folk album Verloren Verleden (Feb. 2016). Not many albums have been released under her own name as solo artist.
Drive is an energetic, warm and recommended listen.
