Greece’s Silvernite are on a mission to remind us just how great the eighties were; Quite a few of us don’t need reminding of course, but for those of you who do and turn to Lost City for education let me say one thing – it really wasn’t this insipid back in the day, believe me…

That may sound harsh but, the excellent title track and Last Stand aside, there’s an awful lot here that fails to live up to the band’s stated war aims.

For a start, the vocals of MariAngela are just not punchy enough to live with Strutter‘s strident synths or the occasional hacking and slashing of Nash G.’s guitar attack. Sure, the girl can sing, but she just doesn’t have enough personality in her pipes to get the job done. This is a shame, but it’s really only on the out and out pop of Come ‘N’ Love Me that she sounds completely comfortable.

On the plus side, Nash’s lead guitar work is very impressive – he knows just how to slot a flashy lead break into a song without resorting to overkill -and Strutter’s synths complement his playing perfectly, often bringing the great Jim Peterik (Survivor) to mind. The two go to town on instrumental track Boarding in best Schon/Hammer fashion and it’s great. If you know, you know… But if it’s eighties authenticity you’re after then look no further than guest saxophonist Artem Zhulyev‘s contribution to Last Stand, which is so good it might well have been recorded by Mark Rivera in the eighties and stored in cryogenic serenity all this time, waiting to be unleashed…

At the end of the day, this whole synthwave/AOR revivalist genre is becoming ever more saturated – almost by the day it seems, with new releases popping into the Sentinel Daily mailbox with alarming regularity – and it takes a lot to stand out from the crowd. At the moment Silvernite don’t quite do that, but the good moments on this record suggest that they do have it in them to create something rather interesting indeed.

Lost City releases on August 30th.