When such releases come to hand, I feel exactly as I feel when I go through the stuff I have packed in my basement, every ten years or so. Usually you find a lot of crap that you never know why you kept in the first place. Of course, you could also find lots of stuff that bring back fond memories and then you keep them trying to find a new use or some new interest in them and if you do you just bring them back up with you in your everyday environment, only to get them back down in storage once again. That’s what’s going on with bands like China. Bands that you have forgotten all about their existence and you re-discover them when they re-emerge for some reason.

Thus, China release Light Up The Dark and it is our job to see if there is any real reason to look for interest in it. And there might be, actually. One of the reasons could be that this kind of music is not that appealing anymore, so there are no new bands going for it, leaving the burden to the veterans. Another reason could be that all those veteran have a right to exist and do their thing. A third reason, might be that there are still fans of this kind of music, quite dedicated some times. Since these reasons exist, China might as well do music and go with it.

Even more when this album is not bad. It actually takes off quite agreeably and keeps going up until the middle of the album, melodic, rhythmic and ambient and puts you in the right mood. That’s, though, where things start to get quite expected and trite. The Swiss manage to combine the classic, melodic style with a more contemporary mood on guitars and a more modern approach in their structure and, in general, they deliver what’s needed for the album to sound interesting to the finish. There’s no more than that, of course, as inspiration is limited to the absolute enough in order to serve this purpose and the demands from a band that was never that successful, even during their prime.

In a nut shell, this is a good, fresh (for their standards) and easy listening album that explains their reappearance and all that’s left to see is whether China will promptly head back to the basement of if they’ll keep at it for a bit longer.