Jean Beauvoir’s Crown Of Thorns is back with a new album and naturally all the songs are written by Jean Beauvoir himself. Karma is the third album of this AOR formation and continues, just where Lost Cathedral left off. The album starts out pretty standard with the track ”Believer”; and although the song is extremely straightforward it is nevertheless quite catchy. The second song ”Gotta Get Next To You” illustrates my problem with all these AOR bands just perfectly; most songs turn into an endless repetition of the chorus.

”Karma” contains ten decent melodic rock songs, which are all catchy and compact enough to be interesting, although nothing new.

Doro Pesch, the Goddess of Rock herself, has co-written and even lent her vocals to one of the songs, ”Shed No Tears”. This duet is definitely one of the highlights of this album.

Fans of AOR, and Crown Of Thorns in particular, will certainly be delighted by this release and Jean Beauvoir shows once again that he is an excellent songwriter with a good feeling for catchy hooks and powerful melodies. Crown Of Thorns outshine many of the other bands in the scene. Nevertheless I have the feeling something is missing. No matter how catchy the songs and no matter how powerful the melodies, the lack of variation within the songs gets to you eventually.