The Finnish melodic sleazesters of Reckless Love are back after a six year gap between their 2016 release Invader and their latest, Turbo Rider. From the title and the cover art alone, you would be right in guessing that the band is jumping on the synthwave bandwagon. Taking a cue from synth and vaporwave, Reckless Love has eighties style keyboards all over this album. This is a marked departure for them even after their huge embrace of pop music on Invader. While this new sound does fit the band decently, they kind of stumble out of the gate with the worst two songs being right up front. The title track is just bad. It sets the whole album up to be bland and generic and it took a few tries just to get past it to review the rest of the songs. It's just boring and plods along. Eyes Of A Maniac is slightly better but still boring and unimaginative. Ironically, the song titled Outrun winds up injecting some energy into the album finally and things get going in a more upbeat direction.

Kids Of The Arcade continues the vidya game theme and both of these tracks help bring up the enjoyment level. Reckless Love cover Bark At The Moon from Ozzy and, well, they most likely will anger half their fans with this one. On one hand the guitars are very faithful to the original as are the vocals. The biggest difference is that there is an added techno drum beat to the song that really gives it a "dance remix" vibe. Again, this will be what divides people on whether or not this is a skippable song or not. The back half of Turborider is stacked with the albums best material. 89 Sparkle is another "controversial" song in the sense that it is super poppy and some people won't like it. I mean, it's so upbeat it sounds similar to California Gurls by Katy Perry. As odd as it might sound though, this works for Reckless Love probably because they too have quite a few songs about having fun on the beach. Prodigal Sons is the most overt metal song on here and sounds like a mix between the drumbeat of Blood Red Skies and the chorus to Youth Gone Wild. The verses consist of a staccato, choppy riff guitar attack and electro drums from Priest and the fist in the air, slamming the toms refrain that Skid Row like to do.

I really like Reckless Love and to me their high water mark is their third album, Spirit. Turborider honestly feels a little rushed to me. It's already pretty short at thirty five minutes and since the first couple of songs are, wooo, not their best efforts, this is more like a solid EP. After six years that's kind of disappointing. Here's hoping for a fairly quick rebound.