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Stay On These Roads The third a-ha album featured a change in style that was to carried to even further lengths in East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Here on Stay On These Roads the sound is still recognizably a-ha, even if it is different than what we saw on the previous two cds. Mostly what changed was the evocative, melancholy New Wave sound, to be replaced in many songs with a more poppy, bouncey theme. However, it wasn't a perfect transition yet, and some of the songs are still beautiful New Wave classics, although it was becoming obvious that those days were numbered. The title song (and first song) is one of those. Again, it's one of the slow songs that breaks my rule, although a-ha was always good at slow songs and have several songs that do that. The imagery of travelling is reminiscent of fantasy, feel-good-even-though-it's-melancholy sounds of a-ha in the past, as in "We're Looking For the Whales" and "Living A Boy's Adventure Tale." The next two songs, "The Blood That Moves the Body" and "Touchy" are both pop songs with a faster beat. However, a-ha hadn't quite gotten the hang of pop songs yet (despite their resounding success with "Take On Me") and both of them are a little bit cheesy, although fun. Another throwback in a good way is "This Alone Is Love," a slow song with powerful emotion and an extremely strong chorus. But the following "Hurry Home" has all the earmarks of filler material. "The Living Daylights" is the first song I heard, since it's the theme song of the James Bond movie of the same name. It's a good dance song, in many ways a highlight of the album, yet it doesn't seem to have aged as well as some of the other songs here, and I sometimes get tired of it before it's done now. "There's Never A Forever Thing" shows off Pal Waaktaar's ability to write yet another powerful and beautiful slow song as well as Morten Harket's vocal range and the power of his voice. However, the song after that, "Out of Blue Comes Green" is a mid-tempo song that is absolutely beautiful and powerful as well; one of the highlights of the disc. Unfortunately, like the other a-ha albums, Stay On These Roads starts to lose momentum towards the end. "You Are the One" is very similar in sound and theme to "Take On Me" and almost sounds like it was an attempt to "re-do" that song in some way, and the last song, "You'll End Up Crying" is so ... different that it's extremely hard to describe. Let me just say that it's hardly a strong finale. Unfortunately, this seems to have been the last album in which a-ha let their New Wave sensibilies rule. For the next album, the big hit was the remake of the Everly Brother's hit "Crying In the Rain" which gave me serious doubts about the direction the group was going. I later heard several of the other songs and decided that my days with following the Norwegian stars were over. All in all, they had a really good run, with some of the best music of the 80s even when, in fact, especially when, it wasn't popular.