Stephen Ten entered the millenium with a futuristic concept album regarding a computer freak and his tragic love story. It's unusual for non-progressive band like this to create a unique lyrical approach even though they still retained the traditional melodic rock style that made them famous in the first place. There are couples of heavy songs, in fact those are even heavier than it used to be, such as 'Barricade' and 'Thunder In Heaven'. The latter track felt very robotic with a long instrumental intro, sounds promising but in the end, it ended up being an average tune that you might soon forgot.

My complain here is that they put too many slower songs instead of balancing it with some real hard rock tunes but I can't deny the quality of 'Give In This Time' or 'Silent Rain', both are amazing ballads with majestic vocal delivery by Gary Hughes. I just expect they can slip in some bombastic arrangement in the veins of 'Black Hearted Woman', that one is a monster track, or at least like the opening track, 'The Stranger', not ultra-fast in tempo but the riffs are spectacular.

The production is awesome and despite the disastrous filler, 'The Heat' or the passable 'Timeless', this isn't a bad album at all. A grower maybe, even though not an essential release of their career, I found 'Babylon' to be an interesting release by the band and glad to have it in my collection.

1967/ 1976 Babylon is the fifth studio album released by the hard rock/ AOR/ Traditional Heavy Metal band Ten. The concept of the album is a fictional futuristic story about a computer programmer and his tragic love affair.

Technically, "Babylon" is an album with Rock Heavy Metal shares, although rightfully be considered a heavy metal albums. We can define "Babylon," a borderline album between Hard Rock, Heavy Metal and AOR, more than for sounds, for lack of aggression and extreme simplicity of the songs. However, "Babylon" is an album that does not disappoint the most discerning Metalheads. In my opinion, a rougher production would help. But to be honest, there are no surprises and strokes of genius in "Babylon" and this does not bode well for the songs, however, well-written, arranged and interpreted.

In conclusion, "Babylon" is not a disappointing album. But careful listening is not easy because "Babylon" is not able to keep the listener attentive all the time.