Adrian Drew and his band of merry men are back with the third single from their forthcoming album and given what I have heard to date I am really looking forward to that when it comes out. While Adrian provides guitar and vocals, the band is now firmly settled with David Crowhen (bass) Undercut, Craig van Kan (drums), The Couch, and lead guitarist Adam Morton-Mason, These Fine Galleons. The fifth member of the band, who has been involved since the very beginning, is Kane Bennett (Sonic Altar) who mixed, mastered and added some touches here and there.
Adrian has previously likened the band to a combination of Pixies and Weezer, and while that sounds like a very strange mix indeed, it is as good a way of describing this melodic commercial pop rock as any, although I would probably also add Simple Minds and possibly some Muse. It commences life with some wonderful bass lines, gentle harmony vocals and picking, then the picks go down the neck and we are into a bouncy singalong number which could have come out of the UK indie scene 40 years ago. One of the delights of Adrian’s songwriting is that each song contains numerous twists and turns, multiple sections, so that one is never quite sure where it is going to lead. The underlying guitars and rhythm section are strong, with Adam playing a melody at the higher end, while the guitar solo/duet is raw and touch, totally at odds with the complex sweetness of the rest of the song. Kane adds some very dated keyboards right at the end of the song, in a very Split Enz fashion, and then all too soon it is over.
Here we have a single which lulls in the listener, yet is also a real builder, full of emotion and power: I can only imagine that when played live this is even more fierce. It is the band’s piece’s hardest, fastest and heaviest song yet, and originally started life as a chorus and intro written by Adrian when he was in his late twenties, only coming to full life in the last year. Described as Adrian’s most autobiographical output yet… this is chronic pain, anxiety, depression, and the love that saved him. Raw, passionate, yet somehow smooth and commercial, this is a triumph.
Rating: 10/10
