Label: Melodic Rock Records
Review by Kimmo Toivonen
Must be something in the water… Here’s yet another melodic hard rock band from Sweden! And what’s more, they aren’t half bad!
Rian is a trio from Stockholm, featuring vocalist/guitarist Richard Andermyr, drummer Jan Johansson and bassist Jonas Melin. Their sound isn’t exactly that of basic power trio though, because there’s a lot of keyboards and layers of guitars on the album. The producer of ”Out Of The Darkness” is Daniel Flores (Find Me, The Murder Of My Sweet), so it’s no surprise that the album sounds like a million bucks.
So why only 3R’s? It’s hard to say, there’s nothing particularly wrong in these songs but somehow some of them just don’t click with me. They’re melodic but not fluffy, arranged well and Andermyr impresses both as a singer and as a shredder, but… There’s plenty of very decent songs here, most of the in fact, but I think the album is maybe a couple of killer songs short of 4-R rating.
My favourite songs are early in the track listing, ”Out Of The Darkness”, ”Out Of My Mind”
and especially ”In A Dream” which is somehow very ”Swedish”-sounding. The legacy of Abba mixed with modern hard rock sound - that works for me!
If you’re into the contemporary Scandi-AOR sound of Art Nation, latter-day Bad Habit, One Desire and such, do check this band out!
https://www.facebook.com/rianisalive/
http://rianrocks.com
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