Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Little River Band
Label: Frontiers Records
Release: 2013
Length: 46:25
Rating: 4/5
Crazy. And now Little River Band, too. A band that’s been on the scene for almost 45 years, and that, believe it or not, has cycled through just under 30 members up to this year, is releasing its new studio album. If the math checks out, that’s the sixteenth studio record overall. The band, though originally Australian, operates out of the USA, because most of its members today are Americans. Even Wayne Nelson, the only name that rings a louder bell, since the guy joined the band back in 1980. So there haven’t been any original or founding members in it for ages now. Nope. None of the people responsible for the band selling over 30 million albums across the planet to date. The ones, that is, who contributed the lion’s share to Little Ricer Bend getting inducted into the Australian version of the hall of fame (»ARIA«).
The man who ended up owning the name Little River Band is Stephen Housden (he joined LRB in 1981, long after the hit Reminiscent was already echoing around the globe). He retired in 2006 and handed the wheel to Nelson. Ironic that the band’s history is being made by later additions rather than the founding, original members. But that’s no isolated case in the rock ‘n’ roll era. Still, Housden didn’t hand over control completely. On the new album too, the band’s first official release after a five-year gap, he laid down a few extra guitar lines as a guest.
Even though they sound like America’s The Eagles and are still an Australian band on paper, the revamped LRB delivers a seriously high-quality musical statement. Besides Nelson, the guys in Little River Band today only joined in the new millennium. But they’re cut from the right cloth. The Eagles? Definitely, with a whiff of ranchers and wide-open prairies, in otherwise compact, thoroughly built and well-defined songs with massive melodic catchiness.
There’s hookiness in abundance. Opener The Lost and the Lonely already came out as the first single and has it all. It sums up in a flash that the band, as it stands in these new times, hasn’t lost what it always set things on fire with, even in the golden era of its run. An exceptional knack for delivering effectively compact arrangements of simple but irresistibly catchy tunes, built on organic, mellifluous tonal shades. These attract each other beautifully in the musicality and coexist in perfect symbiosis. Everybody in the crew sings, and the vocal harmonies are one of LRB’s hallmarks of perfection even in the new times, comparable to the perfection of The Eagles. So it’s clear that the chorus melodies are the core of the whole LRB story. That’s where everything happens, or at least the essence of every song. That’s where a track hits its atmospheric crescendo, and that’s where the album’s great appeal as a whole comes from. Armed with a refined production of deep contrast between organic sonic building blocks, a masterfully preserved high flow in stacking verse – chorus pairings, and restrained, virtuosic communication between the instruments. This is a crew of seasoned old hands who know exactly what they’re doing arrangement-wise! They know superbly how to repackage a worn-out form that in other hands could tip into too much generic-ness, so that it fires up in full again! Instrumental passages are generally short. Usually it’s simple but concise guitar solos that grab the attention in them. They rest on a few strictly chosen notes. And in those few notes they make it clear that the live jam is by no means foreign to the band, but they don’t want to burden the studio product with it. The album’s basic motif is thus full-on devotion to following the infectious lead melody! The only truly stretched-out part belongs to the track Someone with its sax solo, which at most keeps a moment of pop sweetness going in the song.
Every note of the solos has a distinctly characterful sound and sits in a clearly determined spot. Today’s LRB pulls this off with plenty of finesse, know-how and experience, and of course they still lean on the guiding principle of raw, primal feeling, which is the biggest value of the new record’s content. In the guitar solos you feel most intensely that Little River Band come, musically speaking, from the roots of blues and rock ‘n’ roll.
The tracks are equal in compositional terms. No swings, no dips, no wobbles. It’s the traditional arranging principle that made LRB famous back in the late seventies. In this respect the revamped crew effectively upholds the legacy of the band’s past work. In fact, it’s quite successfully chasing the traditional authorial recognizability of the group’s classic era. So credibility is something it doesn’t lack.
So »Cuts Like A Diamond« will still be a hugely pleasing product for everyone who knows this band and loves a perfectly stacked lead melody, lead tunes, refined organic mellifluousness and the harmony of a wash of soft color collages of elementary musicality. In that regard, »Cuts Like A Diamond« by no means disappoints and effectively catches up with the band’s famous past catalog. It sounds mature and has a clearly defined authorial character!
Lineup
Richard Herring – guitar, vocals
Greg Hind – guitar, vocals
Chris Marion – keyboards, vocals
Wayne Nelson – bass guitar, vocals
Ryan Ricks – drums, vocals
SPECIAL GUEST:
Stephen Housden – guitar
Production
Little River Band
Track list
1. The Lost And The Lonely
2. Forever You Forever Me
3. Cuts Like A Diamond
4. You Dream I’ll Drive
5. I’m An Island
6. Way Too Good
7. What If You’re Wrong
8. Where Do I Run
9. Someone
10. Who Speaks For Me
11. Love Is
