Label: GMR Music
Release date: 6. 3. 2020
Production: Pelle Saether
Album length: 46.57 min
Genre: AOR / Melodic Rock
Rating: 9.0/10
Grand Design are a Swedish AOR and melodic rock sensation, founded in 2006 by vocalist Pelle Saether, who kicked up a lot of media buzz in Sweden with their 2009 debut “Time Elevation”. The debut featured two excellent studio veterans, Janne Stark and Tommy Denander, and Saether, as the main ringleader of the Grand Design story, already had a really strong team of songwriters around him in the band’s early days. BeRockRadio went on to declare the band’s debut the best album of the year, and it was also frequently ranked right at the top of many year-end top-ten lists.
The band later piled up three more albums, and with the third, “Thrill Of The Night”, they stepped up to a more mature level of artistry, mostly thanks to a leap in production quality and an even bigger payoff in musical tightness and bombast. Grand Design carried that over to the no-less-impressive follow-up “Viva La Paradise”, released in 2018. The new album, their fifth overall and tellingly titled “V”, brings Grand Design a (new) “victory”. It also brings a change in the lineup, though: Dan Svanbom has joined the band on guitar for the new record.
“V” is another intricately crafted, finely detailed piece of work from these great Swedish perfectionists, with top-notch polished production and equally top-notch catchiness, thanks to the greedy bombast and pomp that the chorus melodies deliver. It’s true that the band has finished evolving, but what matters is that, within a strictly defined template, they still manage to recycle the musical recipe they cling to so tightly in a thrilling way, and serve it up again so that it really catches fire. In this recycling, they cunningly blur the line with “being a cliché”.
The lineup change is definitely welcome, and Svambom is truly the tipping point, bringing some very welcome expressive departures, especially in the middle-eight sections, when you compare the new album with the band’s past releases. He’s one hell of a guitarist, and the band has gained a lot from that, and with it, of course, so has the musical substance of the otherwise highly predictable song arrangements. On the new album, the band (as expected) stays heavily inspired by the look and work of Def Leppard in the Steve Clark era, but it’s hard to slap a “straight-up copying” or “cloning” label on new ideas when what they’re imitating is the original and the authentic. Grand Design take quite a few welcome and effective “detours” in this regard, which is a guarantee of keeping their artistic credibility. Already the chorus in the brilliant opening charger Rigth Away hits an opening mood crescendo, and that’s down to the craftily arranged multiple vocal harmonies in the background, which are a top-class generator of all that pomp! As long as the band keeps writing “poisonous” choruses like those in I Won’t Cry Over U Tonight, Walking the Wire, Stranded (Trapped In A Heartbreak Zone), or in the catchy rocker Gimme the Fire, things are in very good shape. In choruses like these, Grand Design tease just the right amount with their proverbial Def Leppard inspiration, since their own songwriting voice still comes through strongly enough that the compositions don’t start to get “attacked by clichés”. The uplifting, positive-minded The Warrior, which builds out of a major key, is a cover of the Scandal (feat. Patty Smythe) original, and, with Grand Design’s hands-on arranging skills, it gets along superbly with the rest of the band’s original material. In Pelle Saether’s vocal charisma you can find kinship with, for example, the late Shy singer Tony Mills and/or Rob Moratti (Saga, Final Frontier, solo).
Still, it’s hard to defend the band like this across a whole album. Especially if the author of this review is a fan of the classic DL era, and listening to “V” tends to carry him (unintentionally and unknowingly) off into the realms of fan enthusiasm, where it’s that much harder to find the right measure of objectivity. As an example of an overdose of sucrose, Wut Are U Waiting For has to be singled out, because of its sing-songy “ring-a-ring-a-rosie” chorus structure of the “nursery-rhyme” kind. The chorus repetitions do this song another bad favor, since they echo on into “infinity”, and the pretty banal lyrics typical of AOR music no longer find their proper “bite” in this kind of songwriting setting. Luckily, it’s the only song on the album that deserves this sort of criticism. A great middle-eight section, where Swabom steps up with his sparkling guitar soloing, partly pulls it out of the “mush”!
With “V”, Grand Design remain the title holders of a true “party time” band. Fans of that radio-friendly 80s rock sound will gladly give this album their attention despite the constant flirting with the look and work of Def Leppard, and it should go down especially well with anyone who loves the classic days of Def Leppard.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Right Away
2. I Won’t Cry Over U Tonite
3. Strandead (Trapped in a Heartbreak Zone)
4. Wut Are U Waiting For
5. Shame on U
6. Walkin’ the Wire
7. Gimmie the Fire
8. Take Me to Yer Heaven
9. I Dunno Wut to Say
10. The Warrior
11. Guilty of Luv in the 1st Degree
Lineup:
Pelle Saether – vocals, backing vocals
Dennis Vestman – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Dan Svanbom – lead and rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Stefan Westerlund – bass guitar
Joakim Jonsson – drums
