Label: Frontiers Music Srl.
Release date: 7/16/2021
Production: Daniel Flores
Album length: 53.46 min
Rating: 8.5/10
Genre: Melodic Rock
Rian are a Swedish melodic rock outfit whose roots go back to 2017, when they self-released their debut studio album “Out To The Darkness” and showed they had real potential and talent. The band built up its status and gained experience mostly through the gigs that followed, and a special moment came when new guitarist and solo-shredding acrobat Tobias Jakobsson joined the lineup.
After a few years, the band had piled up enough new original material for the next studio album, and it’s a considerably stronger effort than the debut. The A&R folks at Frontiers Music Srl. spotted that quickly from the demo recordings and were more than happy to sign the band. The new guitarist has clearly given the quartet a real pair of wings and a freshly discovered creative drive, and the new studio album “Twenty – Three” easily tops the band’s admittedly bold debut in every department.
This impressive run of songs can raise a few hairs when it comes to the guitar phrasing, but there’s certainly no shortage of swaying along to the sweeter, more sentimental tones either. The band set out to make a 2021 album that’s melodic rock at heart while echoing the classic glam metal and hard rock days of the eighties, so it’s not hard to find some parallels with the likes of Bon Jovi, Dokken, Winger, and fellow Swedes Europe and Treat. Some thanks for the inspiration also go to the AOR west coast approach led by Survivor, as you can hear in We Belong. That’s why Rian could be interesting to fans of similar contemporaries who draw on the same pool of eighties-defining bands, such as Eclipse, H.E.A.T., Wig-Wam, or One Desire. So with “Twenty-Three” we’re talking about a skillful reheating of an old soup, updated and in a modern production setting, and it rings convincingly enough to easily grab the attention and win over fans of the genre, who will adopt Rian right away.
“Twenty-Three” is a very important manifesto for the band. With it, they’ve definitely broken away from the average, capitalized on their talents, and climbed to a much higher level of songwriting. The arrangements hold up, and there are no dips in quality from song to song. Pomp and drama theater give the production a solid foothold for an ultra-musical catchiness that keeps the listener hooked. Still, the new album isn’t yet the creative zenith on the band’s evolutionary path. Even so, the band has definitely done its job at a truly high level, including backing the lead and highly distinctive vocals of Richard Andermyr with extra harmonized vocal lines, and guitarist Tobias Jakobsson’s work is impressive, with that tight pinch of neo-classicism, deftly draped in curtains of keyboards. The guitar phrasing is front and center throughout. The soundscape is carefully filled out and put to good use, and the thanks for that go first and foremost to producer Daniel Flores and his skillful knob-twiddling.
With “Twenty-Three”, Rian may have started chasing the train into the world of new-era Scandinavian melodic rock rather late, with contemporaries swarming everywhere. But the quality musical substance of the new album opens the door for them to hop on without trouble, because the band isn’t just confirming the credibility of the debut, it’s signaling that the next album could bring even more. This is a band that definitely hasn’t said everything it has to say, and one I can easily recommend to all fans of the modern side of melodic rock and, last but not least, of the AOR revival.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Stop
2. In The Dark
3. Where Do We Run
4. Twenty-Three
5. For Your Heart
6. We Belong
7. My Ocean
8. Body And Soul
9. The Passenger
10. Stranger To Me
11. Your Beauty
Lineup:
Richard Andermyr – vocals, guitar
Tobias Jakobsson – lead guitar
Jonas Melin – bass guitar
Jan Johansson – drums
