Tuesday, February 14, 2017

CREYE: ”Straight To The Top”

Rating: - (EP)
Label: CREYE (Self-released)
Review by Kimmo Toivonen

Okay, maybe the band’s name requires instructions to pronounce it accordingly, but damn it, CREYE’s debut EP promises great things for them. The mastermind of the band is guitarist Andreas Gullstrand, who has enlisted some of Sweden’s top musicians to play on these songs. There’s vocalist Alexander Strandell from Art Nation,  guitarist Andrée Thunder from Theander Expression and Linus Abrahamson on bass, to name a few. A bit of a supergroup!

The sound of the band is very much influenced by the eighties, with lots of keyboards and a somewhat electronic drum sound. With the ”retro synth wave” being a trending style, the band sounds rather contemporary. Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense that a retro sound makes them contemporary but sometimes the old is the new ”new”…

There’s two original Creye tracks and a fine cover of Robert Tepper’s classic ”No Easy Way Out” on this EP. ”Straight To The Top” is a hard-hitting uptempo AOR track with a big hook while ”Never Too Late” is a slightly more ”moody” track but just as hook-laden and melodic. The Tepper cover stays true to the original and while Strandell doesn’t have the rasp of Temper, he does a great song making the song his own. The retro-modern-synthwave-hardrock-AOR sound works perfectly for this song too.

If there’s a full album in the works and it’s as good as these tracks, I’ve got a lot of ”R’s” reserved for it…

https://www.facebook.com/creyesweden
http://www.creyesweden.com/

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