Hailing from India, About Us play a variety of rock styles, but often centre their songs around hard edged melodic rock with proggy flourishes. Despite their desire to give AOR a kick, the proggy moments won’t be enough to win over the average prog fan, and might be a little distracting for the melodic rock purist. However, if you’re able to get your head around their sometimes very busy and occasionally quirky sound, their debut album presents some very strong melodies and great songs.
Tag Archives: melodic rock
GRAND – Grand
A new band for 2022, Grand was formed by session vocalist Mattias Olafsson with the desire to pay tribute to the big, shiny sounds of 80s melodic rock. Enlisting drummer Anton Martinez Matz and Wigelius guitarist Jakob Svensson, he quickly set to work on making his musical dream a reality. Having Svensson on board from the early stages would obviously be a major boon, since Wigelius were one of those bands, along with Work of Art, who just managed to pitch an 80s AOR sound pretty much perfectly, decades after most of the world stopped craving the sounds of Survivor and Robert Tepper for their biggest musical thrills. Having worked wonders with his own band, there was every chance that his guitar tones and musical talents would be a key ingredient within Olafsson’s musical vision.
PERFECT PLAN – Brace For Impact
In the year or so leading up to this third release from Perfect Plan, vocalist Kent Hilli kept himself more than busy. Considered by some to be the great white hope of melodic rock in the twenty first century, between 2021 and 2022, he not only issued two solo releases – an album of original material and an EP of covers – but also became the new frontman for AOR legends Giant, appearing on their very enjoyable ‘Shifting Time’ album, and even found time to contribute vocals to the second Restless Spirits album.
ORIANTHI – Rock Candy
Orianthi’s 2020 album ‘O’ marked an overdue return for the Australian guitarist. Her first album in seven years and her first for the Frontiers Records label, it appeared during the pandemic lockdown, adding to an ever growing pile of welcome distractions for rock fans the world over. You’d be hard pressed to call it forward looking in any way – the bulk of the music ploughed a furrow where classic 80s melodic rock was very much at the forefront of her semi-bluesy sound, and the video for its second single ‘Impusive’ seemed to want to set the feminist movement back by decades – but, as melodic rock long players go, it was enjoyable enough.
HOUSE OF LORDS – Saints And Sinners
For many, House of Lords will always be best known for their self titled debut from 1988. A massive piece of melodic rock, the recording introduced the world to the strong vocals of James Christian which, paired with a larger than life keyboard sound from ex-Angel man Greg Giuffria, resulted in the kind of huge sounding AOR that proved that a combination of poodle perms and big chorus hooks needn’t be wimpy. A cover of Blind Faith’s ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’ found the band courting the MTV crowd in 1990 and the future looked bright. Unfortunately, changing musical fashions led to the band splitting after a third album a couple years later, but their work was far from done.
A reformed band – minus Giuffria – released ‘The Power and The Myth’ in 2004, to the delight of fans, but to the indifference of the rock world at large. However, despite a lack of obvious commercial success, it was enough for House of Lords to plough onward, releasing new works every two or three years thereafter.