doubleDrive
Blue in the Face
Roadrunner
Imagine a Ratt with the hindsight of grunge and (yikes!) post-grunge, and what you get is probably something akin to doubleDrive. While they come across like a light version of Soundgarden or Therapy! at their best, doubleDrive are for all intents and purposes a hard rock party band for the new millennium. There’s something slightly sad about a stadium-sized band forever doomed to play their stadium-sized anthems in front of club-sized audiences, but doubleDrive don’t really seem to mind much. That laidback casualness carries across on their best tracks, including the self-explanatory “I Don’t Care,” as well as “The Hand” and the album’s first single “Imprint.”
Their attempt at emulating nu-metal’s “angst,” however, is a far less appealing trait, as it surely must be, and pseudo-sappy tracks like “Freightrain” and “Inside Out” only detract from an otherwise successful formula of hard rocking sing-along choruses. Blue in the Face is fun in places, but doesn’t have the unapologetic carelessness to go the full mile. When it works, though, it does so in a frighteningly successful manner. Is this perhaps the start of the melodic hard rock revival?
Roadrunner Records: http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/
