plorentz's Full Review: Against the Grain by The Veer Union
“Seasons”, the debut single by the Vancouver-based rock quintet The Veer Union, comes on like a mid-90s nu-metal flashback: a propulsive, heavily layered, intricately detailed, relentlessly rhythmic, melodically bombastic, industrial grind that instantly and favorably recalls the best moments of now-largely-and-unjustly-forgotten bands like Stabbing Westward and Machines of Loving Grace. The song’s anthemic arena rock harmonies shift and soar, dive-bombing the listener like a bird-of-prey, graceful, confident, focused, beautiful, and ruthless. It’s a spectacularly promising debut, especially from a band whose lead singer and principal songwriter Crispin Earl’s resume includes writing credits on Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee’s solo album (and, yes, having a gigantic mohawk).
Unfortunately, much of the rest of their debut full-length, Against the Grain, finds this wide-eyed, idealistic, biracial rock quintet doing competent, occasionally effective, but never particularly revelatory re-writes of Nickelback’s back-catalogue, replicating Chad Kroger’s moody vocal theatrics while replacing his angsty lyrics with earnest pleas for forgiveness and paeans to perseverance. Songs like the sledgehammer blunt “Where I Want To Be” are admirably compact and purposeful, and on “The Darker Side of Me”, Earl delivers an uncompromisingly direct reality check (warning?) to a would-be-girlfriend – “I don’t think that you want to be a part of me! I don’t think you want to see the deeper, darker side of me! I don’t think you’re ready for reality… Walk away!” There’s something almost comical (but highly effective!) about the way Crispin announces his emotional emptiness with such derivative conviction over such derivative guitar-god riffage.
“Over Me” and “I’m Sorry” are essentially monsters-of-rock clichés, only writ so large, and wrought with so much youthfully oblivious idealism (I wonder if they’ve ever heard of White Lion?), you almost believe that they almost believe that they invented the powerballad. Still, they save one last heaving epic of a song for last: “What Have We Done” fades in on portentous piano chords and a distant-but-growing stomp-stomp-clap beat before Earl starts earnestly, however generically, detailing how we humans are getting, like, the world and everything just totally wrong before pleading for us to “open up our narrow minds”. I’m sorry, I’m just a complete sucker for this stuff, and when the song climaxes with a unison a capella stomp-stomp-clap chorus, I truly long to be standing on my bleacher seat in a big drunken summer festival amphitheatre audience stomp-stomp-clapping along with several thousand other drunken Veer Union fans in a moment of purest power ballad communion.
I think The Veer Union can do it. Against the Grain is by no means a game-changer of an album. But they do so much of what they do so well that it’s easy to picture the band as the Nickelback of the two-thousand-teens (just like Nickelback were the Creed of the two-thousand-aughts). Which, by the way, isn’t necessarily a complement, but isn’t necessarily an insult either.
- - - - - BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW: “Against the Grain” by The Veer Union UniversalMotown Records Released 4/21/2009
Produced by Greg Archilla and Brian Howes 42 min.
SONGS: Seasons – Youth of Yesterday – Over Me – Darker Side of Me – I’m Sorry – Final Moment – Better Believe It – Into Your Garden – Your Love Kills Me – Breathe In – Where I Want To Be – What Have We Done
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