In their home of England (by way of their native Australia), Grand Drive has been compared to the latter-day Jayhawks, falling somewhere between the overt pop of that band’s Sound Of Lies and the more twang-tinged Tomorrow The Green Grass. Grand Drive’s debut disc, Road Music, reveals them to be largely a classic pop band, relying heavily on loping mid-tempo guitars and drums washed heavily in organ and piano.
Brothers Danny and Julian Wilson write the songs and play most of the guitars and keyboards. Road Music starts off strong with “Tell It Like It Is”, a classic melancholy pop song featuring an elegant organ-piano-tambourine intro and gentle guitar-bass-drums embrace that sets the stage for the band’s clean-pop template. Its powerful lyrical grip lies in its refusal to reveal itself as either a wary beginning or a wizened departure (“Burn my house down to the ground/send me up, I’m not coming down”).
From here, Road Music moves straight into uncomplicated piano-pop with “Undone”. The threads running through the Wilsons’ lyrics begin to appear more bitter than sweet as “Undone” and the third song (“5th Letter”) paint pictures of broken romance and undisguised yearning. Yet the choirboy quality of their voices never permits them to convey the desperation their songs often seek.
“On A Good Day”, a gently rollicking number, furthers the album’s theme of fighting romance’s pull, with its less-than-admiring lyrical hook, “Whole towns fall down/On a good day, at your feet.” The band is at its musical best on “Shadow Of The Man”, mixing love-strewn lyrics with fine country-soul singing and picking, but the song as a whole never quite takes full flight. The album’s final four tracks don’t possess the lyrical and musical focus of the first seven, at times drifting dangerously near the borders of easy-listening.
While Road Music shamelessly aspires to the same vein mined by songwriters such as Jeff Tweedy and Gary Louris, it does so without artifice and guile. The Wilson brothers may not yet write as well as their heroes, but their honest dedication to straightforward pop is a good portent for Grand Drive’s prospects.
