Seven Red Lions - Temple Road (self-released)

Although the London-based Seven Red Lions has a wonderfully cosmopolitan backstory with members garnered from Mexico, Venezuela, Portugal, and Sweden, you can only use that as the main thrust of any review for so long; anything else would just be lazy journalism. (And, as a lazy journalist myself, I should know.)The real story here has to be the music they make, and thankfully, as this debut album proves, the band’s music is every bit as mercurial and marvelous as the makeup of its members.

Temple Road is the sound of rock and roll music being reimagined for a new audience, forged from threads as generically diverse as the band is geographically, and I’m sure those two factors are in no small way connected.

While Seven Red Lions has a consistent sound, one based loosely on low-slung, alternative, scuzzy rock and roll attitudes, it constantly pushes at not only its own boundaries but also the limits of rock and roll itself.

Opener “Alone” takes the weight of grunge and the intensity of alternative rock and drags it kicking and screaming through a 90s underground rock filter into the present day. The result is a sound that is both sleazy and sophisticated, poised and powerful. But this is only one outlet for their sonic experiments.

“Hurry Up” takes detours into almost pop-adjacent territories, at least into a sound that, sadly, barely broke the surface except for bands such as Transvision Vamp, the sound of the rock takeover of the mainstream that never quite happened. “Underground” ebbs and flows between pop and prog, “Titan” is a blend of the groovy and the anthemic, and “Olvido” sees them exploring an almost 60’s hippy-folk sound flavored with some delicate and mournful Tex-Mex border brass. A song as beautiful as it is unexpected.

Seven Red Lions know how the world works. They understand fully that there is nothing truly new under the sun and that it is only by studying the sound of what has gone before that you can create a new sonic vision of the future. Temple Road is nothing less than a new and exciting sonic vision of rock and roll to come. The sound of tomorrow, today!

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