Saint Rich – Beyond the Drone

Album Review by Sam Wiseman | 09 Oct 2013
Album title: Beyond the Drone
Artist: Saint Rich
Label: Merge
Release date: 28 Oct

This New Jersey duo are best-known for their work as Delicate Steve, an instrumental project in which Christian Peslak provides the support to some virtuosic genre-mashing from Steve Marion. Saint Rich flip things around, with Marion providing the rhythmic backdrop to Peslak’s crisp, heartfelt classic rock. Given the role reversal, Beyond the Drone is a remarkably assured record, with an attentive love of acts like Tom Petty, Thin Lizzy and Fleetwood Mac evident in every groove.

That alone, of course, could make this a mere exercise in nostalgia; but Peslak, thankfully, has the ability to pen songs with a bittersweet, catchy immediacy. Like Free Energy’s Stuck on Nothing, this is a record which manages to reinvigorate rock clichés – the rollicking drums and slide guitar of Sorry/Sadly, for example, or the T-Rex-esque melancholy drift of Coming Home – reminding us that, in the right hands, MOR need not mean bland. [Sam Wiseman]

http://www.saintrich.com