Brian from Midlands Rocks has written some nice words about the Cranston album. You can read the full review here. Some quotes:
- What they’ve done here, for the most part at least, is create an AOR album in a manner that will resound with genre aficionados.
- Producer, Sabu adorns most tracks – most notably, ‘See You On The Other Side’ and ‘Queen Of Pain’ with a cavalcade of punchy, dramatic keyboards and high-octane riffs
- The classy ‘Double Trouble’ (which rises to a vertiginous chorus) and ‘You Oughta Know’, a major-key stomp, stand out due to their clever use of call&response, using the backing vocal as lead, an old Mutt Lange trick.
- It all might be rooted in nostalgia, an homage to a time when the world’s charts and radios were dominated by bands such as Journey, Foreigner, REO Speedwagon and so forth, but most of the time anyway, it works.
Thank you Brian!
Cranston ‘Cranston’ (Rock Company)
Cranston from Rhode Island, USA is a band/project formed around musicians whom have already made a household name in the melodic rockworld. The band consists of none other than multi-instrumentalists/vocalists Phil Vincent and Paul Sabu as well as drummer B.F. D’Ercole. Together they recorded an album that musically is clearly sounding like a cross between Phil and Paul’s solo-records, so no surprises at all here. It’s sounding a little better than the last couple of records both gentlemen released, but still the 10 included songs are very cliché tingled melodic hardrocksongs that will definitely please the fans of Sabu and Vincent, although don’t expect anything new here I’m afraid. Not saying it is bad, because it’s all done quite well, but most of the material reminds me of a slightly weaker version of their past work when they started both in the music business and that sounded very sensational (Kidd Glove and Phil Vincent’s first couple of records). So if you’re not familiar with those albums, better start from scratch and leave this alone, but in case you’re a dedicated fan of Sabu and Vincent, then make sure to check this out at: https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/cranston22
(Points: 7.8 out of 10)