Classic rock, here we come!

Though the whole point of the music blogosphere seems to be discovering bands doing something completely new before anyone else does, the reality is that, if pressed, most people would probably admit that a band who are good at what they do are much more fun to listen to than a band who are doing something unlike anyone else. (Ideally, a new band will do both, but I'd much rather listen to a band doing something old really well than an artist doing something really innovative badly). For today's first post, a pair of bands that may not win many points for originality, but who make up for that in being good at what they do.



Lions In The Street make music that could easily pass for something from the early days of Classic Rock. In fact, there's every reason to believe that you could drop any of the songs off their new EP, Cat Got Your Tongue, onto a classic rock radio station and no one would be any the wiser.

Implicit in that statement, however, is that no one would notice because it's easy to imagine any of the EP's five songs dominating the airwaves thirty years ago. Songs like "Lady Blue" and "Already Gone" could fill arenas (both in terms of how big they sound and how many people would go to the shows), and the band comes off as the link between the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.

That's heady praise, to be sure, but one listen to Cat Got Your Tongue makes it easy to believe they deserve it. And, best of all, you can downloaded the album for free from the band's site (thanks to Quinn for pointing this out) -- so why wait any longer before hearing them?



Sproll, by contrast, have a sound with a much more recent vintage. They may hail from New Brunswick, but anyone listening to Soft Science could be forgiven for thinking they're listening to long-lost tracks from bands like U2 or Coldplay. "Just What I Deserve" for example, echoes "In My Place", while "Eyes Have Spoken" has the same soaring sound around which U2 have built a career.

Best of all, though, is "Nobody's Fault", which could easily be Sproll's "Yellow" -- it's catchy, it's heartfelt, and it could be the song that makes them omnipresent and launches them into stardom. With luck, however, when that happens they'll remember that it was Soft Science that put them there in the first place, and avoid trying to be -- and sound like -- the biggest band in the world.