Review: Cherry Suede's Cherry Suede

Cherry Suede is a little-known rock band from Ottawa, Canada whom I discovered through a Facebook advertisement that touted them as a ‘Classic rock band that sounds like Boston meets Def Leppard’. That was enough to get my attention, so off I went to see if their deeds could match their Facebook words. I was very pleased.

Boston meets Def Leppard indeed. Classic rock indeed. Their debut (and so far only) 2006 self-titled album is twelve songs that are absolutely reminiscent of 70’s and 80’s rock. Plenty of love songs, the word ‘baby’ pronounced ‘baybay’, all that good stuff. Mix these songs in with Boston’s own debut, or Def Leppard’s work, and it will feel right at home.

While obviously a modern recording, all the instrumentation and effects are straight out of thirty years ago; two guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, and a singer (with one track’s exception of a very cheesily implemented harmonica). The guitar effects are bare-bones. Distortion, of course, but the analog, tube-amp distortion that came before all the direct-intervention electronic modification that exists in modern amps, and just a single wah pedal enable the guitars to be used properly: as something more than power chord dispensaries. We’ve got actual, fully-realized chords in every track, frequent use of modulations, both direct and chromatic, and secondary dominants, techniques that sadly elude many current artists, and guitar solos that feel at home in the song, and not just an excuse for the guitarist to go off on a fast-as-possible shredding tangent.

Given the small pool of instrumentation and effects, and the budgetary limitations of a debut album, the risk of the songs ending up as samey-sounding is large, and they band does not escape this entirely. The uptempo songs all follow similar formulas, and the slower songs their own. Majority of the songs are in G, E, D, or C major – pretty standard for this music. However, the arrangements are very carefully done, and there are enough tricks and surprises in each track to keep the whole album sounding fresh enough.

Best of all, the whole shebang is free. The band has, for whatever reason, decided that they’re going to give away the whole album for free online under Creative Commons on their website, just Google their name. This is a very cool, very selfless move on their part, and while it doesn’t affect the content of the music, the act of gifting this music to anyone who wants it, with no aim for profit or fame gives the album as a conceptual item a very personal feel, which is very rare in music.

This is an album that strives to tread the same ground as the rock artists of the late 1970’s, and I really believe that if it had been released then, Cherry Suede would be a household name today. I’m aware that the realm of classic rock is a dangerous area to assign musical merit within, classic rock fans being a very entrenched community, but this record is made with the same styles, themes, and attitudes as the rock of thirty years ago. It simply took a while to get to us.