Hannah Cranna “A Real Nice Parade”
With some help from Badfinger alum Joey Molland, Hannah Cranna does a “re-boot” of its 1997 debut from defunct power pop label Big Deal Records. We get an impressive start with “Hello,” a catchy tune in the best Badfinger tradition. This take us to a rootsy “Are You Going Home, Polly?” and some nice harmonizing on “Paul McCartney and Wings,” although the band mentioned in the title has absolutely nothing to do with the song. After a solid first half, the album relies on re-mastered or re-recoreded tracks from the debut, and while pleasant enough there is nothing here that really sticks, until we get the slow compelling jam “Heroine on Ohio” and this tempo leads nicely into a live cover of Badfinger’s “Money/Flying” with Joey leading the band. Hannah Cranna would do much better if they leaned less on him, and did more to distinguish their sound, but for Badfinger completists this will be essential.
Kensington “Borders”
I saw this on a “best-of” list and gave it a spin. This is a Dutch band with a melodic-rock meets new wave dance sound. “Let Go” opens up with fast dance beats and it’s chorus does grow on you after a few listens. There are plenty of angular riffs and handclaps in “Youth” that qualifies it as power pop (barely). They’ve shared the stage with bands like Razorlight, The Wombats and My Chemical Romance and the duel vocals of Caspar Starreveld and Eloi Youssef mesh quite nicely. “All That I Know” has some wonderful harmonies and then switches to a manic tempo with shotgun riffs. This falls squarely in the alternative pop category, with classical overtones in the songwriting so fans of Sparks and Roxy Music may like it too. Other tracks that impressed me are “Not As Bright” and “Friendly Fire.” Definitely worth exploring.
Love the Kensington album! But I agree that it’s “borderline” Power Pop. It reminded me a bit of Panic! at the Disco.
The point I wanted to make is this: Adding the old material tells me you may not have been confident in the newer songs. The newer songs are much better and you didn’t need to add 3 old songs plus a Badfinger cover.
We do appreciate that you liked the new material but the purpose of this album is not only to introduce new material but to reintroduce old material since our two releases with Big Deal have been out of print for almost 15 years…”Hello” and “Paul McCartney…” were off our first release from 1995…it would be impossible for us not to include material from the album we made with Joey since we only made 2 records…we included the live track as a bonus and to give a live representation of the band on a night that was very special to us. Remember, the whole idea of this record was to present a sampler since we were not sure anyone even knew who we were at this point or remembered us – we do however have plenty of material for a totally new cd and will be working on that next – we just figured this was the logical first step.
Actually, A Real Nice Parade contains only 3/12 songs from our 1997 release, which was not our debut album. Our debut album was called Better Lonely Days and came out in 1995. I hardly think we relied on that release since 6 of the songs are brand new/never recorded songs – in fact we just recorded them this summer. As for Joey, as much as we loved working with him, we made a conscious effort not to overemphasize his work with us – and on this sampler you can hear him on exactly one song – seems a bit unfair of you to say we leaned on him too much. He did, however, do and excellent job producing the 3 tracks from ’97 (our second album).