Rose Hill Drive: Moon Is The New Earth : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Rose Hill Drive are young men with plenty of Seventies in their bones. Live, singer-bassist Jacob Sproul, his brother, guitarist Daniel, and drummer Nathan Barnes make letter-perfect dynamite of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" and Mountain's "Mississippi Queen" (backing Mountain's own Leslie West). But in their own songs, they rock entirely in the present tense, with an attention to pop dynamics on their second album that often sounds more like recent Green Day than the Who in '73.

"Sneak Out" opens with a great wrecking-ball riff, but the real action is the wily shifts in licks and meter, the way the band veers from a burglar's creep to full throttle without trashing the tune. "Laughing in the Streets" is part Cheap Trick, part Fresh Cream (especially in Daniel's fat, fluid runs), while the mix of Jacob's Beatlesque vocals and Daniel's howling sustain in "Altar Junkie" suggests Stevie Ray Vaughan gate-crashing Abbey Road. Rose Hill Drive are still writing classic rock as opposed to classic songs. They don't have their own "Immigrant Song" yet. But they've got the learning — and the will.