Dublin quartet Stand have been making friends and influencing all the right people since their move to New York four years ago, having been championed in such influential music industry bibles as Billboard, Rolling Stone and The New York Times. They’ve certainly honed their sound since leaving these shores, and In A Happy Place, their third album, is the sound of a band who are extremely comfortable in their own skin.
Their particular brand of noise is very much four-square school of rock orthodoxy, and they carry it off with considerable aplomb on tracks like ‘Little Sweet Lucifer’ or the acoustic, harmony-laden ‘Walking With Ghosts’.
However, when they slow things down, Stand can get a bit epic and preachy for my liking: ‘When Fate Becomes You’, for example. But when they rock out, as on the title track or the recent single ‘Sleeping On Our Feet’, their no-nonsense approach grabs you by the shirt collar.
In their grittier moments, the quartet can sound like a slightly lighter Audioslave, especially on ‘Dead Ends’, a state of the nation address proclaiming that “We’ll all float to hell, debt-ridden and stoned.” Indeed, their lyrics throughout display a depth and a level of challenge that lifts them head and shoulders above the majority of US-influenced rock bands.
Stand are probably never going to produce a Kid A, Soft Bulletin or Nixon but there will always be a place and an audience for their brand of FM-friendly pop-rock.