Like a wild wolf howling at the moon, the electric guitar that blasts a hole through the first ten seconds of Jeremy Rice’s “Arriianne” is intimidating, familiar and rife with intensity. The drums click into place and leave just enough space for the bassline to fill the background with warm tonality, and even before Rice starts serenading us with a punkish might, there’s a seditiousness to the undercurrent of percussion pushing and shoving its way into the mix. With a spunkiness also found in the music video for “Arriianne”, the track moves forward on the back of a violent rock beat that, were it not joined to a soft, lush harmony, would be a little harsher than what I’ve heard in any indie rock song lately.
URL: https://www.jeremyrice.net/
Jeremy Rice’s voice scales the mountains that the melodically-pleasing riffing piles in front of him, and though he backs off of the gas in the chorus, he never comes across to us as hesitant for even a second. He’s giving it to the audience as hard as he can with the microphone, but his backing band is getting just as into their part in creating this charged pop juggernaut; Rice always remains the main feature of the song and video for “Arriianne,” but he doesn’t have any trouble sharing the instrumental stage with his more than capable bandmates. This isn’t his first rodeo, and he’s exhibiting a maturity in this track that I’d really like to see more of in current popular music.
I-TUNES: https://music.apple.com/ca/album/arriianne-single/1477389816
We come careening to a halt with “Arriianne” after a little over three minutes of Rice throwing everything that he has in his bag of tricks at us, and in both the video and the single itself, there’s a sense of unfinished business that hangs over the conclusion as if to say this story hasn’t been fully told. We’ll likely get a string of sequels hopefully as good as this initial offering is in Jeremy Rice’s new solo album Legendary Fist of Takinawa, and if they indeed live up to the high standard set by this song, it’s going to be one of the more important LPs to be released this autumn.
Kim Muncie