Reviewed by Aleem Hossain

What Brave Saint Saturn is to Five Iron Frenzy, Grand Incredible is to the OC Supertones. But where BSS succeeded in creating a band with a bit of “je ne sais quoi” completely set apart from FIF, Grand Incredible has sadly failed. This is just the Supertones minus the horns; moreover, it’s the Supertones at their most bland. Grand Incredible simply takes up where the last couple of studio albums from the Supertones left off and shows a band desperately trying to come up with a new direction on a machine that ran out of juice years ago. It’s not that this is an amateurish project, it’s just that every flippin’ song sounds the same. Whilst the odd track will have your toes tapping, long before the middle of the album you can’t but help feel that you heard a similar song previously on the disc (and there’s every chance you heard it on a Supertones album too). Disappointingly, this project has its fair share of really naff tracks, like the dire “The Days Are Evil” and the frankly shocking rendition of Cindi Lauper’s “Time After Time”. If the Supertones/Grand Incredible are to be resuscitated as the credible musical force that they used to be, what’s needed is an album with as much bite and spontaneity as the classic ‘Adventures Of…’ and ‘Supertones Strike Back’. But with news that the Supertones are going to jump on the worship bandwagon (which has long since lost a wheel-or-two) for their next project and the departure of founding-member Tony Terusa, it looks unlikely. Rather than wowing listeners with something fresh (a la Brave Saint Saturn), Grand Incredible are barely a whimper in a musical abyss.

The opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those held by Cross Rhythms. Any expressed views were accurate at the time of publishing but may or may not reflect the views of the individuals concerned at a later date.

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