Crashdïet Serves Up Catchy, Anthemic Rock on "Automaton"
The Swedish rockers' sixth studio album is the soundtrack to good times.
Thank you for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection. It’s not often that I get to discover the music of a band that’s been around for 20 years that I’d not at least heard of before. It’s even rarer for a band like that to impress me enough to make me want to dive in headfirst to their catalog and hear everything they’ve done.
That’s what happened when I received the promotional tracks from Crashdïet’s upcoming album, Automaton, which drops April 29 on Golden Robot Records. The Swedish rockers somehow manage their own sound while borrowing from their influences and they’ve produced an album’s worth of infectious, anthemic rock songs.
After hearing their promo tracks, and knowing nearly nothing about them, I immediately requested an interview, so I could meet someone responsible for this outstanding new album. I spoke with guitarist Martin Sweet and bassist Peter London via Zoom from Martin’s home studio in Stockholm.
Here’s the story.
Catchy, melodic, hard rock hit its apex of popularity in the United States in the 1980s. It’s still being made but it’s not exactly the driving force in popular culture here that it once was, when bands were exploding off the Sunset Strip scene. However, over in Europe, there is still a thirst and an enthusiasm for that kind of music. It gets radio play and everything!
Bands like Eclipse and Lionville, for example, are turning out quality music and doing well for themselves. Sweden’s Crashdïet is another band that seems to have a knack for taking the music they’re most influenced by and turning those influences into the creation of songs that sound fresh, feel infectious, and make listeners want to sing along. And they’ve been doing that since their original formation in 2000.
The band is known in Sweden and has been getting some radio airplay there. Crashdïet has a following in Europe and the U.K., but outside of Sweden, the band says that South America is where the fans have embraced their music most.
“Argentina and Brazil has been our biggest headlining shows, I think,” bassist Peter London said.
Automaton is the band’s sixth album and first since 2019’s Rust. It’s the second with the current lineup of Gabriel Keyes (vocals), Martin Sweet (guitars), London (bass), and Eric Young (drums). Young has since stepped away as the band’s touring drummer recently and will be replaced by ex-Hanoi Rocks drummer Lacu on Crashdïet’s upcoming live dates.
The album sounds great. The band put together an album with a big rock sound, lots of layers, and big choral vocals in support of Keyes’ lead singing. Automaton not only has great songs but they were produced by Andreas Werling in a manner that the songs deserved.
“It's a bigger production,” Sweet said. “The Rust album was pretty much recorded in our rehearsal room in a very, like, cheap way. This new album, we went to a top-notch studio in the south of Sweden and recorded everything in a few weeks. So, the difference is very big.”
Although it was written and recorded during the pandemic, Automaton wasn’t made by piecing together parts emailed in from home, even if it started out that way. The band tried making the album in Stockholm, recording guitars at home studios and trying to piece things together. However, in the end, the band scrapped that approach and went to a studio in Gothenburg, where there were no COVID-19 restrictions at the time and the band could all record together. Once they were all together, the whole album came together in just a few weeks.
The album kicks off with an extremely short title track that seemed superfluous to me at first. The atmospheric guitars were fine, but it wraps with an expletive that seemed to come out of nowhere and not add anything of value to the album. However, that isn’t the case at all.
The voice that utters that expletive is the band’s founder and original vocalist — the late Dave Lepard, who sadly took his own life in January of 2006 at age 25. The inclusion of his voice is a nice nod to longtime fans of the band and provides a shot of attitude at the start, just before the band kicks into “Together Whatever,” which is the first ‘proper’ song on the album.
The decision to include Lepard’s voice, which was clipped from a live performance, came from the band’s producer.
“(Werling) was very much involved in the in the songwriting throughout, like even before we had the studio,” Sweet said. “After we had been in the studio, we came home and he was like, ‘I have this idea for an intro. We need something to set the tone.’ And we were like ‘Nah, we don’t need any intro.’ But then he played it for us and he just kind of tested us I think and put in Dave’s voice in the end and it was like, ‘That’s fucking cool.’ So, we kept it. Now that we’ve learned to live with it, it actually sets the tone for the album pretty good.”
The second single from Automaton, “Together Whatever” is a fun, bouncy, rock track with a catchy singalong element in the chorus with layered backing vocals from the band. Keyes’ vocals bear some resemblance to Jeff Keith of Tesla to me, which is not a bad voice to sound like, but the true magic of Crashdïet comes from the big, harmony backing vocals. “Together Whatever” would make for a good show opener because it’s sure to fire the crowd’s imagination and get fans moving.
There are hints of several 1980s bands in Crashdïet’s music — Skid Row, Scorpions, Guns N’ Roses, Motley Crue, and Poison leap to mind — yet those ingredients don’t come out tasting too much like any one of those parts.
Another song that’s sure to get the crowd going at live shows is “Shine On,” the third track. It kicks off with a repetitive “hey! hey! hey! hey!” chant that will no doubt go down well at Crashdïet gigs.
“That’s the idea,” London said.
The band punctuates the song’s chorus with more shouts of “Hey!” and one doesn’t need to be too imaginative to picture a sea of fists rising into the air in unison when Crashdïet plays the song live.
“No Man’s Land” is the album’s first single, and it’s another sing-along, anthemic number. A standout guitar solo dazzles in the back half of the song. Sweet adds just the right mixture of flair and crunch to Crashdïet’s songs.
One of the album’s highlights for me is “Darker Minds,” which is a mid-tempo song — not quite slow enough to achieve power ballad status — which shows off Keyes’ ability to convey emotion other than raw, rocking energy. He sings the hell out of this song, and the layered backing vocals take it to the next level. If “Darker Minds” was released in the mid-to-late 1980s, the track could have been a major radio hit on these shores, alongside the likes of Def Leppard and Poison.
“It just just was a great song from from from the demo stage. And you know, we write a lot of songs when we make albums,” Sweet said. “We often write like 30, 40 songs, and then we pick out the best best ones. And sometimes they're really soft, sometimes really heavy. It's just all about the best tune for us.”
“Dead Crusade” is perhaps the heaviest track on the album and strays close to progressive metal at times. Sweet provides another excellent guitar solo while London and Young form a rhythm section in lockstep with one another, not only holding up the melodic elements of the song but also powerfully driving the song forward.
“The instrumental track (of ‘Dead Crusade’), was something that Eric wrote, and then he kind of emailed it over to me,” Sweet said. “Me and Gabriel kind of spontaneously just wrote those lyrics and vocals really fast. And I think the idea was kind of like all these rock stars that are dying all the time, they must be in some sort of rock star Heaven or Hell and that’s kind of the dead crusade. Remember the movie Ghostbusters (2)? There was like the Titanic just came back from the ocean and all these ghosts wandering from the boat up to the city. That’s the idea I had in my head.”
London chiming in with an “oh wow!” when Sweet talked about the Ghostbusters 2 bit seemed to indicate he hadn’t heard that particular detail about the song before the interview.
Guest vocalist Michael Starr of Steel Panther lends his voice to a verse in “Powerline,” a song that will have crowds belting out the title during the chorus. Starr adds a little grit to the second verse and illustrates his gift for hitting a high note with a flourish. A seeming army of overdubbed harmony voices are layered together to create a big, epic sound when the word “powerline” comes around in the chorus.
Starr’s inclusion on a Crashdïet album has been a long time coming.
“We met the guys (from Steel Panther) on some festival and they’re really cool guys,” Sweet said. “They’re not as crazy as they might seem. They’re very normal people. But they’re fans of Crashdïet, it turned out. Skip forward like 10 years, we just had this idea to have some sort of guest appearance on the album. Steel Panther just popped up. They like us, we like them, and we just asked Michael, ‘Want to sing on a verse on our album?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah dude, let’s do it.’ It was really easy and smooth.”
The band channels old school Guns N’ Roses and Skid Row on “Resurrection of the Damned,” another chunky, heavier number on the album. Keyes belts out the vocals with a sing-song band choir vocal singing the title of the song in the chorus.
Another of the big highlights for me on the record is “We Die Hard” and I expect it to stay in heavy rotation in my 2022 new music playlist. A song about persevering and pushing through, it shows Crashdïet’s gift for creating infectious melodies while still bringing the edgy rock elements to the forefront. It might be the hardest song to keep from singing along to.
“I think the title says it all,” said Sweet, who wrote the song. “We’re not giving up. You know, we've had some rough times, but it’s not going to be easy to make us quit. And I think that's kind of what the song is about.”
Indeed, the band has had difficult times. Crashdïet nearly called it a day after Lepard’s suicide. The plan was initially to disband but after some time, along with encouragement from Lepard’s family and Crashdïet’s fans, the band decided to move forward.
Since then, the band has gone through a couple of vocalists. Olli Herman Kosunen (known by his stage name, H. Olliver Twisted) of Finnish band Reckless Love was the band’s singer in 2007 and 2008, performing on the second Crashdïet studio album, The Unattractive Revolution. Simon Cruz fronted the band from 2009-2015, singing on the Generation Wild and The Savage Playground albums before leaving and eventually being replaced by Keyes.
“Shell Shock” is another mid-tempo rocker, and I don’t find it quite up to the level of the other songs on the album, but it’s not a bad track so much as it just suffers by comparison to the album’s high level elsewhere. On a lesser album, it might stand out more. “Unbroken” kicks the tempo back up. To me, it shares a little musical DNA with Quiet Riot’s “Run for Cover,” although it doesn’t rip that song off in any way and the comparison is only on a surface level during the chorus. The song goes through some nicely surprising twists along the way and Sweet’s guitar work shines again.
The album closer is the power ballad, “I Can’t Move On (Without You),” with some tasty acoustic guitar and another chance for Keyes to show he can do more than just belt out rocking numbers with power and range. The harmony vocals are gorgeous and some subtle keyboards elevate the song and provide depth and texture. The acoustic playing in the verses has a little bit of a Styx “Crystal Ball” vibe, but where Sweet really shines is (again) on the solo, which is electric. It was a little surprising that the band chose to end the album with the ballad, because it leaves you waiting for another rocker to come along, but for that, one needs only to start the album over again.
The album pacing on Automaton is perfect for this musical style. The longest song is 4:39 (“Dead Crusade”) and the majority of the songs are less than four minutes. Each track gets in, hits you in the face, and gets out without overstaying its welcome. It makes for a pleasing start-to-finish listen every time.
Sweet and London both seemed pleased with the album that they made, and they should be. Automaton should do well in Europe and, in another era, this record would likely have made the band MTV stars in the United States. I asked them if this is the kind of album they envisioned making when Crashdïet started writing it.
“We didn't have an idea actually of what kind of an album we wanted. We just wanted to make the best album we could make,” Sweet said. “And it was kind of new for us to bring in a producer who was playing around with our songs. But it was kind of a breath of fresh air, because you can get locked up in old melodies. The songs (Werling) is involved in, you can hear a new kind of melody in certain songs. That’s kind of nice.”
Automaton will probably not get much radio airplay here in the United States (one can always hope!) but with any luck, the band will be able to come over and play live to drum up support. It’s a record worth having in your collection if you were a fan of those melodic rock bands of the 80s, but it has a contemporary finish to it that keeps Automaton from sounding dated.
Track List:
Automaton
Together Whatever
Shine On
No Man’s Land
Darker Minds
Dead Crusade
Powerline
Resurrection of the Damned
We Die Hard
Shell Shock
Unbroken
I Can’t Move On (Without You)
For my full interview with Martin and Peter, check out the video below or listen to the podcast version of Michael’s Record Collection (Episode 59) wherever you get your podcasts — the podcast includes some short audio samples from several tracks. Martin and Peter were troopers, talking to me after a long day of media responsibilities. In addition to the album, we talked about the band’s history and influences, and even a new beer that is going to take the name of Crashdïet’s new album.
Thanks again for your time. Please consider sharing this issue of the newsletter with the first button below, or sharing Michael’s Record Collection with the second. And be sure to check out the podcast version at your favorite podcast dispensary. Feel free to visit michaelsrecordcollection.com and my Patreon site at patreon.com/michaelsrecordcollection to find out how you can support independent writing and podcasting for as little as $2 per month.