Rising Canadian duo Crown Lands have released a new video for Sun Dance, and they're premiering it exclusively with Classic Rock. The track is taken from the band's self-titled debut album, which was released on August 13.
The video for Sun Dance finds the hirsute Canucks in some kind of plant-filled conservatory, where they successfully conjure up the ghost of Led Zeppelin III as the song gently unwinds – Kevin Comeau's acoustic guitar, bubbling tabla rhythms, shamanic, Robert Plant-esque vocals from singer Cody Bowles – before it all goes a bit Led Zep IV somewhere north of the four minute mark, with pounding drums and an appropriately thunderous riff.
Crown Lands might lean on the Led Zeppelin sound – although they've jokingly described themselves as a combination of Rush and The White Stripes – but they're doing more with the template than dressing up old blues riffs with a some random "ooh babys".
“People are going to listen to you, so you may as well say something that matters,” says Comeau. “I don’t play rock'nroll to talk about rock'n'roll, I play to talk about things that matter to me. I don’t need any more ‘Hey Mamas’ in my life."
Case in point: Sun Dance follows in the footsteps of End Of The Road, a tribute to more than 70 women – many indigenous – who've disappeared on a 450-mile stretch of Yellowhead Highway 16 in British Columbia. Squeeze my lemon, this ain't.
Crown Lands was recorded in Nashville with Dave Cobb, who they met through Rival Sons.
“Dave pushed us to listen to ourselves and really trust our initial instinct with a song,” says Bowles. “The first couple of times we would play through a song, he’d be like ‘OK, we’re good’ – if you beat it over the head too much, you lose the spirit and the feel is totally gone. So he allowed us to listen to ourselves and identify that spirit, and I think we’ll really take that with us moving forward."
“We have a really special bond," adds Comeau. "Pretty much like brothers, but more. Cody is like my life partner, basically. I think that connection comes through in our performance. There’s something special about the two of us getting together and turning up to ten, the sound waves that hit people.
"I’m a fairly little dude, a soft-spoken guy, so when I plug in my gear, I want to become a wall of sound on my own to have Cody’s voice soar on top of. When we’re listening back to our performances now, the sound I used to hear in my head is now coming out of the speakers. So we just have to keep pushing ourselves even further."
