Jam bands were one of the best things to come out of the 90’s for me: A group of talented musicians get together, have a jam and make some crazy-ass music. What amounts from this situation is usually veering towards the funk rock style; lazy, dirty, psychedelic and heavy on the solos. Butterfly Fan The Inferno’s latest single ‘Brassneck’ is exactly that: Starting with a laid back groove between the bass and drums that is layered with vocals and an almost constant guitar solo that fills out any of the gaps left in the audio spectrum, it immediately reminds me of US jam bands such as Umphrey’s McGee and String Cheese Incident. With a sound like that I wasn’t surprised to see that this Birmingham based quartet actually started up across the pond.
Their sound is big and boisterous with a ska twang in there for good measure, but I can’t help but think that the song lacks a little depth. It feels like it wants to move away from the initial riff at some point, taking the track somewhere unexpected instead of sticking to the comfort of a verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure. There isn’t a strong enough hook for this song to warrant staying safe and a little bit of thinking out of the box wouldn’t go amiss. Because of this it ends up sounding like a jam band attempting a pop song, which just isn’t quite right in my opinion. That doesn’t mean to say that what they have created in ‘Brassneck’ isn’t good, I just think that with a little bit more thought it could turn into something quite amazing. 6/10
www.myspace.com/butterflyfantheinferno
No comments:
Post a Comment