Tuesday May 28, The Grapes
Looking like Fleetwood Mac circa 1975 [but get yourselves online to see their costumes at other recent events] and sometimes sounding a little bit that way [no bad thing at all], Somerset Velvet are well worthy of your attention, and soon, they’re in a flash of development that could take them far. They’re not great yet, but still looking like they could be.
Top scoring point for me was that though most young bands are working with song templates from what they listen to and like, SV have a whole lot more of those than the 3 or 4 most try to get away with. And for one of those to be acappella all-voices is always going to be a hit with me and underline the musicality of the perpetrators.
Restraint is often a good thing, but this is rock’n’roll, honey, and I think they could push things a lot further, particularly in the instrumental department. Maybe it would veer and steer too far into prog-land, and maybe that’s not where they wanna go, but I found myself wanting to hear a Jon Lord type Hammond, and believe me that doesn’t often happen.
But what’s exciting about SV is how fast they’re developing. Any decent band at this stage is best live, of course, but this was soooo much better than the recordings I was listening to only a few months ago. Join their growing following soon and you can still claim you saw the signs before the rest of the world caught up, and seriously, support at this stage can make all the difference…
Dr Zeno
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