Taking Over - Sunday Brave

Take a simple and groovesome riff, underpin it with a confident, direct beat and a bass line that is content to drive rather than deviate into showboatery.

Throw in a guitar solo that serves the song rather than the ego and top it all off with a vocal that is warm and evocative.

Seems simple? Well, here comes the clever bit.

You then take the sonic scissors and edit things down so that there are gaps between the beats, long pauses between the vocal lines and spaces between the instrumentation.

It is these spaces that allow atmospherics to hang, anticipation to linger, for groove to build, for the song to stand out from the background

It may seem obvious, rock and roll was built on simple ideas but somewhere along the way we seem to have lost track of such direct approaches and wandered off into a style where every space has to be filled up, every riff has to be overplayed, every beat followed by a flourish.

Thankfully Sunday Brave remembers that it is all about getting the fundamentals right, do that and you don’t have to work too hard with the detail.

Simple, down the line, spacious rock ‘n’ roll will sell itself every time and this is as good as it gets in that department.

Simple? Perhaps. Effective? Certainly. Great? Without a shadow of a doubt.

- Dave Franklin