Why limit yourself to working in just one genre when you can let the songs that you write do that for you? Why continue to push at one set of musical boundaries when you can wander freely across the sonic world? Why keep using the same musical template when the whole point of being creative is to be adventurous and push your own limits?
All of these are considerations that find their way into the musical process of the excellently named Soul Rolled Fox, whether he is conscious of the fact or not. It is fair to say that there is a core sound, a sort of acoustic soul vibe, but from here the songs shoot out as sonic salvos in all directions.
There are smooth soul-jazz ballads such as the graceful Clouds but there are also bluesy, rock numbers like So Much, there are songs with an almost Santana-like groove such as the majestic Ultimo Incontro and the title track rounds things off nicely, a confident and cool rock workout, fronted by wonderfully modern, urban vocal deliveries.
It’s a great album, one that doesn’t limit itself to one style but is also concise and complete enough that it never feels anything other than a connected body of work. It’s also an album that wanders through a wonderful dynamic trajectory, from soulful acoustica to blistering anthems, each song seeming to step up from the last so that, as a whole, it goes on its own sonic journey.
Did You Get Any of That? plays with genres, mixing and matching soul with rock, jazz with indie and creating a space to exist where those all cross and collide, merge and meld. But we live in a post-genre world, so isn’t this the attitude and approach towards music that everyone should be adopting? People could learn a lot from Soul Rolled Fox.
