Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Gav Brown, Independent 2019.
Gav Brown hails from Perth and he’s been a regular on the live music scene there for some time.
Sound Circus is his debut album.
The album was recorded in Perth’s Crank Studio in 2018 and features a star studded line-up of Perth’s best musicians including Kristian Borring, Lee Buddle, Lucky Oceans, Ian Simpson, Genevieve Wilkins, Chris Reeve, Ric Eastman, Ashley Brooke, Roy Martinez, Kaitlyn Keegan, Sheridan Drury and Steve Kelly.
I’ve included all the musicians on the list because they all played a vital part in the final product.
Gav has a well worn soulful voice and he plays a mix of country rock, pop and folk.
He’s a multi-instrumentalist playing guitar, banjo, piano, harmonica, mandolin, and ukulele but he says that his real passion is songwriting.
He works hard at his songwriting and states his influences to be broad, ranging from Gershwin to Springsteen, Sting, James Taylor, Carlos Santana and John Mayer.
Gav’s voice and performance style has even been compared to Joe Cocker and Tom Waits.
The 10 songs on this disc are well structured and contain some exquisite playing.
They range from the tongue-in-cheek Greatest Player, a rock fuelled track in which he makes the claim that he’s the greatest player in the world (it contains a really good guitar solo), to the opening country inspired track, Artists Dream, which opens with some pedal-steel to set the mood.
The album closes with more pedal-steel in the folky, Songbird.
There are some good songs on the album. I liked Greatest Player and Lightforce but was unmoved by many others.
My overall impression is that the quality of the musicianship is superior to many of the songs themselves.
Great musicianship can lift a good song but it can’t create one.
