The Strange Boys – Be Brave

Reviewed by James ‘James’ Tabbinor

There’s not a lot to say about this new release by young Texans The Strange Boys, and it’s not particularly favourable. I’ll start off with the bad stuff, so they can have the good stuff for pudding.

Essentially I have two major problems with this single; for starters, the vocals. They’re terrible. Ryan Sambol (lead vocals) cannot sing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of plenty of bands/artists where the singer cannot sing, but they’re voice has something quintessentially gripping and charismatic about it. This guy doesn’t have that edge, he just screeches into the microphone, trying to get a raw, Jagger-esque sound, but just doesn’t pull it off. It’s not pleasant to listen to, and you can barely understand what he’s actually singing.

Now, I’ll go on to the second bad point about this single, which may cut Sambol some slack. It’s the recording, specifically (once again) vocals. Everything else sounds pretty great (which I’ll come to shortly) but the quality of the vocals is shocking. Both the lead and backing vocals sound really, really tinny, a bit like Sambol is singing down a phone line. This single, and it’s poor recording, really doesn’t bode well for the forthcoming album (also entitled ‘Be Brave’). Might I add that if this tinny sound is intentional, then it was a really poor decision production wise.

Now, those are the two things that got my goat, and it’s a real shame because the rest of the single actually sounds pretty good. It’s got a really nice bluesy riff that’s reminiscent of The Rolling Stones, or even Chuck Berry. Listening to this was actually really refreshing because it sounds nothing like the sort of bands that are coming off the indie assembly line at the moment. It’s just a massive shame that this has to be hindered by what is essentially a poor singer.

All in all I’m gonna split my score in two; what was essentially nice bluesy rock n’ roll was let down by shocking vocals. As such the music gets a 3/5, and the vocals a 1.