MusicRadar is excited. We always liked gifted UK bluesman Oli Brown - he can play the guitar like ringing a bell and, more importantly, he has phenomenal hair. But in RavenEye - a trio more Royal Blood than blues royalty - Brown is taking a turn to the dark side. And he sounds much better for it.
"There's always been another side of me that wanted to play heavy music" - Oli Brown
"The blues scene was incredibly supportive, but there's always been another side of me that wanted to play heavy music," says Oli.
"I like the idea of people not feeling like they need to sit down and appreciate a solo, that they can be as wild as they want - and I wanted to feel something different onstage, too."
Power trio
RavenEye is completed by a monstrous rhythm section of Kev Hickman and Aaron Spiers and it's now Oli's main focus. It's a triple-underlined 'power' trio - the title track of EP Breaking Out has a riff so big it could protect the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros - but elsewhere, things have slimmed down.
Gear-wise, it's just Oli's Hofner Verythin with a backline of a Blackstar HT, a Volt Humble head and an MXR Slash Octave Fuzz and Electro-Harmonix POG2 on the floor. While there's still some fearsome fretwork, the fat's been trimmed on the song front, too.
"It was easier than I thought it was going to be," says Oli. "I thought there were going to be a lot of solo breaks, but some of it just wasn't necessary. [With RavenEye] the bigger the riff, the happier I am!"
- For fans of: Audioslave, Royal Blood
- Hear: Breaking Out
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“It didn’t even represent what we were doing. Even the guitar solo has no business being in that song”: Gwen Stefani on the No Doubt song that “changed everything” after it became their biggest hit
“It sounded so amazing that people said to me, ‘I can hear the bass’, which usually they don’t say to me very often”: U2 bassist Adam Clayton contrasts the live audio mix in the Las Vegas Sphere to “these sports buildings that sound terrible”
“It didn’t even represent what we were doing. Even the guitar solo has no business being in that song”: Gwen Stefani on the No Doubt song that “changed everything” after it became their biggest hit
