Shane Beales

Hackney-based singer-songwriter Shane Beales sounds like a man who based his musical direction on Radiohead from the Bends to Kid A, such is the tone of the yearning, electro-flecked and melodic songsmithery on his enjoyable new self-released Tel Aviv album. What marks it out is that it's extremely short, Beales having noticed that listeners no longer have terribly long attention spans. He fits six songs and a heartfelt, season-based narrative about disappointment and new hope into just 15 minutes. It makes you wish more acts did the same, which proves what a good idea it is. You can sample Tel Aviv's songs, or download the album for £3, from shanebeales.com. - The Guardian

Liverpool based artist Shane Beales is quite the up and coming artist. Since 2006, he has released 2 albums, 4 EPs, and 52 singles—all independently.

Beales’s most recent effort, the EP Heavy Clouds, is an interesting set of four songs.

Heavy Clouds opens with “The Crunch,” which feels like a throwback to the early 90s grunge scene. Beales’s voice and the raw guitar rifts are both reminiscent of bands such as Alice in Chains or Pearl Jam.

“The Crunch” is a hard-hitting song, and leaves the listener wanting more. The strange thing is this: the next three songs on the EP, while good in their own right, are not what “The Crunch” sets the listener up to expect. Instead, the songs are about as stylistically different as putting Rob Zombie and Mozart on the same album.

The grittiness of “The Crunch” is followed next by “Across the Seas,” a very soft, mellow ballad. The song is absolutely beautiful, both instrumentally and lyrically. The piano that starts out and backs the entirety of the song has a delicate, dreamy feel to it, which perfectly fits Beales’s lyrics about committing to someone for life.

Following “Across the Seas” is “Terror=Error,” which is kind of like the happy medium between the roughness of “The Crunch” and the softness of “Across the Seas.” “Terror=Error” reclaims guitar as the dominant instrument, but applies it in a calmer way than the EP’s opening track.

The last song on the EP is the title track “Heavy Clouds.” This song once again takes the tempo down a notch. Like “Across the Seas,” the song is very slow, but where the feel of “Across the Seas” is pretty light, “Heavy Clouds” is just that—heavy.

Beales is a talented artist lyrically and instrumentally, but his one weak point is his vocals. Beales has a voice that is nice on the ears, but it’s often hard to understand what he’s saying. This overshadows the messages in his lyrics.

The fact that the last three songs are so different from the first isn’t a negative, but rather just comes as a surprise. Overall, the EP effectively uses the variation between the four songs to demonstrate that Beales is an artist whose talents can span more than one style.

Heavy Clouds is available as a free digital download.

4 STARS - MuzikReviews.com