Review: Dreamin' on Overdrive by Erin Cassels-Brown
By Alec Smith
In an industry bathed in the ever-evolving synthetic feats of technology and elaborately devised mixes, one up-and-coming singer-songwriter from Winooski, Vermont aims to remind listeners what music and songwriting sounded like on the records he grew up listening to. In his debut LP, Dreamin’ on Overdrive, Erin Cassels-Brown goes against the grain of the mainstream polished pop sound of modern music productions with his own style of hard-working and hard-pressed country rock; harkening back to the days of the ‘70s blue-collar songwriter.
Cassels-Brown’s voice is as gritty and twangy as the guitar solo that completes the introductory track, “Classic Records;” a song that practically invites you to wail along with the chorus with the car windows down. It is easy to see where a line like “You feel like a classic record that has gone out of style” comes from. Both in his writing and his sound, Erin Cassels-Brown doesn’t sound like anything playing on the radio today...he sounds like what was playing on the radio 40 years ago. His style is reminiscent of those very records.
With the occasional full country sweep on tracks like “Aurora,” his rockabilly sound for the modern era brings to mind artists like Jason Isbell and Justin Townes Earle. In fact, a song like “Heavy Heart,” arguably Cassels-Brown’s finest work on the album, would not feel out of place among one of the aforementioned artists’ setlists. Those classic records that Cassels-Brown emulates may have gone out of style in this modern music world, but there is something to be appreciated about his revival and preservation of that sound.
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