KenBrian

Kuroshio Sea – 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world – (song is Please don’t go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

Okay, I realize I’m a little slow. Let me give you the back-story as to how I know this. Way back in the early 90’s a friend turned me on to a great band Follow For Now A great funk/metal/soul band from Atlanta, Georgia. This was back in the days of Living Color and Fishbone and a lot of other bands were trying to mash funk and metal, with some doing it better than others. FFN in my opinion was in the later camp, in fact in some ways they were one of many bands that allowed me to see that there were other genres besides metal, cause that’s about all I could hear at that time But their beautiful blend of crunch and funk, hooked me. So for whatever reason FFN just never caught on. There debut album was also their last. It was produced by Brendon O’Brien Who is a well known producer, most notably, much of the Pearl Jam catalog.
So what I didn’t know is that David Ryan Harris, the lead singer and guitarist of the band has continued to make music. Check out some sounds on Last.fm

While Harris continues to promote his solo act, he can frequently be seen on stage performing with artists such as John Mayer (with whom Harris is currently on tour), Dave Matthews, and Santana.[3] Along with artists such as Sister Hazel, Better Than Ezra, and Collective Soul, Harris has also performed on The Rock Boat music festival from 2007-2009.

But of course it is his solo career that I am interested in. The Bittersweet came out in 2006, (although iTunes shows a release date of 2007, I think 06 is the real date). The album starts off pretty mellow and doesn’t pick up much tempo until about 3/4’s in. But that’s not a bad thing. It strikes me as just a great soul record, and David’s voice has got a great big voice to deliver. The first song for you is just the vocal and acoustic guitar, the next few songs clip along in the mid tempo range with some occasional splashes of David’s great guitar work. Probably my favorite tracks on the album are number 7 and 8, “Yesterday Shutting Down” starts off mid-tempo slightly mellow, like the rest of the album, but with a bit more funk/soul. But when the chorus hits, the infectious groove get’s you movin’. The next song, “Hold My Fire” seems to continue where the last one left off. This song reminds me a bit of the old FFN album. Again, with a lock you in groove, and some great guitar stuff, and drums that remind me of that 60’s Hendrix kind of sound. The next song, if I had time, starts to bring it back down, but still really nice. The last song, “Strong Enough” is another pretty ballad, which wraps up the album nicely.
All in all I think the album is worth picking up, but if you were only going to buy a couple tracks, my money would be on 7 and 8. And hopefully if I ever do a music review again, It won’t be 4 years after the release date. But I know you all have been holding out on buying, until you got my review. Okay, maybe not.

I’m resisting the temptation to say things like “finally” and “it’s about time”, I mean I need to give myself a break, right. It happened when it happened, enough said.
But I have posted a new page and would like to take the time to introduce it, as well as map out some of my plans for KenBrian.com.
First the new stuff: I just posted my own version of a V-card (the first piece any way) Located at card.kenbrian.com. I love the metaphor. So if you don’t know a vCard is a kinda like a digital business card, well taking that a step further is a web page with all of my social network links. I still plan to add some additional content to the vCard.
Also I set up this Word Press blog, and killed off all the old content from KenBrian.com with the plans of moving all of the tutorials and writings to the blog and moving the portfolio and art and stuff to a more proper portfolio site. For now I’m just using Deviant Art for my portfolio.
I hope to make writing here a consistent thing, though it will undoubtedly be primarily self serving, unless I can actually create an audience. I’d like to use it to document all of the ideas and projects, as well as linking to cool/interesting things I find on the web. I’d also like to save all of my favorite design/webbish tutorials here, and maybe take a stab at writing my own tutorials.
I’d love to hear comments and thoughts if you don’t mind. If you happen to know something I know about, I’d love to get feedback about what you’d like to see here.
That’s all for now, thanks for coming. Oh, and about the title of this post, sorry, I was listening to Soundgarden. Yes I know it’s 2010, but Soundgarden still rocks