SIMO surprises itself and the outside world with a radical turn towards groove

20. September 2017

Simo

SIMO surprises itself and the outside world with a radical turn towards groove

No one would have believed JD Simo or his colleagues would have done that. The public had put the band from Nashville into the jam blues rock drawer. Although they were anything but disappointed with their penultimate album "Let Love Show The Way" (2016), "Rise & Shine" is a different, much stronger caliber. It's funky, groovy, soulful, and yet they haven't completely forgotten Hendrix and psychedelic blues rock. The album is already a definite highlight of the rock year 2017.

eclipsed: We are shocked - in the positive sense - by the new SIMO plant. What devil rode you there?

JD Simo: Several. Okay, I can see you put us in the blues rock and retro corner, too. I have nothing against that, because the best rock music came into being in the late sixties and early seventies. And with our album "Let Love Show The Way" we delivered our Hippie Bluesrock Woodstock statement. I still like it, but in the end it was very easy to record. But that doesn't mean we always have to do the same thing. That's why we didn't make it so easy for ourselves on the new album, but rather screwed our demands far up.

eclipsed: So it was clear from the start that this time you would really open up wide stylistically?

Simo: Yes, we had planned to work hard on ourselves, our sound and our songs. We wanted to find out where a musical journey could take us. This was not always easy goin', there were also some wrong ways. We tried a lot of new things for ourselves. We personally don't have any musical blinkers, so we wanted to create an album on which we could integrate much of what made us musically curious.

Lest mehr im eclipsed Nr. 194 (10-2017).