Jimmy Swift Band

Recent winners of the Best Alternative Artist category at the East Coast Music Awards, Halifax's the Jimmy Swift Band are amongst the finer jam bands out there. For this album, they provide a more structured radio-friendly song-based element, which in turn gives a good easy listening introduction to their sound. And when performing in a live setting, they take these songs and expand on them in a progressively explosive vein that is much more advanced and in depth, with quick pulsing bass and feel good swipes of guitar strums. Their heavy jam sounds combine what is best about jam music in general — overriding the overdone folky Dead-style jams by taking funk and slight traditional rural choruses along with late ‘70s disco keyboards, then futuristically adding a unique techno-dance approach, making them fit somewhere between the sounds of Jazzberry Ram, Grand Theft Bus and the New Deal. There is much promise to this increasingly popular band — their music acts like a vehicle — driving upwards and gliding in high gear and on cue at any given moment, they turn on the thrusters and explode into uncharted musical territory.