Rock music has always been at its best when it dances across the musical landscape in the embrace of other genres. Blues brings to it a slow, seductive quality, folk an earthy honesty, and pop additional accessibility. But if you want to maximise the groove and turn the dial up on the party spirit, it is to the likes of soul and funk that it looks for its perfect dance partner.
“Trance,” the latest single from Ronzoni Hines, is the sound of these two sounds performing the deftest of footwork together. If the cover suggests that this is a man who knows his way around a bass guitar, the music leaves you under no illusion—this is a song built squarely on a groove and drive and …well, more groove, as all good music should be.
But “Trance” is more than that, too. Sure, crunching guitars and a swing in the back end demand you get up and move, but there are plenty of other sounds at work – soulful backing vocals, pop accessibility (think Lenny Kravitz meets Michael Jackson), R&B swagger and funky energy…to mention a few.
If you feel that pop is too full of transient, throwaway music, rock is too bombastic, and soul and R&B seem to have lost their sonic bite, then “Trance” is precisely what you need to restore your faith in music.
