It’s great to come across some rock and roll that isn’t all about boring bravado and blatant bombast. For, while “Oh Boy” clearly falls into the garage-rock camp, it is soaked in sixties vocals and power pop sensibilities. And if The Dazed Minded’s debut single harks back to a host of late nineties indie bands, it is only because that scene was influenced by early eighty Paisley Underground revival bands, which in turn were emulating certain sounds of the sixties. What goes around comes around.
But that was then, and this is now. And “Oh Boy” is also very now—the perfect change of direction for rock music in a shifting and hopefully more enlightened world. The Dazed Minded could be the fightback against male dominance in music, particularly rock music, that we need. Not in the vein of the bogus nineties “girl power” brand that didn’t really seem to stand for anything much, but a chance to level the playing field by both being as good as anything the boys can come up with and perhaps even more adventurous.
Listen to “Oh Boy” again. It has it all: guitars that wander between the restrained and the raucous, riffs that punch and kick, dynamics that ebb and flow to create a perfect sonic dynamic, heavenly harmonies, an almost pop infectiousness, and an endless groove. This is the sound of muscle and melody dancing in unison.
Imagine if such a sound became the norm. Imagine if this is what the charts ended up sounding like. Oh Boy, wouldn’t that be something?
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