Slowly Rolling Camera

I visited the Gearbox vinyl mastering studio a while back and was very impressed with its dedication to vintage tube powered, analogue equipment. The fact that they use an Audio Note monitoring system might give you some idea of the degree of dedication to the cause, there can be few such facilities on the planet. Most of Gearbox’s catalogue has been vintage jazz recordings from the BBC archives, which is all top gear (so to speak) but the nature of the recordings means that you don’t get the full flavour of what the studio is capable of. This changed last year when Jeremy Cooper cut this debut for British band Slowly Rolling Camera, a modern recording that reveals all of its tonal glory on this spectacular slab of vinyl.
SRC are the closest thing I’ve heard to a personal favourite The Cinematic Orchestra, that is juicy double bass, strong rhythms, a soul jazz vibe and plenty of keyboards, strings, and a fabulous voice. That voice belongs to Dionne Bennett who also writes the lyrics, the compositions are by keyboard player Dave Stapleton and ‘sound design’ and electronics by Deri Roberts, and he’s not a bad designer, the final full timer is drummer Elliot Bennett. The efforts of this foursome are embellished by a string section, brass, guitar, synths and the aforementioned bull fiddle. They make a glorious sound on the eight tracks presented, the style is oft anthemic and the themes are generally straightforward but executed with considerable attention to detail. At the end of the day it’s the sound that takes the biscuit and to use contemporary parlance, it’s epic.