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Visit Spotify and look up \u201cNever2Late\u201d and you\u2019ll come up against a challenge. Not counting artist names in which there are spaces between the words, and not including variants like Never2Late2Sing, Never 2 Late Crew and Mr. Never 2 Late, you\u2019re still faced with no less than five musical acts calling themselves Never2Late. This artist is one of those.<\/p>\n
The music for review didn\u2019t come with a one-sheet, so it was left to me to do a bit of digging to glean background information. Incongruously, a site focusing on orthopaedic products (!?) provided my first clue: Never2Late features guitarist and singer Steve Bollen. Dr. Bollen is a sports surgeon in Bradford, Yorkshire with more than 16,000 operations to his credit. The other core member is also called Steve; the group has been around for a decade or so, and got its start as do most bands: playing covers.<\/p>\n
More relevant to this review, however, is the fact that Never2Late have released a 2015 album, It\u2019s Hell in Happy Town<\/i>, as well as EPs in 2018, 202 and 2022. A quick survey of the group\u2019s previous releases is highlighted by \u201cYou\u2019re My Rock,\u201d a melodic and catchy midtempo original included on the 202 EP, New Beginnings.<\/p>\n
And now comes \u201cLove is Wise,\u201d a single released in late October. A rock-solid drum figure and some nicely crunchy guitar work introduce the tune. The lyrics explores questions about why humanity fights \u201cfor a piece of land,\u201d a question of particular resonance against the backdrop of current event in the Middle East and Eastern Europe (but with timeless relevance). \u201cPolitics and religion have a lot to answer for,\u201d the song wisely observes.<\/p>\n
Spotlighting a problem without offering some sort of solution isn\u2019t a a particularly productive strategy, and Never2Late understand this. Their solution to the problem is a simple and straightforward one: love. A found-sound spoken-word midsection works well on this studio recording; it remains to be seen how that bit would be executed live onstage.<\/p>\n
Classic rock arrangement values are wrapped around this tune, placing the guardedly hopeful lyric in the context of an accessible melody. Nice stuff that invites further investigation of this group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Visit Spotify and look up \u201cNever2Late\u201d and you\u2019ll come up against a challenge. Not counting artist names in which there are spaces between the words, and not including variants like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26436,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,49,62,65],"tags":[5278],"class_list":["post-26435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-indie","category-new-release","category-rawk","category-review","tag-never2late","cat-39-id","cat-49-id","cat-62-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26437,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26435\/revisions\/26437"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}