(Modern Electric Blues) Oli Brown - 3 Albums - 2008 - 2012, MP3, 320 kbps

Oli Brown, 22, is a guitar-playing, singing, song-writing, band-leading prodigy from Sco Ruston, Norfolk who has arrived on this veterans’ circuit like a baby tornado. He has the looks — and for a while the emo haircut — of a typical suburban rock kid. But he has the blazing guitar technique and throaty vocal style of a man steeped in the musical heritage of a much older generation. Suddenly the blues is starting to look hip and, whisper it, a little bit sexy again.
Brown and his band won two trophies at the British Blues Awards in 2010 and scooped up another three prizes at this year’s event, including the coveted Best Album award for “Heads I Win Tails You Lose”, Brown’s second album, released last year on the German label Ruf Records. The award which meant most to him, however, was Vocalist of the Year. “I love playing the guitar and I’m very proud of the way it has developed, but learning to sing was much harder work,” Brown says. “That for me is my proudest achievement.”
Brown found the blues through his father’s record collection. His earliest memory of hearing this melancholy music was Albert Collins’s classic slow blues “If Trouble Was Money”. “I never took much of an interest in music until I started playing the guitar,” Brown says. “And I never associated rap or modern pop music with serious guitar playing. So I listened to the music I was playing and that led me quite naturally into the blues.” His teenage mates were mostly budding musicians and they all introduced each other to different sorts of music. “No one thought I was weird for liking the blues,” Brown insists.
Brown is certainly no blues purist or revivalist, more a singer-songwriter building on a blues-rock platform. But his virtuoso technique and general approach to his craft is more traditional than acts such as the Black Keys or the White Stripes, both of whom he admires.