Zervas And Pepper
Album: Lifebringer
Label: Zerodeo
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.zervasandpepper.com

This duo (and their back up team) do a great job of grabbing your interest as soon as possible with an intense barrage of sounds from the rocky guitars to the delicate harmonious voice of Zervas during the opening track of 'Buffalo Crow'.

Pepper takes the vocal reigns for the second track and gives us a similar style of singing with a lovely little song titled 'Living in a Small Town'. I've found it difficult to find the right words to describe this album, they are self proclaimed as Folk Rock in genre but to me it seems more of a style of its own.

The songs are all well written and do an excellent job of changing musical arrangements throughout the songs to avoid becoming too dull at any particular moment. Vocals and guitars make up the fore front of their music but there is an extremely large variety of back up instruments and sound that work like adding that dab of salt when cooking, enough to add more flavour but not over powering to the main taste.

It is nice that Zervas and Pepper swap as vocalist every song, it paints us a picture of a two stories running alongside each other rather than with each other, which normally I would be sceptical of but it really seems to work for these two!

What is particularly nice are the songs such as 'Water Meets Fire' where they both sing together as a duet. To hear the two vocalists separate and them hear them together is nice development through the album, as though the first four tracks were building up to that first duet.

A lovely album, the popularity of this duo speaks for itself and hopefully much more will come from them in the years to come

Paul Rawcliffe