We’re always suckers for a band with an interesting name here at Send Me Your Ears, so when the opportunity to review Rev. Dave and The Sin Eaters latest single, The Old 302, we jumped at the chance!
The moment the song started we all nodded. It sounded exactly like we expected it to. And that’s not a bad thing at all – that just means that the band have absolutely nailed it with their name.
The Old 302 is a simple country song with a comfortable chord sequence and perfect-for-the-genre instrumentation. It feels like something that you might hear on the juke box in the corner of a dive bar while Dan and Roseanne Connor are shooting pool in the corner.
Lead vocalist, Dave Peddle, carries the track with his warm, low Johnny Cash/ Roy Orbison style vocals. We noticed some moments where the vocal felt a touch of Crash Test Dummies as well. We loved the harmonies in the choruses. These kinds of touches really bring a track like this to life.
As expected, there’s a gorgeous country picked guitar solo which then merges into a lovely fiddle solo. Both are exactly what this song needed. The breakdown after the solos leads into an almost spoken word section that then blasts back into that lovely simplified train rhythm with brushes on the snare.
This is a well crafted mix of instruments. The double bass sits nicely and is well balanced. If you focus in on it, it’s clearly there, but it’s not dominating as bass sometimes can in this style of music.
Overall feeling just a little like perhaps Devil Makes Three, this is a fun sounding song with a sombre subject matter of lives lost on the railway in western Newfoundland and Labrador.
Production-wise, there is not much that could be done to this track; it already sounds pretty good. A boost in the top 3 octaves would add some brightness to the track as a whole and really crisp up the snare which carries the song so perfectly. This could result in increased sibilance in the vocal track so a slight dip back down around 7-8kHz would be a good idea too. From a compositional perspective, we’d have liked to have seen a different instrument added to differentiate between the first and second verse, but the song as it stands is just great and these are tiny suggestions that we hope help.
The Old 302 is the first single from the band’s upcoming new album “Beams of Love” and we honestly can’t wait to get our ears around some more from this great Newfoundland band.