Henry Zhang - Wavelengths

Hear The Track Here

If there is one thing that gladdens the chilly little boulder I laughingly call a heart, it's the sight of new blood. Yummy, dinnertime! Say hello to the UK's Henry Zhang, an 19 year old musician who - apparently - has been playing guitar for two years and piano for four, he's into alternative rock and that's about all the information I can scrape together. Funnily enough, he's been on Soundclick since 2005 but I've never encountered him and having Rey Varela and Wray is a telling sign because both of these excellent musicians moved on after Soundclick's kinda/sorta Golden Age, and haven't been seen since although I know they are both still active. Anyhow, maybe all those years he was learning how to please us eh?

Only one way to tell...

Although I guess its structure is based in rock, Wavelengths is actually an acoustic track; a geezer, his guitar and voice and no, it might sound like a folkie but t'ain't so ya varmints. Kinda reminds me a tad of Thomas J Marchant (at least in approach) but that may be the fault of the extremely lo-fi recording. I say a guy and his voice but, unless I'm mistaken, there is an element of vocal double tracking or electronic jiggery-pokery and - to be honest - it doesn't actually sound that good. Mind you, it's obvious that Henry is incredibly short staffed in the production department, and that may well tell against him in this super-duper, glitzy electronic world of ours where anyone can mix like the masters.

One the other hand, if I was looking at this as a purely 'song demo' thing, then that would be a different story. If I were nineteen again, not that I would wish it on my worst enemy (Ed: why are you looking at me like that?), and a, no doubt spotty, composer of this song, I'd be happy enough no matter what anyone said. After all, being young means that you have lots of time to learn and judging by the song and its content, all Henry Zhang really needs to do is up his production game (spotting tuning/timing errors as well as making it sound good). I'd suggest he listen to said Thomas J Marchant as an example of the competition he faces, and Henry, Thomas was my Artist Of The Year 2008 but it wasn't always so. He sounded a lot like you when he started acoustically.

Uneven, but interesting song.