Ben Fox Smith hit on a great sound early in life with Stony Sleep’s Music for Chameleons and has since spent his music career bounding from mood to mood, vibe to vibe, yet still managing to sound like himself, even when exploring forms that fall outside conventional categories. His profile has been consistently developing for a while now and his new soon-to-be released album shows the coherent leitmotif structure of his music overall despite its great diversity of harmonic manipulations. Smith’s bands (Stony Sleep, Serafin, First, Young Sawbones) have appealed to a great variety of fans: hard rock enthusiasts, classic rock lovers and jam band buffs.

And while his new album, Taciturn Lanzerac, has much to offer the non-musician listener, for musicians it is a great example of how to remain musically flexible but within the framework of a coherent band sound. It is no mean accomplishment to attain this level of tonal variety in an album where it is difficult to separate the individual songs from their overall context: elements of each song’s principal mood find their way into each other even when, on occasion, Smith pulls out blustery, even wild sounds if appropriate. Smith continues to bring new resonances to the alternative rock score, both via evolving styles and via influences that had not previously made their way into his techniques.

https://soundcloud.com/youngsawbones/ysb-you-do-then-you-dont-skp-1013-mstr-cmp-bnce/s-XRzoj