A dynamic piece of acoustic rock and pop folk, ‘Foundations’ is a rich and dazzling ballad that’s energetic, emotionally charged, stirring, and quite beautifully structured and performed.
James Haynes is a singer and songwriter from the English town of Bournemouth, he has a deeply impressive voice that’s akin to a gentle marriage between Kurt Cobain and Jeff Buckley’s voices. Caramel smooth, but with an unmissable grittiness that gives his vocals a certain gravity, James Haynes’s ‘Foundations’ revolves around his vocals and his acrobatic control over it.
The singing on ‘Foundations’ isn’t particularly twisty, but there can be no denying that the melodies are challenging and twisty enough to showcase stellar vocal chops. Moreover, Haynes’s guitar goes all the way from gentle, fingerpicked arpeggios, to intensely impassioned strums, and nearly everywhere in between. The song boasts of a delightfully roomy sound that beautifully displays the earthy acoustic, solid beats, juicy bass tone, and dirty overdrive on the electric rhythm guitar.
All in All, ‘Foundations’ is a touching piece of music that has folk, pop, and rock all written right into its DNA. Expansive and dynamic, James Haynes’s songwriting is on a beautiful display on ‘Foundations’, with its gradual shifts from the subdued folk to explosive rock, and its not-so-gradual ones as well.
