EP Review: Simon Taylor - Survival

When Adele collected her third BRIT Award of the night recently, she made a comment on the music industry of today. “I’m very proud of myself for sticking to my guns,” she said, “and putting out an album that was about something so personal to me because not many people do stuff like that anymore”.

Her words, spoken at the BRITs the night before I started to write this review, came to mind the very first time I heard Simon Taylor’s latest EP, Survival.

The very name itself gives away the theme. Survival tells us all we need to know about his headspace when writing the tracks.

The opening song, the eponymous Survival, is raw and mellow. This is followed by the more optimistically-named Bad Times are Through. The EP is not a self-indulgent, melancholic sob-fest. It is emotional, yet positive, and the third track, Our Crazy Dream, is a breath of fresh air. The collection is contemplative and very much on the softer side of soft rock.

Going Home, the final track of the bunch, is a sedate ode to his roots, laid bare with a sultry acoustic guitar and not much else.

You may recognise Newcastle-based Simon Taylor from his work with Simon Taylor and the Sundowners, a latin/funk six piece formed in 2012 that was well known on the North-east festival scene. Yet Survival EP is all his own and clearly a very personal collection.

Taylor’s Spotify bio goes as far as describing the album as being “mental health themed”. When your mind starts working against you, there is nothing more scary than putting your pain out there on display for the general public to see. That is why I’d echo Adele’s words that ‘not many people do stuff like that anymore’ and that is why Survival should be applauded as an honest, poetic addition to the post-pandemic soft rock scene.

Words: Bethany Lodge