Embers - Sins Unknown

This week, in what is our most read and most retweeted post from the last two months we ranted a little against buzz blogs. We define buzz blogs as those that with lightening quick efficiency copy and paste HTML code of the latest MP3’s, You Tube streams or press releases as soon as they come out with no other context and very little quality control. Their sole aim is to drive traffic to their blog and you get no sense of either the taste or character of the person. Often the bands or artists they post will be the latest act to be getting attention on the internet hence the name buzz blog - because that will help drive more traffic to their sites.

But let’s be slightly contradictory here. Our dissatisfaction with this type of blog doesn’t necessarily extend to those who put music up on their blogs the day it appears on the internet. Of course the best music takes time to bed in, lasting well beyond this year’s next big thing / sound of year xx status, but to dismiss the thrill of pressing play, hearing something fresh and it slapping you so joyously hard in the face that you want to listen to it again and again is to dismiss everything that is great about pop. Not all music has to be analytically broken down and intellectually rationalised as to why it’s good or bad – sometimes music is just astounding from the off and the future will take care of itself somehow.

Last November we said something similar about a new band called Embers from Manchester who dropped some demos into our in box that not only slapped us in the face, but punched us so hard all over that we had no choice but to write about them there and then. We said at the time of the demos ‘Someone put this lot in a massive studio and give them the production and recording weight they deserve please.’ Now that time has come. The band has delivered two monstrous tunes that premiered earlier today on This Is Fake DIY.

Sins Unknown is a dense and devastating piece of post-apocalyptic indie rock – the sound of Thor shitting on you with lightning bolts. Tunnel Vision (one of the original demos we streamed) is even more cataclysmic – like early Embrace throwing their music through a speaker stack made out of thousands of shards of broken glass. As Neil Diamond once said ‘It’s a beautiful noise.’

So even though these songs have only been online a few hours, we’re putting Sins Unknown on Breaking More Waves. If you think that’s buzz blogging, well that’s fine with us - it's just a label and doesn't fit with our full definition. We’re not doing it for hits (which are nice for the band because they get their music heard more, but rewards us absolutely zero) or being cool (which is transient) or because Embers are a band getting lots of attention on the internet (they have had some attention from a number of our UK blog peer group but that has no influence on our choice to post) or being able to say we got there first (although we believe in some respects it is important to post stuff early if a blog defines itself as a new music blog – that’s why readers come to you to a certain extent – posting them next April would be pointless unless there was something else to say about them at that point) but because we want you to hear these songs and for once today we have some spare time to write this post. Now why don’t you click that arrow below?

Tunnel Vision and Sins Unknown will be available as a limited edition vinyl release on 24th September together with a digital download code.

Embers - Sins Unknown