Tuesday 9 September 2014

Kacy Hill - New Waves


If like us you sometimes like to read the blurb about an artist before you press play (and you're reading this so we assume you do), your mindset has probably already been prejudiced before you listen. Here was the thought process we went through with Kacy Hill before our ears did the work on her debut track Experience:

Good Points

1. We’ve seen her described as ethereal. We know it's a word that music journos and bloggers like to use a lot, but generally we like ethereal stuff. So we’re off to a good start.

2. She has freckles. Yes we know this has nothing to do with the music, but then pop music has never just been about the music. Anyway, has anyone proved there isn’t a direct correlation between good music and freckles? No, exactly – so until there’s scientific justification disproving our theory, this might actually be a valid reason for thinking that Kacy might be good. 

3. She has the initial K. This is very good. Why? Because we have a weird warped thing for artists with names beginning with K and L – it’s utterly illogical – there’s probably some deeply disturbing psychological reason for it, but we’d prefer not to analyse that, the results might scare us. 

4. She’s described her song as being ‘inspired by the intricacies of being human and our ability to think into detail and absorb meaning behind subconscious and conscious action,’ which sounds a bit pretentious, but we want our pop stars to be pretentious. After all who wants a pop star describing their song as ‘inspired by working in the supermarket and painting my dining room magnolia at the weekend.’ 

5. Experience has been compared by others to Broods and FKA Twigs, which sounds interesting.

Bad Points

1. There’s some PR blurb floating around about how she got into writing music accidentally, which is a bit like saying you started cooking some spaghetti bolognaise accidentally. Eg: It's a load of old bollocks.

2. The song was produced by Jaylien Wesley. This strikes fear into our hearts as Jaylien co-wrote Scream and Shout by Will.I.Am and Britney, a song that is a tragic crime against pop. (Sorry Britney if you’re reading this, you’ve done a few classics, but this wasn’t one of them.)

Somewhere In Between Points

1. She’s already been an underwear model, which means the internet is awash with pictures of her butt cheeks. We’re not really sure if we want to see pictures of pop star’s butt cheeks, but we guess that’s ‘the modern way’ (and we say that with a slightly forlorn sigh).

2. She’s also been a dancer – on Kanye’s Yeezus tour. 

Then we listened

We pressed play and didn’t worry about the spaghetti bolognaise or Will.I.Am anymore – because this is a slightly leftfield, slightly minimalistic electronic pop song, that certainly sits close to the FKA Twigs school of oddness, although perhaps lacking some of the warped sophistication and possessing none of the eroticism of Tahliah Barnett’s work. There’s more artiness to this song and its accompanying video than we might have expected (a good thing) and the more it's played, the more compelling it becomes. We're not sure if this is just a side project before Kacy gets back into modelling, but if there's more to come, but we'll be listening with interest.

Kacy Hill - Experience (Video)



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

A discussion on your twitter with Basement Fever sent me here.

I came here to comment on how writing about freckles and butt cheeks wasn't relevant and a bit pervy (following Basement Fever's comments) but now having read the blog post I understand where you're coming from. You even say that freckles aren't relevant but are being honest about your weird prejudices.

Scryst said...

I think that debate on Twitter today was a little unfair. Your tweet about Honeyblood may have been open to being interpreted in different ways but the guy was a douche for not accepting the explanation and banging on about it. Ironically if you look at his twitter he has tweets describing a new video that says "contains four hot male bods," so he can't really talk as he judges music by physical appearance.

Breaking More Waves Blog said...

Thanks for the comments.

Glad to see that some people get where I'm coming from.

At the end of the day Jake from Basement Fever has formed a view through reading a few tweets and I now get why the Honeyblood tweet could be seen as being gross - I was just sad that he didn't accept my explanation - it was genuinely not about the physical appearance of the band. Ironically I asked my girlfriend after the gig for a one word review of Honeyblood and she said 'hot' which was why I then tweeted what I tweeted! Anyway, the discussion on twitter today at least gave food for thought for me - namely always try and think how others may interpret your tweets before you tweet them!