Music That Made Me #14 - Blue Roses - Doubtful Comforts

Here’s a question. If this series - Music That Made Me - is a nostalgic look back at influences and memories then how long does that song or memory have to exist to say with certainty that it has helped form you as a person and is not just a passing fancy?

I think it’s when you can delve back, if only for a few months or a year and feel sentimental about something or know that something changed. It’s when you hear a song now and it triggers faded emotions or feelings and brings them into full-bloodied colour again.

Doubtful Comforts by Blue Roses may only be just over two years old, but it’s a piece of music that pulls at my heartstrings every time I hear it. It triggers visions and feelings of twilight stillness, of a pause in time – a moment of thought. I first heard it at a point in my life where in many ways I had achieved everything that many people want to achieve – successful career, partner, two wonderful children and good friends. But with those achievements comes the dawn of middle age. The loss of parents, the realisation of your own mortality, the recognition of the responsibilities I foster and the implications of those responsibilities all form part of this new dawn. For some people music only holds memories of their youth, the key moments in life coming less often as they get older therefore creating less musical memories, but for me the music of right now is shaping me as much as that of the past - even if sometimes the memories are not as life changing, dramatic or romantic.

Doubtful Comforts is a song that gives breathing space. “You don’t have to carry the weight of it all,” sings Laura Groves, and she’s right. This beautiful song brings back a state of calm in my often hectic and madly busy life. The album from which it comes was my favourite album of that year and two years on I think I can be confident in saying that it’s a record that I will listen to forever – not for a specific memory, but a specific state of mind to be achieved. It’s music that made me and continues to make me.

Blue Roses - Blue Roses - Album of the Year #1

It seems appropriate that on the 1st January 2009 we posted an article here at Breaking More Waves introducing the music of Blue Roses and by December we are naming the same act as our album of the year. Blue Roses has retained a significant presence on our stereo through the whole of 2009 since spring and will do so for many years to come, such is the timeless nature of the recording.

Laura Groves from Shipley, near Bradford, effectively is Blue Roses, although the project has encompassed a variety of other musicians to help her form this wonderfully layered piece. Recorded in living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms and a piano shop after hours, it is an album of sublime musical depth that casts magical soft hued spells on its listener. With a sound that verges from classical piano on Greatest Thoughts to softly spun acoustic guitar on Can’t Sleep, it is a record that in a year that was lazily heralded as that of the synth pop girls, only shares a similarity in the tag that Laura is female. This is not an album of instant pop thrills, it does not contain colourful quirkiness and it certainly isn’t an in-fashion album. It is an album that comes from a very personal perspective, focussing on relationships, experiences and how Laura’s surroundings were linked to them. These themes are carried by Laura’s Kate Bush meets Joanna Newsom choir girl voice and natural organic musicianship.

We have often said that talent doesn’t necessarily concern us. What matters to us if is a song, a record or a performance has an emotional connection in some way. With Blue Roses there is undiluted talent and a huge connection. This album will never grace the top forty, nor will Blue Roses will ever be a household name. It is the antithesis of every X Factor / Britain’s Got Talent TV show that exists, and for that matter Rage Against The Machine as well, and is all the more delightful for it.

The irony of this album being listed as our favourite of the year comes from the Blue Roses website. Here her biography states “Instant praise is neither expected nor sought; Blue Roses is not the stuff of lists, tip offs or hollow press recommendations.” Well, this is certainly no hollow recommendation, although it is at the top of a list, albeit from the ones we have seen, only ours. Blue Roses by Blue Roses is our album of the year. Quite simply an evocative and perfect recording - the sound of beauty.

Blue Roses - Does Anyone Love Me Now ?

After we gushed like someone who had just discovered romance a few days back about the wonderful Blue Roses and their show at Brighton's Prince Albert, Shipley’s finest release a new single on XL Recordings. Does Anyone Love Me Now? is a limited edition 4 track 12” EP which is out around the start of December. The lead song is taken from the debut Blue Roses album and is a simple folkish piece where Laura Groves wraps her nimble fingers around her acoustic guitar and sings of wanting to believe a lovers lies and the disappointment of the relationship. “Two nights in a row I didn’t see the moon hanging in the sky, and I need its cool pale face, to believe in this place and believe your lies,” she sings delicately before adding later “I will just lie in wait, if only to hear the stories, you don’t seem to know how to tell.”

The EP also features a new version of one of Breaking More Waves favourite songs of the year, the hauntingly gorgeous Doubtful Comforts recorded live with the band Grammatics. Whilst the original was untouchably perfect the new version is robust enough and demonstrates the singers vocal off to fine effect. Two further new songs also feature. Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand) is a cover version of the Irma Thomas soul classic. It’s a bold move to attempt such a song, with Laura Groves giving it a strange spectral Christmas-like weirdness, a long way from the tracks on her album. The other song First Frost Night loses a little of the minimal beauty of other Blue Roses tunes being more traditional indie created through the addition of proper drums and a hint of Bat For Lashes meets Clannad foggy mysticism.

Here’s a live session version of the lead track from the single.

Blue Roses @ Brighton Prince Albert

There’s a moment during Blue Roses set at the Prince Albert in Brighton when Laura Groves drops her guitar with a noisy clatter. The phrase ‘you could hear a pin drop it was so quiet’ seems to have been taken to a new level. It is the only point in the show that isn’t utterly graceful and perfect in every way. Blue Roses are really quite extraordinary.

Laura Groves may only just be escaping her teenage years but the music she creates has a significantly mature emotional resonance. Laura plays a mix of gentle plucked acoustic guitar, classical piano and electric guitar arrangements, all sparsely layered with accompanying violin and soft pitter-patter drums. Then there’s her vocal - full of a serene childlike beauty that is underlain with something of a deeper and more powerful tone. It’s the stuff of candlelight, churches, romance and quite possibly what heaven would sound like. It caresses and sonically stimulates the ears with the most tender of embraces. As she sits at the piano, her eyes almost shut, Laura seems utterly immersed in the music, the soaring highs of Greatest Thoughts justifying musical comparisons with Kate Bush. Elsewhere her voice floats and rises effortlessly like a younger sister of Harriet Wheeler from The Sundays or Joanna Newsom. Lyrically however Groves is of a different mettle to the aforementioned Bush. The songs of Blue Roses are very much those of a typical young woman singing of emotions, love, loneliness. There is nothing kooky or odd about the music of Blue Roses. Just raw honest beauty.

Every song played is utterly compelling. The heartfelt torch light gentleness of Doubtful Comforts would in any just society be topping end of the year lists. The closing Moments Before Sleep with its ethereal choral folk and looped guitar sound somehow manages to retain the endearing rarity of many other Blue Roses songs whilst sounding big, broader and more wonderful than life itself. If our gushing of Blue Roses in this live review seems just a little too much, we are not apologising. For there is nothing to apologise for. Stunning.

Wild Beasts + Blue Roses @ Brighton Hanbury Club

On a grey, damp miserable evening in October the vintage décor of patterned wallpaper, lampshades and silver mirrors at Brighton’s The Hanbury Ballroom hosts not one, but two acts, that have each released superlatively unusual and inventive albums this year. If nothing else there’s value for money to be had at only eight pounds fifty a ticket.

Our musical love affair with Blue Roses goes back to 2007 when Laura Groves released her debut single I Am Leaving under her own name. At the time we listed Laura as 'One To Watch' in our annual list on the predecessor to Breaking More Waves. Forward on two years and her self titled debut has found a very special place in our hearts, high in our list of favourites.

Barefooted and in a flowing purple dress Laura and her accompanying violinist take to the stage amongst the usual chattering of an audience waiting for the main band. But as soon as she opens her mouth, the audience is silenced; utterly and completely. We can roll out those clichés – haunting, ethereal, beautiful, mesmerising, and angelic – the music of Blue Roses is all of these things without ever being a cliché itself. From the ghostly footsteps of the thumb piano on Doubtful Comforts to the dull thud of drums and minimalist guitars on Rebecca, every song Blue Roses perform is exquisite. Laura’s voice is the sound of crystal, heavenly high and powerful, the music experimental, emotive and adventurous. We cannot help but put Blue Roses on the same kind of pedestal as Joanna Newsom and Kate Bush with who she shares a certain sonic similarity to. Groves plays piano with an impressive mix of subtle passion, tenderness and classicism on songs such as Greatest Thoughts and I Wish I, whilst on I Am Leaving she conjures nimble wistfulness from her acoustic guitar. Previously we have seen Blue Roses play in record stores and cafes, but with a bigger, potent sound system Laura Groves stacks emotional resonance sky high. Afterwards we hear the woman standing behind us gasp “Wow, absolutely incredible.” We couldn’t have summed it up better ourselves. Can the best gig we have seen this year come from a support act? We think so.

We first saw Wild Beasts a year or two back and found them frustrating. Full of experimental and unstructured camp arch seriousness they were too difficult to love. However the bands so called difficult second album has proved a more engaging affair, without ever being easy. Much of this lack of easiness is because of the vocal histrionics of lead vocalist Hayden Thorpe. The male falsetto has always been one to divide and sometimes conquer. Recently there has been the annoying (Mika), the earnest (Thom Yorke), the childlike (Michael Angelakos) and the haunting (Justin Vernon) to name a few emotions. Thorpe manages to invoke practically all of these moods and more, particularly in the live arena. Luckily however these operatic Sparks like vocal acrobatics are tempered with a deeper more masculine sound, with co vocalist Tom Fleming adding a wider dynamic to the mix with his tenor.

Whilst Thorpe’s Antony and the Johnsons sucking in helium pomp may set the band apart, tonight it is songs such as Two Dancers (i) that pay real results; without any high pitched bluster. Starting as a dramatically mellow funeral tune that grows with elegiac percussion into a heavy lonely groove, it’s the bastard child of a flagellating threesome between The XX. White Lies and U2, but we doubt if any of those bands would include a lyric such as “His hairy hands, his flailing fists, his dancing cock by his knees.” Elsewhere Hooting & Howling is catchy and hooky enough to almost appeal to the mainstream, but for the most part Wild Beasts are still very much a leftfield band, although one gradually moving to the middle. Their set is clever, challenging and deliberately different; the band even apologise at one point for acting like rock stars. It is pleasing to know that after the synth kids have stoned landfill indie to death, guitar bands can still produce something with imagination that holds artistic merit. Wild Beasts produce such music with their mix of non-conformist indie rock courting music hall and groove. It may as yet not be fully captivating live, being occasionally too irregular, inaccessible and clever for its own good, but the band are certainly on their way. Critics seem to love them, and with a little more refining and development, album number three and the accompanying live shows should be corkers.

The Great Escape @ Brighton - Day 1

With not a campsite or drop of mud in sight and over three hundred bands playing in over thirty venues over three days, The Great Escape is the ideal festival for music fans whose idea of a weekend without a shower is absolute hell. Now in its fourth year, the Brighton event goes from strength to strength with punters being able to see a number of established acts as well as a host of up and coming bands around the city, for a fraction of the price of a huge outdoor festival. Inevitably some of the more hotly tipped artists will draw full houses and some people will be left standing in queues if the particular venue is at capacity, but Breaking More Waves encounters none of these problems with the bands it sees. Careful planning is the key word here.

Thursday starts with a busy lunchtime gig at Arc on the seafront. Sporting one of the finest beards in folk music William Fitzsimmons talks about how he has “A terrorist looking face,” which led to detainment at Stansted airport on his arrival to the UK. Seated under a single spotlight, Fitzsimmons brings harshly intimate lyrics and gentle sounding acoustic songs concerning divorce, death and his troubled relationship with his father to a hushed audience. “The only goal I have is to make you feel worse about yourselves than when you arrived,” Fitzsimmons half jokes. With his soft easy on the ear Sufjan Stevens styled vocal ,the overall sound created lacks the deep emotional resonance to achieve this goal no matter how bleak the subject material.

For a contrary musical perspective, a short walk to The Hope finds Vile Imbeciles, who bombard the small crowd with a jerky stumbling freeform frenetic brand of guitar noise and Horrors like goth haircuts, tattered jeans and jackets. It’s an ugly cacophony that disregards melody completely and tries to rape the audience via an uneasy listening experience. Ears bleed. Perversely we like it and don’t bother finding the music doctor or police.

The long mirrors, domed roof lights and bohemian feel of the Red Roaster coffee house is almost the perfect space for acoustic music and Charlie Calleja does a sterling job in bringing his classic singer songwriter style to the small seated audience of about thirty people. With a creamy voice that soars effortlessly and a red wine warmth that calms, his honest songs are the perfect end to that first compilation mix tape for a new girlfriend.

Continuing at the same venue, Dan Mangan is even better. The moment he opens his mouth and huskily croons his way through The Indie Queens Are Waiting, we are smitten. With a roll of throat that could have come from a pirate ship, Mangan is the missing link between Damien Rice and Mumford & Sons. With an admission that he once fell asleep at a Mudhoney concert, Journal Of A Narcoleptic is finely framed and precisely played. To finish, even though the room is half empty Mangan is brave enough to leave the stage area to stand on a piano stool and conduct the audience to sing the simple melody of Robots; “Robots need love too. They want to be loved by you.” Everyone joins in. You know when those in the media like to proclaim that “That was a real moment,” at every opportunity at every festival they cover ? Well this really was one of those moments.

Our love of Laura Groves aka Blue Roses is already well documented on this blog and it appears that this love is not alone, with swelling numbers of punters coming through the door. Blue Roses is virtually perfect in every way, from her choir girl vocal to her complex piano work. Even the moment when she pauses during Coast and someone’s mobile rings seems impeccably timed, although of course it gets a large round of laughter. Doubtful Comforts is the highlight, a ghost walk through loneliness, it’s a song from another time, unique in its music box late night ambience.

Leaving the Red Roaster with a delicious warm and fuzzy feel it is time for a change of mood and instrumentation as The Sallis Benney Theatre plays host to Brighton band Mirrors (pictured), who we first posted about last month here . Mirrors are ostentatiously lofty and uber cool. Brooding ghoulish gothic church music echoes through the room and like a scene from Poltergeist a huge screen at the back crackles into life. We almost expect a small child to cry out “They’re here,” as the band take to the stage. Dressed in matching suits and ties Mirrors line up in front of keyboards and an electronic drum kit, two members stage front, two slightly staggered behind. They stand motionless, arms by their side in darkness except for a flashing strobe fixed to their electronica. Then they start to play, lit only by the colourful abstract films behind them. Their references are Kraftwerk, New Order and most notably OMD in both their sound and look. Artily pretentious, highbrow and executed with perfection it seems amazing that this is a new band, so complete is everything about them. Each year names are touted as the next big thing. Mirrors may just be a little too cool to appeal to the mainstream, and there is a nagging doubt that their obvious pomposity may be their undoing, but their synth laden brand of pop noir may be a good sneaky outside bet for a One To Watch in 2010.

After such a run of highs, the evening finishes with a low. Grasscut are Andrew Phillips an award winning televison film and television composer and Marcus O’Dair who adds additional double bass to their experimental electronic sound. Playing to an ever dwindling audience, one person in the room says “They’re like a rubbish Enigma.” Whilst their work may be more abstract and nerdy than that, he’s not far off.

Day One is done. But rather than trudging through mud to a tent where drunkards will regularly wake us by tripping over our guy ropes all night, Breaking More Waves heads off to a warm inviting bed in a decent hotel and the promise of no queue for a shower in the morning.

Blue Roses - Blue Roses

This week here at Breaking More Waves towers we are going excitably hype crazy. Yesterday we wrote about the best gig we have been to so far this year. Today we feature an album that come year end can almost guarantee itself a place in our Top 10 Albums of the Year list.

Blue Roses self titled debut is the work of one Laura Groves from Shipley, Bradford. It is a cliché to say that an artist shows maturity beyond their years, and in recent times many talented female singers from Laura Marling to Adele have been tagged in this way. It is likely that the music of Blue Roses will also receive such seals of approval, but if it does it will be for a very different type of maturity. Vocally Laura Groves certainly doesn’t sound particularly seasoned. Startling and wonderful yes, but her high reaching voice is more reminiscent of a choir girl than some ageing troubadour. Instead the maturity from Blue Roses emanates from the ethereal classicism of her beautiful music.

The songs of Blue Roses are not instant. They will never light up the pop charts or bother the mainstream. They are delicate and subtle pieces to immerse yourself in. Layered but never over saturated with soft coloured experimentation, they are elegant and involving.

Recorded in living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms of various houses, the album is formed from the basis of complex piano works more reminiscent of Schubert or Debussy, and folkish guitar pieces that dance in the moonlight with Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell. Cover Your Tracks is one such song, a lovely lullaby which features xylophone, a repeated plucked acoustic guitar refrain and soothing vocals from a choir and Fyfe Dangerfield from the Guillemots. Single Doubtful Comforts is a haunting minimal ghost waltz with the distant crackle of old vinyl present. Then there’s Can’t Sleep where Laura sings of the unreachable expectations of love, “Beyond this ceiling’s heaven, is that where we’re aspiring?” she questions. Every song on the album has the same degree of perfectly measured morning mist tranquillity without ever being ‘coffee table music.’

If catchy verse chorus verse pop songs are your only thing, then the music of Blue Roses will not meet your taste. However if you are prepared to listen to something that is a little more ambitious, dreamlike and unique then Blue Roses is an album that you will slowly begin to treasure.

Here is a simple acoustic version of the song I Am Leaving from the album, brought to you by the wonderful bandstand busking people. The album will be released next Monday, 27th April.

Blue Roses @ Brighton Resident Records

Surrounded by Animal Collective, Jeff Buckley and Bon Iver, Laura Groves aka Blue Roses is in good company. Alas this company is only by way of the racked CD’s, which her debut album will shortly join, as she plays a short in-store live set at Resident Records, Brighton. The intimacy of the venue and hushed silence that greets Laura’s performance is enough to make any artist jittery and certainly at the start she appears slightly nervous. However if there are nerves, they surrender as soon as she begins to play, the confidence and beauty of the music taking over. Besides the songs the only sound that can be heard is that of a weary brush, sweeping the street outside. The Council worker in charge of the brush seems to linger by the open shop doorway an unnaturally long time; the sound of Blue Roses may have found another fan.

Blue Roses mix songs between piano and guitar, Laura’s voice wonderfully strong and otherworldly throughout. She sounds like a young Kate Bush or Joanna Newsom. These are not simple pop or folk tunes but deft and often complex pieces of work. The piano based songs in particular owe more in their structure to classical music, inventive and challenging, rising and falling in waves. The guitar songs are slightly simpler, nimbly plucked with a folkish tinge and then layered with her mesmerising voice. “I want to see the electricity, on the masts of the ships, as the storm builds,” she sings poetically on Coast against gentle faultless guitar and backing xylophone accompaniment. Innocently seducing, the music of Blue Roses deserves its place on those record store racks. Based on this performance she is a very unique artist.

Blue Roses - Coast (Live Performance)

Doubtful Comforts the spellbinding single by Blue Roses aka Laura Groves was released last month. It is one of our singles of the year so far and has lead to high expectations for the album that will follow. From the tracks we have heard, the record will be a jewellery box of delights, something to really treasure.

A few weeks ago Laura shot some live performances of songs that will be found on the album. Recorded in various locations around her home town of Shipley, these songs are being uploaded to the Blue Roses Myspace over the next few weeks. The first of these performances is the song Coast which was recorded at Shipley Harmonium Museum. Originally featured on the Something I Learned Today compilation, released a couple of years back on Dance To The Radio, Coast features sky kissing choir girl vocals and acoustic guitar subtly backed by xylophone and violin. If you like this keep checking the Blue Roses Myspace for further instalments.

Blue Roses - Doubtful Comforts

The words haunting and ethereal are often over used when describing music, but that is exactly what the debut single by Blue Roses, entitled Doubtful Comforts is. Blue Roses is one Laura Groves, from Bradford and she has previously released a single under her own name entitled I Am Leaving. You can read the background to her on a previous blog here. Doubtful Comforts was released yesterday through XL Recordings on 7” vinyl, but you can also download a free copy of the song for a limited time if you subscribe to the Blue Roses mailing list.

Doubtful Comforts is a sparsely minimal and tender song with an atmosphere of magical tranquillity to it. With a softly sung choir girl vocal and music box ghostliness, its closest cousins are Bjork when she’s not messing around with beats and noise or the elfin wonderment of Joanna Newsom. It’s a song to be played in the dark of night when all is still, with Laura capturing your heart as she sings “When you come home tonight my love, will you take me out somewhere, you’re so good at getting my hopes up where they don’t belong, I can’t reach them.” It is so bewitching, so perfect in its composure that it is Breaking More Waves single of the year so far.

Blue Roses - New Waves @ Breaking More Waves

At the back end of 2007 our One’s To Watch for 2008 list featured an artist from Bradford, UK called Laura Groves. Just over a year later and still Laura remains very much an unknown. With just one single, I Am Leaving released independently on Salvia on 7” vinyl, a finger appears to have been placed over her lips with no further releases in 2008.

The reality is that Laura has been slowly building an album under her new identity Blue Roses, notching a support slot with Emmy The Great, appearing on Jeremy Warmsley’s Welcome To Our TV Show and busking on a windswept bandstand. Laura feels that she is in a different place musically to where she started out, so it was appropriate to become something new and hence the name change to Blue Roses. Her album, which was recorded in the relaxed comfort of her producers house rather than a traditional studio is now due for release this year.

Laura has explained that whilst her current live shows are simple sparse affairs with just acoustic guitar and violin accompaniment, the Blue Roses album will be a much more layered multi instrumental affair. A while ago she posted up the first fruits of the album recording sessions on her Myspace page and they bode well for a curious, warm and haunting listen. There is the ghostly waltz of Doubtful Comforts and the intimate choir girl folk of Does Anyone Love Me Now, both songs easily surpassing her previous work. The vinyl crackles and melancholy of Doubtful Comforts in particular shows a new found maturity both vocally and in mood and texture. Breaking More Waves hopes that there will be more of this to follow.

Until further new material emerges, here is the fuzzy felt and wool video for Laura’s debut single I Am Leaving which will feature in a different form on the album. The song sounds like a silver tap, dripping essence of Joanna Newsome and Alessi’s Ark, captured in a tiny perfectly formed glass potion bottle.

Dismiss Blue Roses as just another girl with an acoustic guitar at your peril, for there is magic in that bottle.