Today Pale Waves release their debut album My Mind Makes Noises. I think there's been enough talk about the band now and they've played enough live gigs for everyone to see the arguments both good and bad about what they do. However, whatever you think about them, they’re doing something right. Hype only lasts for a very short time - people see through it if the artist doesn't deliver and Pale Waves continue to play increasingly larger shows with an ever more energetic, enraptured and youthful audience. The first time I saw them their crowd was a mainly unresponsive bunch of guys in a small pub. The last time it was a big bouncing gang of mainly young people losing their sh*t to every song. The whole thing felt rather glorious. After just three plays through the album, here’s a tune that has already cemented itself as one of my favourite tracks from the record. Eighteen, Kiss and There’s A Honey are all glorious (if rather similar) pop but Red is as good as any of those. It is, to use a well-worn term, a banger. It’s the sort of tune I’d have really liked Taylor Swift to have made after the 1989 album rather than the bloated Reputation LP. But then of course Taylor already has an album called Red, so she’s been there done that. It will be interesting to see how the critics respond to the record - I'm predicting a mixed response with younger writers favouring it over older ones. Red is another obsessive relationship song. This seems to be what Pale Waves do; singing about the make-ups, the break-ups and the bits in between, before and after. It's the stuff of simple attraction that their young audience can relate to. “You haven’t left my mind, trust me that that I’ve tried and I’ve tried, I’ve tried.” Yet it seems that Heather really doesn’t know that much about the other person, except that Red is their favourite colour. Well, I guess it’s one criteria to make a judgement about someone. Unless of course, you’re like me and don’t have a favourite – it all depends on how the colours are used. This one is on Soundcloud - it seems (for the moment) the band haven't restricted it to just Soundcloud Go users, bucking the trend for most major label acts. Take a listen below. Pale Waves are doing a Twitter listening party tonight at 9pm, whatever that involves. Probably lots of people just tweeting 'I love U', but if that sounds like your bag join in and get tweeting. Maybe tell them what your favourite colour is? Pale Waves - Red
Yes yes. I know all the arguments against Pale Waves. To a certain extent I agree with them. Their songs all sound the same. Their songs all sound the same. Their songs all sound the same. Their songs all sound the same. Their songs all sound the same. Their songs all sound the same. And then there’s the argument that people only like them because of their indie goth pop look. Which I don’t agree with. Having seen a hyped-up energetic crowd bouncing up and down and singing along to every word of every song the band played at Heaven, London recently, it certainly didn’t feel like a gig where people were only there because of the bands style. They were fully invested in the music. People might buy into or identify with the look, but only if they’re passionate about the songs first and foremost. And what a gig Heaven was. With a light show that screamed ‘we want to make this look as amazing as we can in a small venue' and with Heather becoming a rather excellent front woman (especially when she put down her guitar and pulled some shapes) it was a watershed moment for Pale Waves. At that point it left me feeling right here, right now, they’re unstoppable. Whatever the arguments against them. Today the band continue their upward trajectory with a new video. Accusations that Heather is actually the daughter of Robert Smith won’t be helped here. It’s undeniable that the guitars in this tune could quite easily be taken from one of Fat Bob and the Goths poppier moments. And Heather’s got the oddball eye rolls and jerky quirky hand movements down to an art form. The fact that the song is called Kiss – virtually the same title as one of The Cure’s songs (which incidentally features one of my favourite opening lyrics of any album: “Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, your tongue is like poison, so swollen it fills up my mouth.”) doesn’t help either. So as much I want to throw the ‘all their songs sound the same’ argument into the ring, there’s something about this track (namely those similarities to one of my favourite bands) and Pale Waves’ confidence and energy that keeps me locked in. Pale Waves - Kiss (Video)
Whilst some questions remain of the Pale Waves sound and if it is going to provide enough long-term variety to keep everyone hooked in, for now the buzz they’re creating continues to propel them forward. Despite not varying far from previous tunes in terms of melody or style, Heavenly, the best track from their All The Things I Never Said EP and one of the first songs the band ever wrote, still manages to be a mini indie-pop thrill that gets inside the head, beaming with a glossy mix of 80’s indie pop, energy and modern production. Today Pale Waves released a new video for the song and its their most stylish piece to date. It features lead singer Heather Baron-Gracie in a set of minimalist coloured futuristic visuals and casts her as some sort of latex clad dancing marionette. It reminds me a little of Edward Scissorhands being trapped in Clive Barker's Hellraiser film as she is trapped by the wires. Pale Waves - Heavenly (Video)
With the 2018 Breaking More Waves Ones to Watch posts now complete, I’m wrapping things up with the full list of 10 artists selected and an accompanying spotify playlist which you can find by clicking here or stream below. It has one song from each of the acts selected. Whilst posting about these artists I’ve had a couple of comments made from readers about balance and how the selections were all mainly female and I’d just like to address this. First, so what? It’s the music that I'm concerned about not the artists sex. Secondly that statement is actually incorrect. Yes, 9 of the 10 artists I have selected have a female vocalist (when I introduced the posts here I noted that because of my tastes, the list wouldn’t be balanced in that way) but there were 31 musicians of which 16 were male and 15 were female. So in terms of that demographic the list was pretty much balanced - although this was more from luck than any judgement. Thank you to everyone who engaged with these posts this year. Whilst Breaking More Waves is written mainly for my own entertainment, the Ones to Watch posts are very much for others. Amongst my (real life) friend group some of my friends, who know I'm obsessed with music will often ask me ‘what are the latest new acts we should be listening out for then?’ My Ones to Watch list is essentially my online response to that real-life question. Here’s a summary of the 10 artists chosen and a playlist featuring 1 song by each act. 1.Sigrid 2.Jade Bird 3.Superorganism 4.The Blinders 5.Pale Waves 6.Grace Carter 7.Off Bloom 8.Confidence Man 9.Pink Kink 10.Maisie Peters I'll be updating the Breaking More Waves monthly playlist at the end of this month as per usual, but it won't include the Ones to Watch posts only the other new music that I have uploaded in November. If you want to follow the monthly Breaking More Waves playlist you can find that by clicking on this link.
Pale Waves might have come to prominence at the start of 2017 with the ultra-hooky There’s A Honey but the band's origins date back as far as 2014 when they were operating under the name Creek before changing to their current moniker in 2015 and being picked up by a handful of early adopter blogs. Much has been made of the involvement of Matt Healey of The 1975 in the development of Pale Waves, although he has been at pains to point out recently that whilst he has helped with the production and editing of the songs, he’s not some sort of svengali. The songs were already there before his involvement and even in 2015 early reviews were making comparisons of the Pale Waves sound to The 1975, as well as the likes of Peace and Swim Deep. Pale Waves deal in accessible indie pop anthems with chiming guitars and rousing choruses, but the emphasis is on the pop here; lead singer Heather Baron-Gracie not only has the looks of Robert Smith of The Cure’s daughter but her band take the same path as the more upbeat end of the goth-pop masters music. Just don’t expect and Disintegration or Pornography bleakness quite yet. With three songs out there in the world, the aforementioned There’s A Honey, TelevisionRomance which sounds to all intents and purposes like There’s A Honey and recent release New Year’s Eve, a two months supporting The 1975 in huge US venues, their own headline tour of the pubs and clubs of the UK and a forthcoming US headline shows Pale Waves are carefully stepping upwards, maybe not towards global domination, but at least to a point where they have enough of a fan base to release an album to. Pale Waves - Television Romance (Video)
There were a few questions asked of Manchester’s Pale Waves in these quarters at least when their second release Television Romance sounded like a copycat version of their rather brilliant and hooky debut There’s A Honey. Add in a slightly stilted and samey debut London headline gig and I was beginning to question if the indie-buzz in the UK around the band was really justified. Thankfully the third song out of the bag, New Year’s Eve gives more hope. Sure, it’s not radically different from the other two and there’s still the nagging suspicion that lead singer Heather’s vocal delivery might become a bit tiresome over a whole album, but New Year’s Eve is undeniably catchy, from its chilled ambient beginning through to the 80’s jam-pop funkiness which sounds not that dissimilar to Breaking More Waves favourites Fickle Friends. The music is certainly upbeat and confident, but it’s not that way lyrically on the song: “I don’t want to be alone on New Year’s Eve, do you even wanna be with me?” sings Heather doubtfully. A sad fact for you all – whilst Heather is worrying about New Year’s Eve studies show that for a lot of people New Year’s Day is even worse – and I don’t just mean because of bad hangovers. In the UK December 31st has one of the lowest suicide rates of the year, whilst January 1st is the day with the highest rate. There’s a suggestion that this is because of the ‘broken promises effect’, when hopes of a new beginning are not met. New Year’s Eve is the first track to come from Pale Waves forthcoming debut EP, released in early 2018 on Dirty Hit. Pale Waves - New Year's Eve
If you were to eat a piece of cake and the first slice tasted delicious you’d probably be tempted to have another. But would that second slice be more enjoyable, less enjoyable or about the same? And if you enjoyed it just as much, would you eat another slice and then keep going, slice after slice until you had eaten the whole cake? It’s a bit like that with the new Pale Waves song Television Romance for me. I really liked their previous tune There’s A Honey; it was an extremely hooky piece of indie pop. But.....Television Romance sounds an awful lot like that, particularly the chorus where you can virtually sing the chorus of There's A Honey over the top of the song and it doesn't sound wrong. So in theory I should like this just as much. But it's a dilemma. Because is that second slice really as good as the first? If I'd eaten the second slice without tasting the first it would have definitely been superb. What I'm trying to say (badly) is that our tastes and perceptions of music are affected by what has gone before. It's not quite as simple as just listening to every song in isolation. Let's continue this idea forward. What if the band released a whole album of songs that sounded very similar? Would I like that? Probably not. For me it's why a band like Oasis became ever less exciting with every album and why David Bowie always kept my attention. If music is the food of love, give me excess of it, but make sure that it continues to interest me, challenge me and take me to new and exciting places, otherwise eventually the appetite will die. So that’s a thumbs up for Television Romance,it is ultimately a good song (and yes, like the previous tune it sounds a lot like The 1975 version 2.0 / rebranded), but there’s going to have to be more variety in the future to keep me engrossed. Pale Waves - Television Romance
As a new band having the patronage of another successful group can have the possibility of being a double-edged sword. On the plus-side it can get you a lot of attention quickly, but on the negative if you can’t develop your own identity and fan base you’re likely to always be subordinate to the group who helped champion you in the first place. Only time will tell if the association with The 1975 (which I wrote about in my introducing piece on the band back in February) will cause Manchester’s Pale Waves a problem in the longer term, but ultimately it will probably come down to their creative output. With only the one official song out there (ignoring the earlier demos under previous guises) it’s impossible to judge, but I stand by my previous statement that There’s A Honey is a piece of radiant pop that will make your day all the more better. Now with a video for the song it’s possible to get a bit of the band’s visual aesthetic and here they seem to be forging their own ground, sitting somewhere between The Cure and The XX with their dark goth look. The video itself is a simple performance piece which is given a slight feeling of claustrophobia (again very Cure-esque) by the band playing under some sheets of air supported fabric. Pale Waves - There's A Honey (Video)
Pop music’s a funny old thing, isn’t it? Or at least pop music is a funny old thing when it comes down to defining yourself by the bands that really mean something to you and those that don’t. Take The 1975. They’re a band that seem to mean an awful lot to an increasingly large number of people. They’re an oddity; as a group, they inspire the same sort of obsessive fan base that the likes of Bieber or pre-split Take That had and yet they also have the seal of approval of many critics, music bloggers and the like. Their pretentiously titled (and for the record, I don’t use the word pretentious as a criticism, I love pretentiousness in pop music, otherwise it would be boring) second album I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It was a commercial big hitter and found its way onto the Mercury Prize list. They sell out arena sized shows and get very good reviews for them. In an age when new bands are struggling to assert themselves over the deluge of solo artists, The 1975 are succeeding. Yet they really don’t mean anything to me. They’re one of those acts that I just don’t get. Every music fan has a few of these. I’ve never really got Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin or more recently Rihanna. It’s not that I dislike any of these artists, they’re just a bit ‘shoulder shrug’ to me. I’ve even seen The 1975 live in the hope of understanding why people adore them, but they didn’t connect. Sure, Love Me, The Sound and Chocolate are all very good radio-friendly if somewhat unoriginal singles, but they don’t grab me in the heart as they clearly do for many. For me their latest album, whilst having moments of some interest, is way too long and becomes a snoozefest by the end. And although it doesn’t have anything to do with the music, I do find Matt Healy a tad annoying – although to be fair the lad does seem to realise it himself: “I’m surprised no one has ever punched me in the face,” he said once. "I am a bit of a knob," he told the Guardian in an interview last year. So, when a couple of days ago I heard a new song that sounded remarkably like The 1975 with a female singer the alarm bells began to ring. Why? Because, I discovered that the track was produced by Matt Healy and George Daniel from the band. By rights I shouldn’t like it. But I did. More than that, I loved it. Maybe The 1975 were finally going to win me over, but from an alternative route than their own music. The group in question is Manchester reverb and glitter indie-pop quartet Pale Waves, who are Heather Baron-Gracie (vocals, guitar), Ciara Doran (drums), Hugo Silvani (guitar) and Charlie Wood (bass). They've been around for some time now, first under the name Creek before changing to their current moniker, with tracks like Heavenly, The Tide, Dangerous and Lust picking up some traction on blogs from as far back as 2014. Since that time, they’ve signed with Dirty Hit records (home of The 1975 and The Japanese House) deleted those old songs and this week release There’s A Honey as their first official single. It is 100% catchy. Once you’ve heard the “I would give you my body, but am I sure that you want me?” line once it will be lodged in your head all day. A piece of radiant pop that will make your day all the more better. Pale Waves - There's A Honey
