Glastonbury Emerging Talent - Our Choices

After hours of painstaking listening and deliberation some of the best music bloggers in the UK have put forward their nominations for the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition 2011, and that includes Breaking More Waves. It was incredibly difficult to decide on our final three choices from the list of 160 bands we were given to listen to, but eventually we went with our hearts choosing quite simply the music that moved us the most.

We’re very pleased to announce that our top choice was the fantastic Codes, followed in second and third respectively by Leaving Atlantis and Temper the Wolves. We hope at some point to be able to see all of these bands live and hopefully support them on the blog, irrespective of if they make it any further in the competition.

Later this week, the 123 acts will be narrowed down to a shortlist of just 8 who will compete at April's live finals for a main stage slot at this year's Festival. They will be chosen by the final judging panel which consists of the following 10 judges: Michael Eavis (Glastonbury organiser), Emily Eavis (Glastonbury organiser), Nick Dewey (main stages programmer), Martin Elbourne (main stages programmer), Malcolm Haynes (Dance Village programmer), Steve Symons (West Holts programmer), Philippa Aylott (Radio One producer), Angus Baskerville (live agent), Paul Charles (agent/promoter/manager) and Chris Salmon (music journalist). We wish our three choices the very best of luck.

It also pleases us to see a number of other bands on the shortlist that we have blogged in the past such as Run Toto Run, Dems and The Dufflefolks – all excellent selections. In fact the long list represents a fantastic sample of new and emerging talent – the UK bloggers have demonstrated exactly why they are becoming increasingly known as a vital part of new music discovery. Below you’ll find tracks by all of these other bands together with an introductory video from our top choice Codes – an Irish band with a grandiose vision who combine stadium sonics, subtle electronic soundscapes and songs that deliver immediately but get better with every listen. Their album – Trees Dream In Algebra is brilliantly accomplished and we hope that irrespective of their now slim 123-1 chances of winning, that as the year progresses more people outside of Ireland will get to know about them.

The full long list of all 123 bands can be found using this link here.

01 Hater - Run Toto Run by Breaking More Waves

Jarndyce vs Jarndyce by dems

1. Two Hands Clapping by thedufflefolks

Your Blues by Leaving Atlantis

Cold Hands by Temper The Wolves

Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition 2011 - Bands Part 4

This is our final blog highlighting some of the bands that have come to our attention during our current involvement in the longlisting process for the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition. At the risk of boring regular readers we have to first utter our usual disclaimer that we’ve issued on every one of these posts and that is that the bands identified in this and the three posts that precede it will not necessarily be our 3 choices for the longlist – although they are being considered – but they are all artists that we’ve been enjoying. It’s the last we’re going to say on the competition until the official list is announced in March, when you’ll be able to see the acts that this and 39 other blogs chose to go forward to the next stage of the competition.

Red Shoe Diaries (pictured above) from Nottingham are very much a gentle indie band – call it twee if you must – and share a similar sonic territory to Belle and Sebastian and Felt. They’re the kind of band that are never going to have the word muscular applied as a tag to their songs, but that’s fine because sometimes a subtle and tender kiss is all the more tantalising than a drunken hard and fast tongue sandwich up against the wall. The band released an EP simply entitled Debut EP back in 2009 and don’t appear to have issued much else since, so fingers crossed that the fact that they’ve entered the Glastonbury competition and have a show at the Lexington in London on February 7 supporting Allo Darlin’ means that they are still a going concern and further material may surface. Our favourite tune from the EP is Underage Disco which should get old school Belle and Sebastian fans doing that awkward I’m-kind-of-cute-but-kind-of-embarrassed dance that they do.

Our final choice are Temper The Wolves, a band who you can find hard gigging all over London in the next month or so with shows at (amongst others) 93 Feet East, Relentless Garage and the 100 Club. This Camden based five-piece create well-crafted electric guitar tunes that have just a hint of darkness in their sound. They reference bands such as The National, The Smiths and Joy Division as influences and certainly their music contains elements of classic indie-rock structures. With a Myspace that was only created late last year Temper The Wolves are very much a new band, but certainly show some promise with songs such as Cold Hands that both soar and swim in equal measures as their lead singer sternly intones “we slow dance tonight.”

Cold Hands by Temper The Wolves