The Hall of Mirrors - Maybe (Video)

The Hall of Mirrors songs are not just dripped in retro wistfulness but positively washed in it and there’s no better example than Maybe. It’s like the sad reflective moment in a long lost black and white musical where we find lead singer Jessica wiping away a solitary tear and lamenting the fact that maybe she does love the man she’s let go after all. So what does she do? Maybe give him a call on his mobile perhaps, or send him a text or email to explain her feelings? No Jessica’s world of romance is so old fashioned that she sings “I’ll write a letter to show my pain, I’ll post it in the morning.” Let’s just hope that she doesn’t post it second class, because if she does she might find that her potential suitor has already got himself shacked up with another sexy young filly by then.

Whatever the outcome of Jessica’s letter, the song itself is cooingly lovely. Originally from The Hall of Mirrors Love Child EP released earlier this year, Maybe has been given a new video treatment which you can see below.

The Hall of Mirrors - Maybe

The Hall of Mirrors - Bittersweet Love

They’ve already been described as Julie Andrews in hell (by Paul Lester in The Guardian), cutesy dream pop (by our favourite blog sister Flying With Anna) and a delicate spoonful of sugar adventure of pretty tunefulness (by ourselves) but those last words were written a long time ago, in 2009. Yet it seems that it’s only now that The Hall Of Mirrors are slowly beginning to pick up the media attention that they deserve. At least there’s no question of the group being a hype band, shoved onto the scene with no time to develop or write a decent collection of songs. We’ve seen plenty of examples of that over the last few years and it’s still happening now, with the blog pack mentality slavering over identikit sounding groups who haven’t had the chance to learn the craft of how to play or write (other than one or two pretty good tracks ). Bands end up playing to expectant industry types in London on just their third gig only to end up ignored and forgotten within the year. So many potentially great bands are destroyed by the sharing / upgrade generation; developing in public isn’t always an easy or good thing.

Thankfully Hall Of Mirrors are emerging gracefully. They may not be fully there yet, but they’re better positioned than many bands are.

This is a new video for their song Bittersweet Love, a candyfloss collage of dark psychedelia, sixties referencing pop and easy listening. It’s likely to make you feel uneasy even if you adore it – but then when has love ever been simple? Lead singer Jessica certainly seems to want to have it her own way. “Bittersweet love will satisfy. You want me? Bittersweet love will satisfy. Well I don’t need you. Bittersweet love will satify. Come here and kiss me. Bittersweet love will satisfy. You know you want too. Bittersweet love will satisfy. Of course I don’t love you,” she coos.

The band will play The Guardian New Band of the Day show at The Camden Barfly on the 14th June but before that Jessica continues to model a ‘Chair of the week’, one of which is pictured above, over on the bands website.

The Hall of Mirrors - Bittersweet Love



The Hall of Mirrors - Bittersweet Love (Video)

The Hall Of Mirrors - Transparent Love

Back in 2010 we featured Portsmouth based (now London) group The Hall Of Mirrors a number of times on Breaking More Waves. Since then they’ve been slowly gaining momentum with shows supporting Eliza Doolittle and festival slots at both Secret Garden Party and Southsea Fest. The Hall Of Mirrors also recently cropped up on Flying With Anna, one of our favourite blog buddies. Last, but not least, on a weekly basis the band have been naming their chair of the week on their website, with lead singer Jessica posing with the winner. Personally we like this one, although this one is quite good to.

Throughout 2011 The Hall Of Mirrors released a series of free download singles; Springtime, Say Goodbye, Transparent Love and Love Child. They will be following this up with a full EP in the early part of 2012 and so now seems as good a time as any to re-introduce the band with one of those songs from last year.

Transparent Love has a cigarette smoking, nylon wearing, groovy, easy listening sound that hints at The Carpenters or The Cardigans circa their Life album. It’s a modern take on the soft focus café culture songs of the 60’s that could provide the soundtrack to a whole new generation of psychedelia loving swinging indie dudes. What The Hall Of Mirrors do certainly doesn’t fit with any current fashion, instead they are making their own. They are all the better for it.

The Hall Of Mirrors - Transparent Love

The Hall Of Mirrors @ Portsmouth Fat Fox

For those like us who thought that The Hall of Mirrors represented a soft focus dreamy French café pop collective – think again. From the blood red Spacemen 3 guttural guitar intro to the lead singers female reverb soaked vocal, this is a band that in a live form trade on big alternative rock sounds set to some sort of blurred psychedelic vision. It later transpires that tonight is not the standard Hall of Mirrors line-up, with members of The Confederate Dead – friends of the band, being enlisted to help replace missing players. This explains some of the explosive din coming from the dark strobe-frenzied stage.

The mission tonight appears to be to create some sort of mind-blowing transcendental noise – a velvety Brian Jonestown Massacre perhaps. Lead singer Jessica Spencer takes cover behind her keyboard, one red shoed foot bracing her against the wall. “I see spirits everywhere,” she wails, spreading her arms theatrically wide, her head thrown back, like a young Kate Bush about to climax in some sort of blissful sonic orgasm. Sometimes the vocal is almost lost in the uproar of funeral guitars and drums, but this gig seems to be less about songs and melody - more about dense and sometimes heavy atmospherics. In that respect it works well, the often ineffectual sound system at The Fat Fox coping admirably enough to leave the small audience feeling that their ears have received some kind of beautiful battering.

The Hall Of Mirrors - Love Obscure

Here's a band who wear their sixties influences not just on their sleeves, but their whole bodies and souls. First introduced here, The Hall Of Mirrors have just released a video for their hallucinatory pop song Love Obscure. In the video lead vocalist Jessica Spencer is trapped inside a rainbow dream of a television set. It’s a soft focus track that manages to join together a heavy wad of psychedelia with the sound of spellbound elevator music, all fronted by Julie Andrews. Lyrically Love Obscure sees Jessica questioning that age old concept of love “Why is it when two people fall in love it seems so blue ?” she asks. “Only love can give you pain. Only love can feel again. I’m still waiting to feel anything,” she sings, before the whole video takes off in a wash of radiating love hearts and kaleidoscopic colour.

The Hall Of Mirrors are playing a number of gigs in the UK over the next month or so including a show at The Zenith Bar in London and The Great Escape in Brighton.

The Hall Of Mirrors - New Waves @ Breaking More Waves

Here is a band that we have already given a brief mention to back in September, in our review of Southsea Fest 2009 here. The group in question are called The Hall Of Mirrors a Portsmouth via London based band, fronted by the twenty one year old singer, songwriter, ex-dancer and pianist Jessica Spencer. Still in their infancy, The Hall Of Mirrors feature seven musicians that include guitar, bass, drums and strings. They are however, very much the product of the emotional highs and lows of the fertile imagination of Spencer herself. That imagination brings a haunting sepia tinted sixties styled pop that reminds us of cult French films, Burt Bacharach and rainy days in bohemian Paris coffee shops. It is a sound that right now for a new band, is pretty damn unique.

Spencer found the piano at a very young age, being fascinated with its sound from the age of two. Since birth the singer struggled with congenital dislocation of the hips, with much of her early life played out in a hospital bed often unable to move from the waist down. With a permanent bar fixed across the base of her back, her legs were pulled out into the splits meaning that one of the only objects she could sit on was a humble piano stool. So it came to pass that she discovered piano from that perch, her mother sitting her there all day as she struck each key to discover its sound.

Spencer suggests her influences are as wide ranging as The Carpenters to The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Ella Fitzgerald to Barrett era Pink Floyd, but probably the most profound is Franz Liszt. It is the passion, romance and fury of Liszt that appears to have inspired Jessica, and it is with this diary of emotions that The Hall Of Mirrors capture the listener. “I fall in love with everyone / everything so a lot of my songs are about love and then also what happens when I quickly fall out of love,” Jessica explains.

Jessica describes the sound of The Hall Of Mirrors as being “Like early spring, when the sun starts to come out. Then some clouds appear and you hear some gentle rain against the window. Then the rain gets heavier and the clouds grow darker, suddenly big booms of thunder echo through the once peaceful morning. The thunder storm passes and you are left with glistening pavements and dew on the grass.” We would also describe the bands music as a soft focus sixties string laden affair where Julie Andrews pulls some heart strings. It’s music of another time and a ridiculously dreamy place.

Although the band have yet to formerly release any material you can hear songs such as the subtly sexy French pop of A Gift From Cupid and the sweet floaty Love Obscure on their Myspace (link via bands name at the top of the post). The band are also playing a variety of gigs and hope to release some material in a physical form at some point in the year. The Hall Of Mirrors are a group who are romantic, sensual, arty without being pretentious, trippy and hazily beautiful. Go look them up.

Southsea Fest 2009

Southsea Fest is modelled on events such as The Great Escape in Brighton and Swn in Cardiff but on a smaller scale. Established in 2007 the first event was held to raise funds for the promoter Josie Cutis’ younger brother, a musician, to record an album after he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. The event has now expanded and this year took place in twelve venues with over one hundred and fifty acts performing with some profits given to charity.

An entry wristband was budget price, being the same cost as a standard gig ticket, allowing access to all venues which were situated within close proximity to each other, mainly on Albert Road in the south coast town. Unlike similar larger events such as The Great Escape there was no need to turn up at a venue early and queue to guarantee entry, wristband holders were able to freely wander between locations as they chose. At times the event resembled something more like a giant pub crawl than a music event, with bands providing a backing track for happy drunken punters roaming the street. Breaking More Waves took a more conservative approach however, remaining in one venue all day, (Little Johnny Russells) except for our surprisingly well received DJ Set early in the day under our DJ Hojo Hits guise at Cafe Citrus, where we managed to bring dubstep, synth pop, vintage rock and roll, and seventies disco to the artists VIP area.

This years event was crammed so full of bands that it is no surprise that several stages ran behind the scheduled timetable, but most punters seemed unconcerned, happy to catch whatever artist they stumbled across at any particular time. The line up for the event consisted of a number of small national bands previously featured on this blog such as Peggy Sue, The Joy Formidable, James Yuill and Alessi’s Ark as well as plenty of local artists. So to the bands we saw..

With lead singer Clym Arnold swinging from the stage balustrade till it almost collapses, diving onto the floor and his band raping your ear drums with a fistf*ck of visceral punk, The Deads mean business; and we don’t mean the kind that involves hot desking, water cooler moments and power lunches. No this is business that is primitive, brutal and likely to find you sprawled over the photocopier with a microphone stand thrust up your backside. We have no idea about the songs they play, except for a dirty cover of Helter Skelter, but finding blood gushing from our ears actually seems like fun.

The Hall Of Mirrors are about as far removed from The Deads as you can imagine. Every song is a delicate spoonful of sugar adventure of perky tunefulness. “This next song is all about love,” gushes singer Jessica Spencer and we are sure we see fairy dust sparkle from her keyboard and Mary Poppins skipping around in the background. Only at the end when she kicks back her piano stool and delivers a harsher bluesy number do things become a little more unsettling.

The keyboard remains for a short set by Loz Bridge , this time without his backing band The Box Social, who we have featured here before. Bridge produces a short, accomplished set of jazzy rootsy sounds, full of earnest musicianship with just a hint of Chris Martins more reflective moments. One for the more mature listener, his sound is better suited to a quiet theatre or lounge bar than a chatty south coast pub on a Saturday afternoon.

Little Johnny Russells fills up rapidly after Bridge finishes for the megaphone wielding Holdfast, who having recently bagged support slots with White Lies, These New Puritans and in the near future The Chapman Family. The band have developed a confident swagger as they race through their charged punkish riot of keyboard and energetic guitar laden noise with glittery dress clad singer Roberta stepping into the crowd. They may not yet have perfected any killer songs, but they have a dark raw shout about them that takes them above the level of your standard local indie no hopers.

Breaking More Waves regulars The B of the Bang have been peddling their wares for some time now and tonight feels like one of closure, songs from their debut album Beginning Middle End being performed for possibly the last time before some new material is unleashed. Lung is still a colossal beast of a song, triumphant in its sadness and set closer Alaska bristles with taught atmosphere, but their live centrepiece remains Last Day On Earth which is performed with members of The Dawn Chorus; full of soaring trumpets and men singing the words “La la la,” as if it were the most important thing in the world.

Rather like a game of tag The Dawn Chorus continue where The B of the Bang left off. The band are a menagerie of multi instrumentation and subtle tunes with heavenly trumpet fanfares that uplift and involve, and on one song the band even have a little stab at some ska which seems rudely off centre to the rest of their country tinged rock sound. Strangely endearing and glorious.

Eight piece Revere (pictured) are physically and musically too big for such a tiny stage as Southsea Fest. The band bring military jackets, waistcoats, strings and a big big sound that comes from the same musical space as bands like Broken Records and Arcade Fire. Their songs sweep and soar gloriously high, powerfully evocative and beautiful. With due respect to all of the bands that have come before them, Revere stand that much taller, that much stronger and bring the most illustrious sounds we hear all day.

After Revere ‘dirty folksters’ Billy Vincent have a tough job. A slimmed down check shirted version of the whole band, they play with just two acoustic guitars, and as the beer flows more readily you have to feel sorry for any act that really demands quiet attention.

Next up are San Francisco’s Love Like Fire who play a fairly straightforward female fronted blend of indie rock that has a vaguely early to mid nineties feel to it. The band suffer from an audience that now seems more interested in alcoholic kicks than actually listening to the music. There are hints of something epic trying to break out, but it’s a case of seen it all before with this band.

“Give me some love it’s tough up here,” announces Chris T-T. Good god the man’s right. At this point in the evening we wonder if anybody is actually interested in the music at all. Chris T-T could have probably come on stage, pissed in a pot and walked off again and nobody would have noticed. So all credit to the man who has played on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square for having the guts to force out his political acoustic folk rock to those who care. Breaking a guitar string after his first song, he continues a cappella, before thrashing out tunes about getting older, hunting and the wonderful Preaching To The Converted which has thrusting intensity and humour in equal measure. “Billy Braggs gone fishing in his 4 x 4,” he sings to a an audience who are drowning in lager.

At this point it doesn’t look good for James Yuill , but miraculously his beats, loops and geekoid electronic wizardry win the day. The inebriated crowd are ready to dance and the heavy beats and laptronica that Yuill produces work well. His sound mixes elements of Nick Drake, Radiohead, Aphex Twin and Calvin Harris into something that is uniquely his own. As songs such as the dreamy rotating No Surprise and the gentle bounce of This Sweet Love are played out it reminds us why we put his Turning Down Water For Air album in our Top Ten of 2008. Enchanting electronic melodies with a human side, from one of the nicest men in music make a fine way to end the evening.