New Music: salute - Light Up (Ft. Liv Dawson)

Put together one of the artists I named as One to Watch for 2017 (Liv Dawson) and another artist that I’ve featured in the past (salute*) and what do you get? The musical equivalent of feel good movie with bags and bags of popcorn coated in sunshine. It’s just what the doctor ordered. As Liv sings of “getting drunk on the bass” and of being so excited that she’s only just begun, it’s impossible to feel anything but absolute optimism and hope from this shiny computerised banger.

A tiny bit of internet research reveals that this track is a bit of a team effort with Zyra (another previous One to Watch, who as yet still hasn’t released her own music, but it is perhaps getting closer) stating on Instagram that this started out as a soul pop instrumental that she made to try and make salute smile “and he took it on and smashed the final song" with Liv Dawson, Pawws (another Breaking More Waves regular a few years back) and Bren Grieve (Sam Smith’s bass player and a writer / producer in his own right).

*What is it with all these trendy kids just doing their name in lower case? Did they learn nothing about grammar when they were at school? 

salute - Light Up (Ft. Liv Dawson)

salute - New Waves

You’ve probably already heard of Mura Masa (if you haven’t play some serious catch up by listening to the groove laden brilliance of Firefly featuring Breaking More Waves favourite Nao and the track Lotus Eater as a seriously good introduction), but you might not yet have come across salute (yes, the lack of capital S isn’t a mistake) who unbelievably is a classmate of MM’s in Brighton. That's a very cool college.

With a whole bunch of tracks already online, Castle (Magic) is salute's first official single, via 37 Adventures. Built around some muted vocal loops, deep bass and synths there’s hints of something more ambient beneath the track, giving it a soft, near classical undercoating. There’s a hook as well, not in the sense of a traditional pop vocal melody hook, but with electronics that sound like a Clanger who has eaten too much green soup (go and ask your mum or dad if you have no idea what we’re talking about – or just Google it). This dude is good.

salute - Castle (Magic)