Breaking More Waves has been a big supporter of Newcastle’s Let’s Buy Happiness for some time now and today it gives us great pleasure to stream their new single Dirty Lakes, a blog exclusive.
Dirty Lakes brings a musicality of lightness and carefree joy, Sarah’s delightfully sparkling voice skipping and dancing as she sings that “It’s time for us to get soaked.” There’s a summery indie pop feel to the song, re-affirming absolutely everything we love about music and about this band. Dirty Lakes has a sweet urgency that hasn’t been present in the groups previous work; with it they flower.
In summary, this is heavenly, still delicate but with a ripple of muscle. A tune worth looting for. However, rather than risk a night in the cells, we suggest you actually purchase a copy. You'll be able to pre-order it very soon using links on the Let's Buy Happiness facebook page.
Although much of the music that has made me and continues to inspire me now is based in the traditional structures of song – verses, choruses and delightful melodies – there’s another part of me that thrives listening to the leftfield. No other artist satisfies this desire for the more peculiar than Aphex Twin. The first Aphex Twin album I purchased was his classic Ambient Works. It was a mesmerising recording full of graceful looping synths, out there beats and calm creeping atmospheres that I would put on constant repeat for hours and hours. I loved the way the tracks were in no rush, everything in the music appeared when it was ready and not before.
Following its release Aphex Twin became the king of experimental and underground music, throwing out remixes, singles and albums at some rate of knots and with a somewhat maverick approach. Rumour has it that he was meant to remix a Lemonheads track and when the record company came to collect it he hadn’t even started work on it, so he just gave them a half-finished demo he had been working on and they loved it.
His gigs became legendary; there were tales of DJ sets where he would put on sandpaper discs instead of records. When I went to see him play at The Old Trout Pub in Windsor (before his status ensured that grotty pub gigs would be out of the question) he set his equipment up at the back of the stage, filled the place with dry ice and blasted mind numbing techno at ear crushing volumes out to the crowd. When he left stage the music just continued and nobody knew when to applaud or even leave the venue. My most vivid memory of that gig was a zoned out hippy standing at the front with his ear pressed hard against the speaker as the beats punched out – his hearing surely destroyed for life.
I have many loved Aphex Twin tracks, but it’s On, a single that wasn’t featured on any of his albums that is my favourite. It finds a measured balance between his ambient material and harsher techno work. The video for the track was also directed by Jarvis Cocker of Pulp fame. Although the likes of Come To Daddy and Windowlicker with their freakily menacing horror show Chris Cunningham directed videos are more universally well-known it was On that achieved Aphex Twins first ever UK Top 40 single, which for music that was obtusely non-commercial is some achievement.
The original concept of The Saturday Surf was to round up the loose ends at the weekend – giving a little bit of exposure to tracks that we’ve been enjoying but not had time to give a full blog post to. This concept of course assumes that there are enough good tracks to go round, that we’ve managed to discover them and that we are actually around at the end of the week to write about them. Yet with summer festivals, holidays and the real world getting in the way of internet time, this Saturday Surf finds itself being written and readied for publishing well before the weekend with very little time to make new discoveries. Thankfully we’ve managed to find three, so without further ado here they are.
Outfit – Two Islands
It’s fair to say that Outfit have nearly become one of the buzz bands du jour in the world of UK indie bloggers. Until now they haven’t impressed Breaking More Waves at all but this track Two Islands does the trick, starting all quietly shy and then gradually creeping up to smother you in layers of gliding guitar and subtle groove. It gets released on 7” clear vinyl in September through the equally buzzy Double Denim records.
Now here’s something curious from the leftfield. A confident piano riff, warped alien pitch-shifted underwater vocals and a simple growing beat create something that sounds like the soundtrack to a druggy road movie. The track has a distorted mystery to it that’s both creepy and strangely infectious. If we were going to classify it as a genre we’d call it pianocore. It landed in a whole host of bloggers in boxes last Wednesday, including ours, with no explanation about who created it, although there are rumours of a Manchester connection. You can download the track for free here. And what are those /// about ?
Finally something more late night and downbeat after the journey home. In fact night is the operative word, for Shura describe this music as Night Folk, in the same way that another Breaking More Waves regular Alpines describe their music as Night Pop. This is the inner calm after coming in out of the rain. Find someone to curl up with and spend the rest of the darkness listening to this. River defines beauty and in this case that beauty is free to download.
How relevant are the UK singles charts these days? In terms of being the best tool we have available to measure sales they’re still the best – they don’t take into account all sales, the likes of purchases from independent sites such as Bandcamp are not measured through the charts for example, but they still give the most concrete and least subjective guide.
With so many other methods of easily consuming music being available sales are not necessarily a 100% foolproof guide to who is ‘popular’, but they still present a more objective amount of evidence than other similar tools. A number 1 on the Hype Machine for example can often have very little relevance to the vast majority of music consumers in the UK. This is illustrated sharply when gigs by bands that are ‘big on the blogs’ and have had high Hype Machine chart placings pull only a tiny handful of people to see them. Last year we attended one such gig where despite coverage by the likes of Pitchfork, Gorilla vs Bear and a Hype Machine top 10 there were 16 people in the audience. Yet take an act like Ed Sheeran, who until very recently was hardly listed on Hype Machine and you’ll witness his shows selling out in minutes. At July’s Camp Bestival festival Sheeran’s set in the Big Top was packed to the gunnels (the busiest of the weekend), the crowd baying his name a good twenty minutes before he came on stage. The same weekend a number of ‘big on the blogs’ bands played to just a handful of people.
Sheeran’s recent single The A-Team reached the top 3 in the UK singles chart. When you combine this with his well-attended shows it supports the argument that despite the 1001 ways we can consume music, the sales charts are still relevant in terms of a gauge of what acts are popular at any one snapshot in time.
Sheeran is an unlikely pop star – with his mop of ginger hair and folk / hip hop angle of his songs, but we like him a lot. There’s something very real, very honest and very sincere about what he does. Breaking More Waves has never been afraid to cover new music that is popular – witness our past treatments of acts such as Ellie Goulding and Hurts as well as darker more underground stuff. Music is a broad church and we worship it all.
So here’s the new single from Ed. You Need Me I Don’t Need You features Wretch 32 and Devlin and was first posted on the blog in March – with a video of his SB TV performance which has now racked up over 3 million views on You Tube (another possible guide to popularity - but then don’t forget how many hits Rebecca Black received - we’re not convinced that the hits she received were because people liked her)
Below you can hear the single itself, a remix and watch the video. His album titled + is due in September. Expect it to do very well in the charts.
