Thursday 20 March 2014

Zella Day - New Waves


Once upon a time the SXSW festival was known as the place to discover new music. These days of course, for those with the time and inclination you don’t need to get on a plane and fly to Austin, Texas to carry out that discovery, you can do it just as easily from the comfort of your own home as long as you have an internet enabled device. Of course nothing beats the visceral thrill of seeing a band up close and in the flesh at a sweaty club gig, but there are plenty of cheaper alternatives to achieve that than Austin’s big festival.  So here’s one of our discoveries of this years event; we found her whilst staring at a laptop on our dining room table and drinking tea. Her name is Zella Day.

The SXSW website tells us some facts about Zella that you may or may not find interesting whilst you are consuming her tunes. For a start during her childhood her family owned the only coffee house in the town where she lived that had live music. At least we assume it was live music, SXSW tells us it was ‘life music’ which sounds pretty weighty and deep, but we have no idea what that it is. It also tells us that she now resides in Los Angeles and incorporates her simplistic roots and blends them with the eclectic sounds of the West Coast. You can hear that on her cover version of The White Stripes Seven Nation Army on her Soundcloud, but her other two songs, Sweet Ophelia and 1965, (both released on her debut single on April 7th via B3SCI Records) have a bigger pop nous. 1965 is actually the b-side of the record but is our favourite of the two - a swoon worthy epic with wild west twangs and touches of Lana Del Rey all over the shop. It's a crushingly beautiful pop ballad.

Zella Day - 1965

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