One of my favourite UK based boutique labels is Chess Club – they seem to knock out record after record that my musical tastebuds find absolutely delicious. Their current roster includes the likes of Billie Marten, Casi and Pumarosa – all acts that I’d written about in their very early stages before they’d got on board with the label. Then there's past Breaking More Waves approved artists such as Jungle, Wolf Alice, Chet Faker, Mumford & Sons, White Lies, James Yuill, Cherbourg and Kyla La Grange. It's a smorgasbord of musical goodness.
Today I saw Chess Club Tweet “NEW MUSIC ALERT!! Keep ‘em peeled ‘cause we’ll be bringing you brand new music from a very exciting new artist later this afternoon” and as good as their word, a few hours later they revealed their latest addition who goes by the name of SKOTT. Once again, Chess Club has come up trumps - it seems that if I plugged myself into a musical dating website, they'd be my top match.
First impressions on SKOTT:
1. The blogs are going to love this. It’s very ‘bloggy’ sounding. (5 hours later that was confirmed – 14 Hype Machine blogs posted the track in that time – a very impressive start for a brand new artist).
2. Whilst it’s very ‘bloggy’ sounding I’m not sure if Joe Public will 'get' her immediately – it’s maybe just a bit too edgy.
3. But then this could just be one of those ‘get the bloggers on board’ tracks before some even bigger pop monster is released further down the line. On the other hand maybe she's just not that kind of artist.
There’s some blurb on the press release I was sent about her growing up in a forest commune run by a collection of outcast folk musicians, and having not had an opportunity to listen to any contemporary music until she went to the city for the first time in her mid-teens. It all sounds very romantic and alternative and you will probably find these facts on almost every blog post, often copied and pasted directly from that press release (copying and pasting is the new journalism you see), but being slightly cynical I think probably any of us could write a biography that makes our lives sound wildly exciting. For example I grew up on a remote island, conceived by hippy parents who lived in a tower overlooking the sea after jacking in their normal city lives. From there I returned to the mainland, to live in another isolated location, on a houseboat moored just yards from a castle where I ran hidden strobe lit rave parties. That’s all true, but maybe some of the more boring bits (the rough Council estate I lived on for a number of years) get forgotten. Of course SKOTT's back story may be the whole tale, I don't know, but even if it isn't it's good to have pop stars who at least sound like they might be interesting isn't it? I'm not sure a blogger's life tale has to be that exciting though.
Irrespective of the back story what you really want to know about is the music isn’t it? Ok, time to press play. Skott’s first track is called Porcelain. It’s a wonderful piece of digital melancholy melodrama. It’s my (and many other bloggers) on repeat of the day (only a day mind you because us bloggers all have such short music-churnover attention span defecits).
SKOTT - Porcelain