The Great Escape Festival 2015 - Preview (Part 3 of 5)

This is the third installment of a series of posts designed to suggest a few artists that might be worth your attention if you're struggling to decide who to see amongst the hundreds playing at this year's Great Escape in Brighton. Click back through the previous two posts to see recommendations 1-8. Here's our next four:

Recommendations

9. Låpsley 

Winner of the Blog Sound of 2015 poll, a nominee on the BBC Sound of list and one of our choices as Ones to Watch 2015 last November, Liverpool's Låpsley (real name Holly Lapsley Fletcher) has been making quite a storm over the last year and a half with her beautiful downtempo electronic music that captures the minimalism of James Blake and then twists and manipulates it into something with aspects of jazz, soul, classical, pop and ambient dance in it. Having put going to university on hold she's signed to XL records and is now pursuing a musical career to see where it takes her. With only a handful of live shows under her belt, she's on a fast learning curve, but her Understudy EP from January  bodes very well for an innovative and intriguing album at some point in the future.



10. Float Fall

Belguim's Float Fall captured hearts with a delicate little pop song that sounded like a cross between The Beautiful South's A Little Time, David Gray's Babylon and Coldplay's Fix You with beats back in 2013. It was called Someday and we've been waiting for them to make their way to the UK ever since. Finally 2015 is that time.



11. Broods

Of New Zealand brother sister duo Broods' debut album Evergreen, last December we wrote: "Despite the album achieving number 1 in the charts in their home country and number 5 in Australia, in the UK Broods hardly made any sort of dent in the public consciousness due to a promotional campaign that appeared to focus largely on Australasia and America rather than Europe. This is a shame, because with Evergreen Broods conjured up a record of swelling atmospheric synths, polished production (from Joel Little of Lorde fame) and most importantly some excellent melodic, hooky, memorable pop songwriting that has been the soundtrack to the second half of our year." 



12. Ward Thomas

Ward Thomas (another sibling duo) are one of the groups that alongside Breaking More Waves favourites The Shires are being touted as responsible for an upsurge in UK based country music. If vocal harmonies, good old twangy guitars and songs that sound like they've come straight out of Nashville are your thing, then we recommend Ward Thomas for Great Escape.

Float Fall - New Waves

We all know that well worn cliché about how sometimes if you are looking for love, the best place to find it is often right under your nose? It often applies to discovering new music as well. Yesterday we spent a seriously long amount of time (four hours to be exact) wading through the blog in-box trying to experience that punch the air moment of elation that comes from unearthing something new that's absurdly brilliant. We failed.

Then just as we were about to give up, we remembered a pretty and melodic pop song we heard a few days back courtesy of Belgian music blog extraordinaire Disco Naïveté. The track in question is called Someday and the band is called Float Fall. This special duo has created one of those tunes that just sounds exquisitely familiar on the very first listen. Yes, it's a comfort blanket of a pop song, but one that we're happy to have the security of. 

From the cute boy-girl vocals, the tiptoe piano, soft pitter-patter beats, underlying simplicity of the keyboard backing and guitars that grow from nothing to something vaguely reminiscent of Coldplay’s Fix You (the second time that song gets a mention on this blog in a week) we challenge you not to immediately fall in love with it. We've read a number of comparisons with The XX on blogs, which we don't really hear, except for the fact that the song uses some simple electronic beats and has male and female voices. If anything the sweet vocals remind us more of The Beautiful South on their huge UK hit A Little Time. 

It took a number of wasted hours to prompt our brain to remember that the needle in the haystack wasn’t in the haystack at all, but in our back pocket just waiting to be pulled out. We’re glad we remembered eventually. This is lovely.

Float Fall - Someday