This new video from Grace Lightman is for a song she released earlier this year and is described as a ‘Live Karaoke Performance’. All I can say is that Grace has attended some far better Karaoke sessions than me. There’s no evidence of a drunk bloke shouting out the lyrics to Mr Brightside* as he’s cheered on to shouts of ‘go on son’ whilst necking five pints of lager. No this is Karaoke by way of a scene out of Twin Peaks. Given its eerie, ghostly sound and visual atmosphere I’m not sure if Halloween really is over in Grace Lightman’s world, but nonetheless this is unsettling in a good way. *Footnote. Mr Brightside is a great song, but it's now become the 00's equivalent of Wonderwall in the UK at least - over played to the point of annoyance. Grace Lightman - Halloween Is Over (Live Karaoke Performance)
Whilst I don’t subscribe to the idea of comparing one artist to another as instantly being lazy journalism, I do if the likenings are wildly off the mark. Probably the two singers that crop up the most in the world of slightly alternative pop as wrong comparisons are Bjork and Kate Bush. The number of times I’ve read ‘sounds similar to Kate Bush’ and then I’ve pressed play and the vocal sounds nothing at all like Kate, except in the broadest sense that the singer is a higher toned female, are plentiful. So now here I go. I really hope it isn’t a lazy comparison, but hell, the new song from London's Grace Lightman sounds an awful lot like Kate Bush. That is, Kate Bush with a low-key 80’s electronic cinematic ballad backing. It’s exactly the sort of music that if you’re a regular here you’d expect to find on Breaking More Waves. What of course is lazy journalism is saying very little with too many words. But then I’m not a journalist and sometimes, just sometimes, being lazy is OK. Grace Lightman - Faultless
In our introducing post on Grace Lightman we suggested that Grace was unlikely to be producing any songs that we can proclaim to be club bangers in the near future. How right we were. For today Grace has released her take on the traditional song Black Is The Colour (Of My True Love’s Hair), a tune that has followed the classic folk tradition of being passed down over the years from listener to listener, from artist to artist, with everyone from Nina Simone, Mike Seeger, Cara Dillon, Paul Weller, Christy Moore and The Corrs recording it. This is a bewitching and eerie version, taking the ghostly sparseness that contemporary folk bands such as The Unthanks have used to such effect over the last few years and using stillness as much as instrumentation to create an experimental torch song, with the Parallax Orchestra (former Dry The River member Williams Harvey and cellist Maddie Cutter who have previously collaborated with the likes of Meadowlark, Bring Me The Horizon and Martin Grech) adding beautifully uneasy strings. Pop banger it isn't, fascinating, almost subtly menacing listen it is. Grace plays her first solo live gig this week at Brighton’s Green Door Store (which is free) on August 19th before she plays The Waiting Room in London on September 3rd. Keep an eye on our Twitter feed (here) as we will be bringing the odd photo or tweet from one of those shows. Grace Lightman - Black Is The Colour (ft Parallax Orchestra)
Here’s an artist that’s new to the blog, that we were going to post about yesterday, but then got somewhat diverted by the Hype Machine chart integrity debate. However, better late than never as the clichéd saying goes, so say hello (no don’t, this is the internet she can’t hear you) to Grace Lightman. Grace came to us, not through searching long and hard to find new music organically as we described yesterday, but by way of the email in box. The email concerned tells us that Grace once fronted a London psych rock band called The Hypnotic Eye, mentions references to Kate Bush and influences ranging from Vincent Gallo films to Francois Hardy and Nico. We think what this email was trying to tell us was that Grace is pretty damn cultured and is unlikely to be producing any songs that we can proclaim to be a banging club anthem in the near future. Certainly Vapour Trails, her debut,won’t be the song to play if you’re having it large in Ibiza this summer. This is something with far more depth; it requires a few listens to fully explore and appreciate its nooks and crevices, which are crammed with interesting flourishes of electronics and opulent off-kilter experimentation alongside the base of a traditional song structure. Those Kate Bush references have some degree of accuracy, but we’d also like to suggest that Lightman’s voice is a little like Snow White in the Disney cartoon, but with a greater weight of melancholy. It's a fascinating start; Vapour Trails is a thing of wonder and even better, it's available for free download from the Soundcloud player below. Grace Lightman - Vapour Trails
