The Saturday Surf #5

Choose blogging. Choose new music. Choose electropop. Choose dirty aggressive walls of sound. Choose beauty. Choose dancing. Choose folk. Choose no time in the f*ckin’ day to listen to everything you want to listen to. Choose gigs, dancing, festivals and the internet. Choose sexual analogies about songs. Choose the underground. Choose cute girls with keyboards and even cuter boys with guitars. Choose forming bands, growing bad haircuts and splitting up before you’ve even released an album. Choose Saturday. Choose us. Choose Breaking More Waves every single day of your life.

Hello. Thank you for choosing us. This is the Saturday Surf, our weekly round-up of stuff we missed or didn’t have time to properly post about in the week just gone.

Remember Just A Number 05272011? They were the mystery band that animated the blogosphere with their rather good off-kilter electropop and Scooby-Doo-esque ‘who are they?’ mystery identity approach. When we first featured them back in March we suggested that the number may represent a release date. In fact yesterday was simply the day that they revealed through twitter that they were to be known as Battlekat. It’s a shame really, because we preferred the more unconventional name Just A Number 05272011.

If the anti-climax of this revelation felt a lot like not being able to get an erection after the tantalising promise of sex with a new partner, then the hope is that when Battlekat release some new songs they’ll destroy everything in their path, and we’ll all forget about the just a number gimmick. The only up side to the 'actually our name is rubbish' fiasco was that the Copenhagen based band (not Isle of Man as suggested by their Soundcloud) also played their first ever live show a few hours later. You can finally see what the band look like and read a short review of the gig on the Line Of Best Fit here. In the meantime here’s another remix of He Didn't Want A Love Song from the group.

He Didn't Want A Love Song (Lisa Alma Remix) by Battlekat

Givers are a six-piece from Louisiana that have been around for a while now, but are only just beginning to break through in our own territory of the UK. Mixing afro-beat, indie and synth rock the track Up Up Up is one of those 100% guaranteed joy tunes. Expect more of this from their forthcoming debut album. For those in the UK the band are due to visit these shores this summer, with confirmed festival appearances at Field Day and Summer Sundae, both of which will be reviewed on Breaking More Waves. Watch this space.

GIVERS - Up Up Up

Les Mistons are a band that could be huge. Not in the sense of selling out stadia and winning platinum discs huge, nor having the ability to eat themselves into obesity, but they seem to possess the capacity to make big sounding music.

Take their signature track Keep Flying. It’s not the type of song that can be judged until it’s been given five minutes and fifteen seconds of your full attention as it slowly builds from its atmospheric beginnings to its chest thumping gang-shout chorus, “Woah-oh” chant and repeated line of “Hit it over the head with a blunt object.” It may be a little rough around the edges, but imagine if you took this London 3 piece, who have been friends since they were 11 and were previously in a covers band called The Badgers and put them in a big studio with someone who had a firm grasp of sonic science, the results could be colossal.

Keep Flying by LesMistons

Finally for this week we wanted to give a quick heads up to Beat Connection who managed to get Breaking More Waves hometown of Portsmouth a raving and a grooving in a pub that vaguely resembles someone’s gigantic front room a couple of days back. In The Water is the sleek new single out this week, it’s crammed full of trippy and Balearic influences . We're streaming it below and you can see the new video for it here.

Enjoy our choices.

In the Water by Beat Connection

The Saturday Surf #3

It seems highly appropriate that the picture you see above was taken in Brighton, for right now that’s where we are soaking up the vast expanse of new music on offer at the Great Escape Festival 2011. A review (of sorts) will follow early next week.

Until we return, let’s dip our toes into a just a small handful of tracks that kissed our ears in the days between last Saturday and when we left for Brighton, but didn’t quite make it onto a full post on Breaking More Waves – and this time we unravel some new sexy synthtopia and computer love-making.

Earlier this week we introduced a new prince and princess of dark electronic music – the magnificent Curxes. Since we featured their music they’ve uploaded two new songs online. Here’s one of them. Creatures pays particular homage to Depeche Mode with its sinister synths and clanking industrial rhythms, but the vocals are strident female ones rather than the mournful baritone of Dave Gahan. It will be self-released on tenth June along with another song Jaws which you can hear on the bands Soundcloud.

Creatures by CURXES

Moving on from a prince and princess to the queen herself, Queen of Hearts is a Breaking More Waves favourite and this bootleg/rework of Daft Punk's End Of The Line from the Tron soundtrack not only cements and power floats our love for her but has us falling on our knees in front of her, begging for more like a fanboy.

Queen of Hearts v Daft Punk - The End Of Nothing by Queen Of Hearts

Our final track is a remix from mystery electronic pop mischiefs Just A Number 05272011. The internet continues to be full of speculation as to who / where / what the band are and holds its collective breath to see if anything of significance happens on the 27 May. Until then however they’ve sneaked out this remix of He Didn’t Want A Lovesong which just adds to the anticipation.

He Didn't Want A Lovesong (sff vms Remix) by Just a number 05272011

Just A Number 05272011 - Business

We predicted a blog avalanche for Just a Number 05272011 after we posted their debut tracks The Pain and He Didn’t Want A Love Song and we were right. Now they’re going to do it again with new electro-banger Business, which premiered on The Fader last week. It’s gearing up for more blog overload. And rightly so, because Business is….er…. the business. With monstrous dirty electro fuzz pulses that grind sexily in your ears, it seems that the time to get a little bit excited about Just a Number 05272011 is now.

With nothing else known about Just a Number 05272011 blogs are having to create their own backstory if they want to say anything else than describe the music. Current rumours are that the band are not from the Isle of Man as their Soundcloud player information states but from Sweden (due to the obvious sonic references to The Knife in the sound) and as we suggested in our first blog about the band the 05272011 figure could possibly signify a release date.

However, at the moment it’s the music that’s doing the talking, not the artist, their twitter giving very little away except links to their songs. “There are a few reasons 4 the name. Just feel like telling some of them soon,” one tweet said, but as yet, that is all.

BUSINESS by Just a number 05272011

Just A Number 05272011 - New Waves

Blogpop. Is it a new genre? Popjustice certainly think so, having mentioned it today. Of course it can’t be can it? Blogs are so broad and so all-encompassing that there can be no such thing. Yet the number of times the phrase ‘big on the blogs’ crops up these days would suggest that there may be something in it. If we were going to put forward a definition, then maybe blogpop is slightly cool off-kilter underground music that is still listenable enough that it can cross over to the masses? Maybe, but then again maybe not. How you can define a sound just by the fact that a bunch of internet geeks are writing about it?

However if blogpop does exist then over the last few days a number of blogs have gone into overdrive as they unearth a shining example of it. Just A Number 05272011 is an odd name, if indeed that is the artist's name, there's very little information out there right now. However you can be assured that if there's one thing most music blogs like it's is some sort of enigma to chase - the classic "shouded by a veil of mystery," or "we know very little about this artist," quotes will appear regularly. The name perhaps signifies a release date – your guess is as good as ours, but forgetting the internet gossip the important thing is that their brand of eccentric electronic chamber-bop, which sounds a little like a madcap version of The Knife, is going down very well indeed. So at the risk of turning into a sheep, here they are on Breaking More Waves as well, because Just A Number 05272011 sounds like a majorly great piece of blogpop.

THE PAIN by Just a number 05272011

He Didn't Want A Love Song from just a number 05272011 on Vimeo.