Kyla La Grange’s transformation from slightly edgy folk-rock singer songwriter to electronic princess of credible pop has been pretty incredible and now it gets even better. Taking on Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball was always going to be a bit of a risk, for whatever you think of Miley there’s no denying that once you get past the tongues, nakedness and such like, Wrecking Ball is a higely powerful pop tune. Thankfully Kyla nails it.
Rather than rocking up and kicking ass Kyla takes the song on a different journey – one of subtlety and restraint. We can imagine a video treatment for this that involves Kyla dressed as a mermaid swimming under tropical waters rather than licking tools and swinging from a ball. In fact we reckon Kyla would make a bloody marvelous mermaid. So in summary :Very good. No, more than very good. In fact this is quite close to A.M.A.Z.I.N.G.
In other amazingness news, Kyla’s album (due for release on June 2nd) has a cover which is pretty much flawless (see here). Not a mermaid, but still pretty much perfect. Kyla La Grange - Wrecking Ball
“I swear to god as soon as online publications realise they don’t have to publish every day it will be as revolutionary as the printing press.” That was a tweet we spotted yesterday from one Adrian Chen, a writer and editor at The New Enquiry, a subscription based online publication. He has a point. Nobody has to do something every day if they don’t want to. Tomorrow we could all just stay in bed, not go to work and have wild passionate sex with someone we fancy (assuming they want to). But these actions have consequences. If you’re employed you might find yourself out of a job. There might even be a baby boom as well. And likewise if you are running an online publication to keep a roof over your head and rely on advertising income you might just find you can’t pay the rent / mortgage at the end of the month. For many sites, page views = income. However, the perceived wisdom is that the majority of mass content / numerous posts a day / link baiting sites are low in quality, especially if they're run by a small team or individual. But hits are incredibly important unless you do things another way such as the subscription model that The New Enquiry uses. With that model as long as you haven’t agreed with your customers to produce daily content, you don’t have to, and the consequences are less. If your customers are happy with the slower production rate and don’t cancel their subscriptions, you are operating in a very different arena. Quality suddenly goes higher up the agenda. You can possibly even stay in bed all day and make a baby. Although if you do you might need to up your subscribers in the future. Here’s a another tweet, this time from Sean Adams, founder of Drowned In Sound website: “My job would be 98% easier if I was more forgiving and liked more music, but our website would probably be 6000% less good. #science." We guess what Sean is alluding to is what he calls the ‘churnover’ of artists, bands, news, reviews, songs and suchlike that music websites create every day. The endless ‘here’s a song, right we’ve forgotten it already let’s move on to the next thing,’ culture that the internet has helped create. Sean’s talking about curation and selection, providing stuff that you believe in (and continue to believe in) and hope your audience will too, hence developing readership loyalty, something that endless “10 greatest guitar poses in rock” features probably doesn’t do. And the argument is that selection and curation requires time, which brings us back to Adrian’s point about not having to publish every day. So why are we writing about this? Because we want to add the voice of the amateur to these statements and because we're shockingly amateur with words we couldn’t fit it in a 140 character tweet. So here we go. The discussion about volume of posts, quality and funding models whilst interesting, ultimately has no relevance to unfunded music blogs like Breaking More Waves. Why? Because we don’t generate income, the likes of traffic and page views becomes irrelevant. Sure it’s nice for the ego to know that someone reads the crap we upload (every blogger likes an audience, no matter how small – otherwise why put your posts publically on line?) and it’s good for the artists we write about if there’s some traffic, getting them a few more plays and possible interest in their music. And yes, we want to produce the best quality we can, as we’re a little bit proud of our humble blog and what we’ve done with it over the last 5 and three quarter years, but we’re realists; we don’t have huge amounts of spare time to produce the thing. If quality = time we have to let the quality go a little. That enables us to rattle out our posts in the spare half hour we have here and there, often writing and scheduling over a sandwich at lunch time at work or burning the midnight oil late when the family are all in bed. “Why not slow down and increase the quality?” you may ask you ask. Especially when we’re not being paid. The answer is because unlike Sean we love A LOT of music; indie, rock, pop, disco, electronica, folk, dance, hip-hop, soul – (sorry heavy metal types, we just can’t get into your groove), and we want to gush uncontrollably about as much of the stuff that we adore as we have time available, without ever just becoming a lowest common denominator ‘this song is good’/ then post the track blog. (We still have some standards!). This to our minds is what music fans do, they talk and obsess about music more than anything else; even more than thinking about practicing making babies. That’s why whilst we agree with Adrian that we don’t have to publish every day, with some exceptions (holidays, the odd Saturday or Sunday and right now for the next three or four days *), we continue to do so. Because like a teenage couple in the first flourishes of excitable romance – we want everyone to know about our passion. Our love affair of music doesn’t stop - this is about love not money. Oh. We almost forgot. This song is good (DAMN!) *Yes this is possibly the longest blog post ever to get round to saying we’re not posting anything for the next three or four days whilst we take a bit of time off away from the blog. Sorry we got carried away. Kyla La Grange - The Knife
Although Kyla La Grange has been big on Breaking More Waves for a long time - not big as in her physical size, she’s relatively featherweight in the flesh - or big as in being a huge fan of the blog, spending all her spare time reading it, although she might do (if she does HIYA KYLA!), but big in terms of we’ve featured her numerous times, she’s never really been big on the blogs (Walk Through Walls excepted). Cut Your Teeth however has changed all that, being a big Hype Machine hit. Of course to give perspective being a Hype Machine hit doesn’t translate into being a real hit, just a few thousand clicks on one of those love hearts worldwide can get you to the top. Niche audience etc. But then blogs are pretty niche aren't they? Nobody we know outside of hardcore music fans reads them. However, from our window ( a slightly warped but beautiful window) Cut Your Teeth would be a real life bona fide chart topper, garnering A-list playlist status on any music station that knows its onions. And now it has a video. Everything about this is arrestingly beautiful. Get ready to open the door to Kyla’s weird and wonderful world of glow paints, ultra violet light, skeletons and parrots. Kyla has stated that it is her favourite video that she’s created and we couldn’t agree more. Kyla plays at Southampton Joiners this Saturday (which we would 100% be attending if we hadn't already committed to another live show) and at Hoxton Square Bar and Kitchen in London next Tuesday, which is sold out. Kyla La Grange - Cut Your Teeth (Video)
Breaking More Waves has been going long enough now that artists that we featured as New Waves (our Introducing type feature) some time ago have gone from early demos to singles to an album and are now progressing to their second (not sophomore if you’re in the UK like us thank you very much) or even third long players; and as this blog is very much a ‘fan’ blog this means that when those artists that we’ve followed since the start come up with the goods we can get very excited about things. WE ARE VERY EXCITED ABOUT KYLA LA GRANGE RIGHT NOW. There are 2 reasons for this. 1. There’s a new single (due for release in March) called Cut Your Teeth and it finds Kyla (who first featured way back in 2010) repurposing herself in a centrefold coating of bubbling minimalistic electronics and beats, her voice the prettiest we’ve ever heard it. Yesterday on twitter we witnessed someone asking Kyla to marry him. On the basis of this song, we can see why, although judging by some of the lyrics here we’re not sure if this is a sensible idea. After all any woman who sings that she’s going to break your bones, cut you up and never let go has to be treated with a degree of caution, no matter how intensely lovely her new song is. 2. Her new hair is A.M.A.Z.I.N.G (Remember, the Rules of Pop Chapter 8: Good hair = good music.) Kyla La Grange - Cut Your Teeth
Throwing the migratory concept of the multi-venue multi-gig idea out of the window, due to a weird combination of the organisers timetable programming and our own summer festival schedule which gives opportunities to see certain artists at numerous events and therefore not necessarily this weekend in London, our whole second day of the Camden Crawl is spent in the bunting dressed Wheelbarrow pub. Camden Crawl ? More like Camden Stationary.
As the music and alcohol flows a constant stream of bladder-stressed punters are found pushing their way towards the front, for the location of the toilets is like a space planners entry into the Carbuncle Cup, being located behind the stage. It’s as if the audience are doing a constant conga through the crowd.
The first half of the day is presented by This Is Fake DIY and as you’d expect, what you get is the more alternative, d-i-y shouty end of the indie spectrum, conga toilet dancing probably wasn’t on their agenda.
3 piece Tall Ships start with big sonics. There’s looped rifferama, huge multi-layered soundscapes and floor banging that could start an earthquake. Neil Diamond once sang ‘What A Beautiful Noise’. Maybe he had Tall Ships in mind.
Next is one of This Is Fake DIY’s own family; the preposterously named The Victorian English Gentlemans Club. Their set list is scrawled roughly on a huge sheet behind the stage. There’s a horny aggression about them, with moments when individual members look like they’re about to lose it completely with an experimental self-induced orgasm. Thankfully they keep it under control albeit with telephones used as microphones, sawing violins, oppressive drums and guttural noise.
The audience thins out a little before Evans the Death start their female fronted indie jangles. The band don’t look as if they’re enjoying themselves, but then not every form of music has to invoke a cheese-laden smile. Lo-Fi torch song You’re Joking is fairly endearing, the band stripping away the fuzz for something a little more naked with Katherine's female Morrissey mournfulness taking center stage.
Remember when indie bands actually sold records? Johnny Foreigner do. “You must be what’s left of the record industry, pleased to meet you,” Alexei, their indie to the core (he’s even wearing a Wedding Present T-shirt) vocalist starts. It’s followed by “This song is off our new album, didn’t anyone actually buy our new album?” “This song is from when we used to be famous,” is another one. Starting your set with off-microphone singing in a room full of people halfway through a day of all-day drinking probably isn’t the best way to get heard; the chatter wins this one. However Johnny Foreigner punch back with a raucous and glorious racket once amplified. Soon the whole audience looks like one amorphous nodding dog as sweat drips from Alexei’s brow. They might not be selling many records, but their ferociously good live show still trades excitement.
After a short break the second half of the day commences with Kyla La Grange. Kyla may be a slight figure on stage but her raspy unforced vocal has some balls behind it and she needs that to deal with the now ever increasing drunks. A dirty look from La Grange at some p*ssed lads who are standing right at the front with their backs to her talking says a lot about what La Grange is thinking, but she’s much politer than much of her ‘audience’ to say anything more. It’s a shame because her widescreen country / folk /rock sound typified by the frowning Vampire Smile is at times spine-tingling with its crescendos and hushed intimacies.
Any criticisms about music festivals being badly organised and running late are put to bed by Beans On Toast who comes on five minutes early, hashes up the first song and finally gets going bang on time. There are old songs (MDM Amazing), new songs (Dry War), a new band that sound like the Pogues gone wrong in a good way and a truncated cover version of the Beastie Boys (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party) all delivered with Beans gravel voiced wit and humour. For Dry War he explains that he started writing a song about the drought but it started raining every day since “so I put some stuff about war in it to make it relevant.”
There’s an influx of (mainly female) younger audience members in the front rows for Bastille. Vocalist Dan Smith sports a haircut last seen on Tom Bailey of the Thomson Twins, the euphoria dial gets turned up several notches and suddenly the drunks seem to disappear as the room takes on a new level of vibrancy. It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes. It’s easy to see why after a few years of plugging away solo with little return Smith and his band are now collecting the dividends. Songs such as Flaws, Laura Palmer and Overjoyed are compelling and have developed a life of their own – a rapturous and dramatic three quarters of an hour of pop music.
Burger King hats, leopard print, hotpants, stupid shades, bouncing (lots of), calls for ‘make some noise’, mates of Kanye (Mr Hudson), a bird watchers daughter (Rosie Oddie) and a collection of songs that sound like every best guilty pleasures compilation you’ve never bought finish the evening off, all courtesy of BIGkids, whose second set of the day they declare to be much better than the first. What they do is dumb-fun, fans of classic rock and indie will not be amused, but frankly this was a much better party than beard / cock stroking over a Beach House B-Side.
Hear a collection of songs from some of the bands in this review below.
At first glance Summer Sundae festival in Leicester doesn’t look particularly appealing. Located in a city centre with a line-up that includes McFly, Newton Faulkner, The Maccabees and Showaddywaddy (yes honestly) sounds like someone has put the name of every band that ever existed into a hat and pulled some out randomly and called it a line-up.
But closer inspection reveals a festival that is bulging with musical goodness and has a couple of unique selling points that means that it’s a cracker of a festival – whatever the weather.
Summer Sundae may not pull huge names; it’s having to be run on a very careful budget after overspending in previous years, but as you look down the bill there’s a whole host of great new artists, many of whom have appeared on this blog. Take for example the band Other Lives, who play their first ever UK show on Friday afternoon on the Rising Stage – their album Tamer Animals is a subtly distinguished gem, one of our favourites of the year. On the same day there’s the jaw-droppingly good folk rockers Admiral Fallow, the irresistible put-a-smile-on-your-face indie of Givers and a certain Mr Graham Coxon of Blur. Add to that list over the next two days Breaking More Waves featured favourites Beth Jeans Houghton, Yaaks, Kyla La Grange, Delta Maid, The Antlers, Warpaint, and Exampleas well as names such as Blood Red Shoes, Dry The River, Bellowhead, I Am Kloot, The Agitator and Mercury nominated acts King Creosote & Jon Hopkins and Everything Everything and you have a veritable feast for your ears.
But there’s something else pretty clever about Summer Sundae. Unlike many other festivals, the chances of the dreaded line-up clash are minimised by the main stage running whilst the other three stages change over and vice versa. So in theory if you don’t stop for toilet or food breaks you can watch a band on one of the three smaller stages and as soon as they finish walk a few yards across the compact site to watch the next performance on the main stage. Not only that but if the weather is atrocious, you have the benefit of being able to dry off and even sit in comfort on a balcony as the second stage is Leicester’s De Montford Hall which is located on the side of the park where the event is held. Of course being a permanent building on site brings other luxuries – permanent toilets, sinks with hot water and soap and a carpeted bar area. If the idea of 3 days in a muddy field seems like your worst nightmare then Summer Sundae provides a decent halfway house between that and a normal gig.
We’ve mentioned some of the artists playing Summer Sundae. Here are three of our recommendations for your listening pleasure. We’ll be bringing a full review of Summer Sundae with our usual round up of the key points that make a festival work or not after the event.
*Footnote - Due to the recent riots and looting in the UK some events have been cancelled. We understand that there have been some incidents in Leicester, but that Summer Sundae organisers are liaising with police and the festival is still due to continue. Please however check the event website (link at the top of this preview) before travelling.
When we originally posted Kyla La Grange’s searing second single Been Better we noted that it was somewhat fiery. Now here’s the video and guess what, there’s actual real burning in it. This means we can use the fiery word again and also throw in other fire related terminology such as noting the seriously large amount of smouldering staring going on here. If we continued in this way (which obviously we're going to do) we could also mention that when that guitar riff crackles in (particularly from 2.25 to 2.39) things move from fire growth to flashover pretty quickly. It’s a smoking track that’s for sure; but really that’s enough bad flame related analogies for one day, we’re off to calm down and squirt an extinguisher all over ourselves.
Kyla La Grange, who we first came across in March last year, may have started out as a gentle acoustic folk chanteuse but is rapidly transforming into a nicotine-stained, ballsy riffing rock chick. This is a singer who knows what she wants and knows where she’s going. “Tell me none of your longings, I don’t need them, or you,” she sweetly rasps at the beginning of Been Better – her new single - before the song marches into war ready to breach fortifications. “I’ve been better when the sky was red and a face like yours couldn’t make me scared, I’ve been better with the things I’ve said, when I took the lead instead of being led,” Kyla hollers as guitars become blood-drawing weapons of music in the chorus. This is vigorous and commanding stuff from the ex-Watford lass, full of fiery passion and power.
Kyla La Grange is out on tour supporting Wolf Gang in May / June before she plays a number of festival shows including Lounge on the Farm, Summer Sundae, Secret Garden Party and Bestival. We’ll certainly be catching her dramatic sound somewhere in a field this summer. Been Better by Kyla La Grange will be released on 7” and download through Chess Club on July 11.
Regular readers may remember that last October we mentioned a Kyla La Grange track called Courage that she had up on her Myspace – a dense emotional torch song about the bravery that is sometimes required to leave someone even if you love them. Now finally we’re able to stream the song on Breaking More Waves and also offer a free download. Courage has a big sound full of echoing downcast Phil Spector-like military drums and raspy tender vocals that are head and shoulders above the crowd. Part widescreen-folk, part force of nature rock music, whatever genre you categorize it as it’s commanding and convincing.
Kyla’s next gigs are on March 8 in London - the official launch party for her single Walk Through Walls (Courage is the B-Side) and then she’s over to the States for a SXSW Communion / Neon Gold official showcase. It was of course at a Communion gig back in March last year that we first came across Kyla (here) and hopefully this show will generate some new U.S fans for her.
Big ballsy guitars, female vocals out of the Maria McKee school of country tinged rock girls and drums that the word crash was really invented for give a powerful introduction to the new single by songstress Kyla La Grange - who you may remember from Breaking More Waves back in March and April last year.
Following up her support slots this winter with I Blame Coco, Kyla’s new material is a free download entitled Walk Through Walls – you can put it on your PC or laptop from the Soundcloud player below. If we were directing a video for this song we could easily imagine scenes shot on windswept mountains and in vast derelict churches, Kyla dressed in flowing robes trailing romantically and seductively out behind her as shards of glass rain down like surreal raindrops. If visualisation of music isn’t your thing and maybe you’re a bit more kinetic, then just feel the full blast of the guitar wattage here, this is a powerhouse of a song, the kind of stuff that when played live it’s ok to pull a gurning* face to whilst placing one foot on a speaker stack in a rock god pose.
Kyla will shortly be announcing some UK dates, so maybe we’ll see you down the front for one of those and see if he gives it the gurn. She is also due to play SXSW in Austin, Texas in March.
*Note for non-UK readers who may not be familiar with the art of the gurn or gurning, all is explained here.
Do you ever bother reading the text on a music blog? Or do you just press the scroll down button and head straight for the audio content hoping to scavenge more free downloads? Well if you do that’s cool with us, but just consider you might miss something. OK, we admit, we’ve done it as well. Sometimes we go straight to the music and then if we like it we go back to the text. If the music’s rubbish then normally it’s “goodbye blog”.
So whatever way you’ve arrived here, either buy clicking play and then scrolling up or slowly working your way down to the bottom, we thank you. We won’t keep you long, just some basic facts.
The artist below is Kyla La Grange. We wrote about her last spring here and here. Ninety per cent of what you need to know is there. The other ten is next. It’s a mini update.
If you’re going (or have been) to see Sting’s lass I Blame Cocco on her October / November dates then Kyla La Grange is the support act. Make sure if you're going you get there early because (controversially) we think she’s much better. Kyla has a rather excellent new song – Courage – up on her Myspace – a dark brooding layered folk number with subtle sixties Phil Spector styled rumbling drums. ‘It's about wanting to be brave enough to walk away from someone because you know they don't love you as much as you love them,’ Kyla told Zeitgeist blog. Since our earlier posts Kyla has been playing more gigs and continues to record. Hopefully we will hear more new material soon. That’s it for now. Kyla’s star is slowly rising. Here’s the other (older) track currently on her Myspace, it’s called Lambs. Thank you for reading. Now if you haven't done so already do the inevitable and press play.
Kyla La Grange’s dark windswept songs about breaking up, getting together and death were the highlight of a recent Communion event at Brighton’s Prince Albert, and so today we bring you a little more of this new singer songwriter.
An ex philosophy student from Cambridge, Kyla La Grange was born in Essex to a Zimbabwean father and a South African mother, but grew up in Watford. After graduating from university her demo recordings garnered interest from Rollo from Faithless who introduced her to producer Marky Bates. The three of them have been working together on her debut album Ghosts, which is due to be finished fairly soon..
From the songs we’ve heard, Kyla is blessed with a slightly husky, sensual, smoked-out, nightime voice full of restrained passion. It’s pretty easy to be convinced after just one listen to medieval folk-rock ballad Lambs, where complex clattering live beats mix with heavy heartbeat drums, that Kyla is good. Or even better than good. Then there’s the emotionally chilly Vampire Smile where she sings “Baby you need to leave, ‘cos I’m getting drunk on your noble deeds. It doesn’t matter that they don’t get done, when I feel this cold they’re like the f*cking sun.” You can almost imagine her swigging a wine bottle as she spits out the words in a feisty manner. Such edgy savage lyrics and folk instrumentation could inevitably draw comparisons with artists like Laura Marling and Alessi’s Ark, and certainly if you are a fan of these acts Kyla La Grange may be one to keep your eye out for. Kyla is playing a number of gigs in the next few months including another date with Communion, this time in London at Notting Hill Arts Club, and a support slot at the Hoxton Bar and Kitchen towards the end of May with Cibelle and La Shark. You can listen to Vampire Smile below and if you like it you can grab it until it disappears as a free download from her website
