Sound the trumpets, hang the bunting up and roll out the red carpet because a feature we’ve laid to rest for a while is back. It’s the return of the Saturday Surf. When we last posted this featured in February we said it would return in Mid-March, but due to technical difficulties (we forgot) March seems to have become June.
The rules are simple:
1. The Saturday Surf will never be more than 5 tracks.
2. The total length of the music will be no more than 15 minutes.
3. The text relating to each track will be no more than one short paragraph.
The concept is that we don’t want to take up too much of your time. There are plenty of blogs out there who post long playlists and generate high volumes of traffic to their site from blog aggregators such as Hype Machine. This is not one of those blogs. We believe that in the world of the internet, where there are so many distractions, there aren't many people that have the patience to sit through 20-30 new tracks chosen by someone else in one sitting. Instead we serve up a smaller and hopefully more palatable dish of delicious new music from the last week or thereabouts that we didn't get round to posting on its own for your aural consumption.
Alice Jemima – Only Girl (In The World)
This is how it seems to be working. Alice Jemima uploads a new song on line. We write something gushing about her. Repeat over and over. If music is a relationship we're way beyond the infatuation buzz now - this is proper love. Alice Jemima is undoubtedly one of the Breaking More Waves golden girls. After her beautiful interpretation of Lana Del Rey's album track Million Dollar Man (another one of our golden girls) comes another cover. This time Alice tiptoes her way through Rihanna's fist-pumping, ball-busting Only Girl (In The World) with a delicate sensitivity that gives the song the same sort of natural intimacy that we last heard on The XX’s debut album.
No Ceremony/// - Holdonme
We’re getting a better sense of No Ceremony/// and are beginning to be able to define their sound with more accuracy with every new track they release. Holdonme delves deep into the landscape of the night with druggy computerised voices and trance like beats and bass. It would be a perfect soundtrack to a road trip in the small hours.
Charli XCX – You’re The One
Another one of our golden girls, although maybe Charli XCX is laced with streaks of something more urban and gothic in amongst the shine. If All Saints were still around in 2012, this is the kind of song we suspect they’d be doing. Despite it’s dirty and sexy electro styling You’re The One is actually a rather neat pop song, primed for the ears.
As this post goes up onto the internet, if you're in the UK you’re probably either :
1. Sitting watching TV moaning (and most likely tweeting) about how rubbish the Brits are.
2. Sitting somewhere else moaning how you really couldn’t care less about the Brits.
3. Sitting somewhere not even knowing the Brits are on the TV right now.
Or you could be like us and just enjoy watching the Brits as a piece of TV entertainment, one of the only times you'll get to see performances by more than one artist on a peak time TV show that isn't the X-Factor. You might even not be getting angry or moaning and accepting the fact that not everyone thinks the same way as you do. *EDIT @ 22.45 - Unfortunately after the Brits we did have a little moan on twitter about Adele's thank you speech getting cut off and Blur's set being partly moved to ITV2 and may have even used the words 'piss poor production' on twitter. We're sorry. We let our side down. But we're still not going to moan about the music. Sure we didn't like some of it, yet some we did, but the point is you don't watch the Brits to like all the music. Go to a gig or buy a record if you want to do that. Here's an analogy, we quite often (in fact nearly always) fancy pale skinned, freckled, ginger or dark haired arty girls that have Scots or Irish accents. But not everyone does. And you probably don’t get angry about the fact that we do. So if you don’t like Adele or whoever wins an award – calm down - everyone has different taste and criteria.
However, whatever you’re doing you might also like to hear some new music – after all that’s why you’re reading this blog. That’s what we do.
So here’s the new single from No Ceremony /// which is called Heartbreaker. According to the PR blurb it contains the guitar talents of The Pixies' Joey Santiago, although frankly it could be anyone. Heartbreaker makes a significant step forward for the band / artist. Whilst the song retains the sense of menacing brooding atmospherics combined with screwed up vocals that Deliverus and Hurtlove owned, this time the pianocore chimes are replaced by dirty squelchy electronic bassy sounds. It’s never going to challenge the likes of Ed Sheeran, Jessie J or Adele for awards, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t damn good.
Unlike commercial publications who in order to attract readers / hits have to feature certain artists that meet the demographic of their audience, being truly independent means we can do what we like. This is what fan journalism is about. There’s no reason for us to feature the latest buzz act (hello Azealia Banks) if we don’t love their music. However, if we want to feature a whole weeks worth of adoring gushing N-Robz (hello Nicola) posts we can. We could even rename our blog The Nicola Roberts Appreciation Society if we wanted to without any worries about loss of readership through re-branding.
So today here’s a remix. We’ve been long-term lovers (and when we say long term we mean in the sense of the timescales of music blogs, which in the main operate at a hump ‘em and dump ‘em speed of about 2 milliseconds) of The Good Natured and have been getting quite frisky with No Ceremony/// of late, so when you put the two together for a bit of a remix orgy the chances are, as a fan, we’re going to get quite excited and jump in to enjoy the fun.
Like any coupling there’s usually someone who’s a little more dominant and in this case it’s No Ceremony/// who are in the driving seat, so for balance we’re also streaming the original Good Natured track, a solo effort (no we’re not doing a masturbatory pun on that) which we didn’t post when it first came on line as we were busy with all of our end of year run downs. Play both, but don’t deliberate the differences, that’s like comparing a girlfriend / boyfriend with a previous partner. Just enjoy each one for what they are.
The Good Natured - Video Voyeur (No Ceremony/// Remix)
No Ceremony/// are not only sitting behind a wall of fog in terms of their ‘mystery band’ status but also apply the shroud to new song Deliverus that dropped onto the internet earlier this week. Despite the gentle clarity of the guitars that weave the track together, the overall impression is of drifting out into the middle of a misty lake where sighs of ghosts breathe slow weary caresses against your ears.
If that all sounds like pretentious baloney, it probably is, but we’re not apologising – that’s the images that came into our brain when listening to the music. If music (and music writing) wasn’t occasionally pretentious it would be a very dull and beige world.
After the similarities between Hurtlove and Wearme, Deliverus suggests that not only is No Ceremony/// not just a one trick pony, but that he/she/they/ it are an act that may be able to deliver a long player that could have some value beyond blog hype. Only time will tell, but the chance is there for the taking.
Imagine the scene; a secluded dwelling owned by a playwright and writer, in a remote Scottish village. The intoxicatingly expensive red wine is flowing heavily whilst the writer and her friend are discussing books, music and art as the rain pounds down on the dark isolated streets outside.
This is the scene where Breaking More Waves finds itself right now. However, whilst we’re away the blog posts continue, including our usual weekly round up of songs that got away, on what we call The Saturday Surf. This week just 3 tracks – because as someone once said, 3 is the magic number. Or as someone else said, a threesome is my ultimate fantasy.
No Ceremony /// - Hurtlove (Dawn Golden and Rosy Cross remix)
First, this rather mournful and sad sounding remix of the mystery pianocore artist(es) No Ceremony/// and his / her /their track Hurtlove (that's a lot of // in this blog post) remixed by Dawn Golden and Rosy Cross -a side project of one Dexter Tortoriello. Reminiscent of something Brian Eno might have constructed this remix is placid, ambient and beautifully calming. It's free to download.
Next is Jessie Ware. We first stumbled across Jessie via her work with SBTRKT and then on a track called Valentine that she released in February with Sampha (who has also provided vocals for SBTRKT). Now she’s about to release her own single Strangest Feeling and it’s really rather good. With floaty soulful vocals, burbling dirty bass sounds and atmospheric electronics it’s a pretty persuasive argument for wanting to hear more from the lady as soon as possible.
Finally making up our trio of tracks is the new country smothered single from our favourite warm and dreamy Leeds based folk pop quintet, Ellen & The Escapades. Any band that sings a song called When The Tide Creeps In is always going to get at least a degree of love from a blog edited by someone who has the word sea both in English and French in their surname (Seamer), writes a blog called Breaking More Waves and lives by the coast. However even if this song had been called It’s Time To Get The Fragrant Chicken Stock You Made Last Week Out Of The Freezer Darling And Called Me Stavros, we’d still love it, although maybe not quite as much.
The pianocore soundscape of Hurtlove by No Ceremony/// got a number of bloggers all flustered with excitement a while back (we even added to the buzz ourselves a little). So the one question besides the mystery group / who are they puzzle is what will they do next?
The answer appears to be to release virtually the same track again – it’s called Wearme. There’s basically the same ghostly piano chords, the same lumbering beat and the same snatches of out-there vocal that leads onto another question. “Are they taking the p*ss?” Well if they are, we have no problem with that, because we liked Hurtlove and therefore if this track is so similar to the previous one, based on the music and the music alone we have to like this one. How these two tracks would fit in the context of an album is another matter - would maybe these two compositions mould seamlessly into each other before gradually evolving into something else as one long singular body of work?
You can download the track from the No Ceremony/// website for free and watch the slightly chilling visuals below.
But then we’re back to the first question ‘what will they do next?’ Because rather like having sex with the same person in the same position at the same time in the same place every time, eventually no matter how good it is, it will eventually get boring.
The original concept of The Saturday Surf was to round up the loose ends at the weekend – giving a little bit of exposure to tracks that we’ve been enjoying but not had time to give a full blog post to. This concept of course assumes that there are enough good tracks to go round, that we’ve managed to discover them and that we are actually around at the end of the week to write about them. Yet with summer festivals, holidays and the real world getting in the way of internet time, this Saturday Surf finds itself being written and readied for publishing well before the weekend with very little time to make new discoveries. Thankfully we’ve managed to find three, so without further ado here they are.
Outfit – Two Islands
It’s fair to say that Outfit have nearly become one of the buzz bands du jour in the world of UK indie bloggers. Until now they haven’t impressed Breaking More Waves at all but this track Two Islands does the trick, starting all quietly shy and then gradually creeping up to smother you in layers of gliding guitar and subtle groove. It gets released on 7” clear vinyl in September through the equally buzzy Double Denim records.
Now here’s something curious from the leftfield. A confident piano riff, warped alien pitch-shifted underwater vocals and a simple growing beat create something that sounds like the soundtrack to a druggy road movie. The track has a distorted mystery to it that’s both creepy and strangely infectious. If we were going to classify it as a genre we’d call it pianocore. It landed in a whole host of bloggers in boxes last Wednesday, including ours, with no explanation about who created it, although there are rumours of a Manchester connection. You can download the track for free here. And what are those /// about ?
Finally something more late night and downbeat after the journey home. In fact night is the operative word, for Shura describe this music as Night Folk, in the same way that another Breaking More Waves regular Alpines describe their music as Night Pop. This is the inner calm after coming in out of the rain. Find someone to curl up with and spend the rest of the darkness listening to this. River defines beauty and in this case that beauty is free to download.
