The Saturday Surf #34

As much as we love outdoor music festivals and would recommend that you get out there and experience as many as you can possibly afford, this weekend if you’re in the UK, with some weather forecasts predicting a month of rain in 24 hours, we suggest that you stay in and soak up some music in the dry of your own home.

So why not start with this – The Saturday Surf, our once a week lazy post where we keep the words to just a few sentences and let the music do the talking.

Noosa – Walk On By

New York multi instrumentalists Sky Barbarick & Matt Buszko have recently released their debut EP and it’s this track Walk On By that has been nuzzling our headphones the most. A mini-epic that combines piano, strings, guitar and female vocals to make the sort of stately pop song that spins inside your head like a whirlpool, it’s a very impressive start from Noosa.

[Strangers] – Safe / Pain

Yesterday we featured the lovely Alice Jemima’s cover version of Safe / Pain by [Strangers], so today to enable you to compare and contrast, here’s the original, which has only been on line itself for a few days. Warning, this song features a stratospheric electropop chorus. Safe / Pain deserves to be adored. [Strangers] best yet. It's released on August 20th. Alice Jemima's version is free to download from the link on her name above. Big.

Lewis Watson – Windows

The next Ed Sheeran? Possibly. There’s an incredibly similar softness to Lewis Watson’s voice and he treads the same gentle acoustic path, although this time it winds out from Oxfordshire. Considering the success that Sheeran’s had it wouldn’t surprise us if this lad finds himself the subject of some interest in the next year. 

[Strangers] - Shine On You

[Strangers] are, er….no strangers to Breaking More Waves. This is the seventh time we’ve posted about them. And this is the best post so far, because of this song. Forthcoming single Shine On You is an ambitious euphoric hands-in-the-air electronic anthem. Previously sheltering under the dark-pop tag, here [Strangers] come out of the shadows into the sun; you can feel the warmth of musical rays amongst the big woah-oh-oh hooks and sovereign synths. Shine On You is hugely uplifting; if music is about escapism and making you feel better about life then this should be prescribed by every doctor out there.

The song is released through Killing Moon/Beatwolf Records on April 16. It’s a day for glorious celebration. Mark it in your diaries.

[Strangers - Shine On You]

[Strangers] - Shout (Video)

Tears For Fears album Songs From The Big Chair isn’t one of those recordings that you see regularly cropping up on those Greatest Albums Of All Time lists. In fact ‘regularly’ is probably an over sell. It doesn’t really crop up on any of them, (although it did sneak into one of those 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die books).  Reaching no.1 in the US charts and no.2 in the UK it was a multi-platinum selling record, so somebody somewhere must have liked it. We did. We even had the limited edition extra tracks version on cassette. We could probably sell that on ebay for the price of a packet of crisps now given the devaluing of pop music since the invention of the internet.

Breaking More Waves regulars [Strangers] must also like it because they’ve recently put this cover version of Shout - one of the records highlights - up on line. Apparently they recorded it on a whim at a recording session recently. If you like it you can get the mp3 for free by emailing the band at bornstrangers@gmail.com.

[Strangers] - Promises (Curxes Remix)

Today we would like to invite you to a wedding. It’s the musical marriage of stern synths, industrial clanks and smart 80’s referencing pop sensibilities. Welcome to the marriage of [Strangers] and Curxes, two bands that have been courting on the blog with some regularity. Like a plug finding a socket and thousands of volts of dark electropop coursing through the wires of a robot body, this is an empowering remix where neither band overshadows the other.

What we’re particularly enjoying about Curxes remixes (the other one out there – Worship’s House of Glass you can find here) is that they follow very much their own template. There’s no dubstep wobbles or attempts at hands in the air builds to please the masses on the dance floor. This is a duo that take their own influences and vision and apply it to create their own courtly drama of the matrimony.

[Strangers] play the Electricity Showrooms in London on November 24 and Curxes play Club Fandango at The Bull & Gate in London on November 30. They also support 80’s minor league synthpop stars Blancmange at the Komedia in Brighton the day before the Bull & Gate show.

Promises (Curxes Remix) by [STRANGERS]

[Strangers] - Human

[ Strangers ] keep things nice and simple with their third EP, calling it EP 3. It follows on, would you believe it, from EP 1 and EP 2. If we were the betting sort we’d be tempted to have a flutter on the title of their next release.

The EP features the songs Promises (Featuring Lara Smiles), Sweet Nothing and our personal favourite Human (it is also referred to as Because I’m Human on the blurb on their Soundcloud player) which streams below. The first few seconds of the song attempt to throw you off the scent a little with a keyboard riff that sounds like it’s about to build into some euphoric rave anthem before everything comes together in an electric dream of 80's referencing pop hook melody and an earworm of a chorus.

Away from EP3 The band have also knocked out a moodily skewed electronic version of the ubiquitous Video Games by Lana Del Rey, which you can hear by clicking this link.

[STRANGERS] Human

The Saturday Surf #10

The biggest two enemies of the sole-author music blogger are the email in-box and time. Put these two together and the maths add up to potentially exhausted looking creatures once known as human beings staring wide-eyed, crushed and broken at their laptops.

To avoid such situations its necessary to have the weekly equivalent of a wardrobe clear out. We call it The Saturday Surf. It’s a musical jumble sale, where we’ve already creamed off the best of the bargains and hidden them in a bag at the back of the room for you.

These are the best tracks that didn’t quite get their own full posts this week, but probably deserved to. As always we make sure that it takes you no longer than about 15 minutes to listen to everything here.

Fixers - Swimmhaus Johannesburg

Oxford’s Fixers are no strangers to this blog and we thought we had them sussed with their Brain Wilson vibes and playful sack of psychedelic fun. We were wrong. New single Swimmhaus Johannesburg takes a very different route. There’s an italo-house piano, squealing siren-like sounds and proper guitar riffs. It’s utterly bonkers but shows that they’re no one trick pony. This song doesn’t get a formal release till August and we understand that the album isn’t out till January next year. Could they be a BBC Sound of 2012 possibility, or are they just too batty for serious consideration? We’d like to think not.

Swimmhaus Johannesburg by Fixers.

[ Strangers ] – It Was A Sin

Another group who we’ve featured before at Breaking More Waves, first in a new waves feature back in March is [ Strangers ]. We’re still not convinced about the brackets around the name, but they’ve caught our ears again with their second EP and this song It Was A Sin. It takes all the best bits of Depeche Mode – dark lyrics, big church like synths and stern vocals and makes us want to don our black leathers and do the side-to-side Dave Gahan arm dance.

It Was A Sin - [ EP2 ] by [STRANGERS]

Monarchy – Maybe I’m Crazy

More electro-pop comes from blog world favourites Monarchy who are finally about to release their debut album Around The Sun. Monarchy are a strange proposition – a pop band who can really play live, completely look the part, have received extensive blog /media coverage and possess some cracking tunes like Maybe I’m Crazy. Yet at the moment they’ve not crossed over and attained mainstream public love. The debacle of the album leak last year and the subsequent regrouping probably hasn’t helped matters, the window of pop opportunity quickly pulling the shutters. It is, all in all, a shame.

Maybe I'm Crazy by Monarchy

Peggy Sue – Cut My Teeth

Finally, in a world far away from electro pop, news reached us this week that Peggy Sue are due to release their second album Acrobats on September 12. Produced by PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish the groups sound has evolved significantly from their early wacky lo-fi folky doo-wop days when they were known as Peggy Sue and the Pirates. We featured the band a number of times in 2009 on the blog, and back in the day, when we did interviews Peggy Sue was one of our victims. This new track Cut My Teeth, is darker, edgier, more guttural and not that dissimilar to some of the work Ms Harvey has produced with Parish.

Cut My Teeth by Peggy Sue.

Wardrobe cleared. Jumble sale over. See you next week for some more tunes dragged up from the ocean of music.

Strangers - In Chaos (Paper Crows Remix)

‘Hotly tipped,” is a phrase that gets banded about these days almost as many times as Katie Price appears in the UK edition of Heat magazine and is just as meaningless. ‘Hotly tipped’ to do what exactly? Sell lots of records? The chances of that are less and less these days. Produce an album of great quality? Well that’s a possibility maybe, but just don’t ask Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong about how to do it. Or to go from rock n roll hero to appearing on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here? Well at least Shaun Ryder and John Lydon do share something in common with Katie Price then. But whatever they’re ‘hotly tipped’ for, the much Breaking More Waves supported Paper Crows have had this label slung at them a few times since we first featured them last summer.

Only time will tell if such hot tips are worth anything more than the small change on a waiters plate at the end of a meal. But in the meantime let’s turn our attention to another band that Paper Crows have been messing around with, who are only just appearing on the horizon. That band is Strangers. Their song In Chaos was featured a few days ago here and now there’s more. Paper Crows get their remixing hands dirty, fusing all sorts of electronic goodness together, followed by a video for the track which takes retro-subdued colours, a pretty girl and some arty camera flickers to accompany the song. Anyone fancy hot tipping Strangers then?

[STRANGERS] - In Chaos (Paper Crows Remix) - [STRANGERS] (E.P 1) by [STRANGERS]

Strangers - New Waves

One of the journeys that slightly more leftfield pop music has gone on over the last few years is one from high colour and showmanship into slightly darker more introverted spaces – it’s an inevitable backlash against what has gone before. You can trace it through the spine of this blog – the phrase ‘pop-noir’ was first used back in April 2009 and ever since there has been a slow transition to darker places with the XX’s debut album being a keystone in changing the musical landscape. Pop music continues to go out of fashion rather than wear out and whilst no doubt further changes lay ahead, for now dancing in the twilight is a guilt free pleasure.

Strangers label their music dark pop and whatever it is, they do it rather well. We’re not talking about intense shoegazing layered-noise, but magnificent electronic pop music that superbly scales into territories occupied on one side by Hurts on the other side Gary Numan. Not everything has to sound angry for it to come from the night.

Another more direct reference to the sound of Strangers is a band we blogged in the past – NewIslands - who apparently are no more. However Strangers seem to slot into their clothes with a perfect fit. The song we’re streaming below is entitled In Chaos and is a track from their forthcoming EP (keep an eye on their website - linked above - for details). It’s cinematic and emotive – the sound of David Bowie impersonating the vampire lord of synthpop in a billowing robe. What more could you possibly want ?

STRANGERS - In Chaos by [STRANGERS]