New Music: Introducing - Paradisia

As someone who was brought up on a strict diet of Bruce Springsteen (and Neil Diamond) by my mother I have a love / hate relationship with The Boss. I really don’t care for the length of his 4 hour plus concerts, his obsessive fans who swear that he changed their life, or even some of his so called classic songs. Sorry, I just don't get The River at all. However, I will admit to being hugely fond of his Ghost of Tom Joad album and like the fact that he’s always stuck to what he believes in - he seems like a decent and principled man.

But here comes a Bruce Springsteen song I can get behind very easily. An absolutely heavenly cover version of his 80’s MTV winner Dancing In The Dark (you know, the one where he grabs the girl out of the audience and in turn gave Bono a whole bunch of ideas) played and sung to perfection. It's by a band with a rather great name - Paradisia. No, I’d never heard of them until just now either. The vocals possess a significant similarity to those from the band The Night VI….. oh hold on…there’s a reason for that. Paradisia are the three female members of The Night VI. 

Move over Bruce, it’s time for something beautiful.

Paradisia - Dancing In The Dark

The Night VI - Just Words

“Will this be the one where they let us down?” It’s a question we ask of all our favourite bands every time they release something new to the world. Inevitably it will happen. Even the ones you love dearly will fall over every now and then. That doesn’t mean though that if one indiscretion or moment of failure occurs we’ll be turning our back and looking for something new. It takes a lot more than just one duff song to end that relationship. 

Thankfully we’re nowhere near that with The Night VI. We’re still in the honeymoon phase, even although that part of the relationship should be utterly over by now. New tune Just Words does what every relationship needs to do to survive; it subtly shifts and changes the dynamic of what has gone before, keeping things interesting,  without ever losing the identity of what made it all so special in the first place. Just Words adds a new glossily soft r ‘n’ b smoothness to The Night VI’s sound, it's just enough to make us realise (again) how lucky we are to have their music. If you weren’t a fan of the band before, but enjoy artists like Jessie Ware, this might just be the one to turn you. “Don’t leave me now,” the vocals plead. We’re not going anywhere. No mistakes here.

Just Words is taken from the group’s 3rd EP which will be released in September.

The Night VI - Just Words

The Night VI - Turn Your Light On Me

A few words about some of the philosophy and idea behind the blog and why we do it. If this navel gazing type of post bores the pants of you, then just skip to the bottom and press play.

Two of the things we’ve always prided ourselves on at Breaking More Waves are being fully independent from both the music industry (yes, there are blogs out there who are written by people who work in the industry, writing about acts that they have a financial interest in, who don’t give full disclosure of the fact) and the critics. In the early days of the blog we carried reviews of albums and attempted to deliver critical analysis of music, but eventually came to the conclusion that we didn’t see the point of spending hours critiquing something and giving it a panning when we weren’t being paid for it – we’d rather spend our spare time being positive about music we like and acting as a ‘fan blog’. 

And as a non-industry fan blog this means that we’ll often feature artists that we’re fans of multiple times, irrespective of if they’re signed or unsigned, popular or not. It's a fact that there are certain blogs that won't cover an artist beyond the initial tentative first footsteps of their career. We're not suggesting that this is right or wrong to do so, each blog is the product of its author's mind and should be allowed the freedom to cover what it wants, but it's not our approach to hump and dump every artist we cover. Sometimes we like to be in it for the long haul. True love rather than quickie romance if you will.

Can you guess who the most featured artist is on Breaking More Waves over the years? It’s this lass (click here). We couldn't think of a better act to demonstrate our approach than her - from blog buzz / Sound of predictions through to major label and then going her own independent way - we've written about her all the way. 

One other band that has become a blog regular through our fan based approach is The Night VI. That coverage has extended from lead singer Sophie-Rose Harper’s early solo days, through to when we featured them as just The Night through to the addition of the roman numerals to their name. Over that journey we’ve noticed a swell in coverage from other music blogs (hurrah) and whilst popularity on the internet doesn’t always translate into real tangible substance such as music or ticket sales, certainly the couple of times we’ve seen The Night VI they seem to be pulling half decent audiences in. 

Today The Night VI release their latest tune to woo a few more lovers into their musical clutches. It’s a song about a love triangle, sung as a duet between lead vocalist Sophie-Rose and vocalist/keys player Kristy – Abba are a point of reference for what the band were going for here in terms of that vocal delivery. Once again the song features all those things that made us fall in love with The Night VI in the first place; smooth harmonies, well-structured songs and musicianship that when you close your eyes takes you somewhere else. It will be interesting to see with this one if The Night VI remain a favourite in the blogosphere or if the fickle bloggers will be off to pastures new, considering the band a bit 'old hat' by now. There's no chance of that with us though. This is delightful. We’re still in the fan club.

Turn Your Light On Me will feature on an EP the band plan to release in September. You can pre-order from this link.

The Night VI - Turn Your Light On Me

The Night VI - Too Late To Lie

The internet is a funny place. Some songs go from recorded form to being streamed in public in a matter of seconds (sometimes before the artist has wanted it to happen – hi Madonna) whereas others gestation period is months or years. It’s the later in the case of Too Late To Lie by The Night VI, which was first mentioned way back in 2013 in this interview with The 405 but finally sees the light of day now.

Too Late To Lie starts a little differently from the songs on the band’s previous EP (the wonderful D-I-Y EP, one of our favourite EPs of 2014) with a simple piano refrain creating the backing, although the song is instantly recognisable as The Night VI’s due to Sophie Rose Harper’s silken soothing voice. Gradually the tune grows into something that bears more similarity to the work on the DIY EP. It’s a graceful and artistically accomplished tune that in a modern pop world of auto-tuning , pitch shifting and over the top production sounds as un-gimmicky as it’s possible to be. It’s all the better for it.

If you like this song you can get it now by pre-ordering The Night VI’s next EP on vinyl/CD here. You will then get the MP3 version of Too Late To Lie straight away as well as every other song revealed until release date. It’s also worth signing up to the band’s mailing list this week as by doing so you'll get a free download of a covers EP. Go here for that.

The Night VI - Too Late To Lie

The Night VI - Heroine

We’ve featured an awful lot of The Night VI on this blog, not that there’s anything awful about them of course. 

We’re not the only site to do so either. The band has found much favour with parts of the blogosphere, which we find a little surprising, not because their music isn’t to be treasured and celebrated, but because The Night VI’s songs seem rather grown-up and adult, more likely to be played by Simon Mayo on Radio 2 than any youth orientated station and generally new music blogs tend to gear themselves towards ‘da yoof’. But then these days with Fleetwood Mac finding themselves saluted by all ages it seems that it’s perfectly acceptable to enjoy records your mum and dad would like and vice versa.

So here’s a new tune from The Night VI, taken from their forthcoming EP called DIY released through Duly Noted, which will be released as a physical 5 track CD only, initially just available at live shows. It’s called Heroine, and sits comfortably alongside their other work, characterised by lead singer Sophie’s irresistible vocal to the band’s warmly crafted mid-tempo instrumentation. With a melody and chorus that wafts gently across the ears it’s another one to please lovers of music everywhere, irrespective of their age.

The Night VI play a headline show at Madame JoJo's in London on the 18th November, supported by another Breaking More Waves favourite Robyn Sherwell.

The Night VI - Heroine

The Night VI - Drops

If Jungle’s debut album was the soundtrack to your summer then there’s a danger that come autumn and winter as the heat fades it will slide away and be forgotten, particularly in an age when the likes of easy-streaming means that our relationship with music is turning into a polygamous one. There’s always something new and fresh vying for our attention. However, here’s something that might give it a bit of extra longevity amongst the many musical f*cks that are to be had out there in the world of the big sexy bad dangerous internet. It’s via a live cover by Breaking More Waves regulars / favourite (since 2012) The Night VI, who’ve recorded a stripped back version of Drops. It does both bands lots of favours. There’s something irresistibly reassuring about Sophie-Rose Harper’s voice in all of The Night VI’s music, but particularly on songs like this where her royal throatage (is that a word, probably not – who cares ?) is allowed to breathe a little more in amongst the organic sounds.

The band will soon be announcing the release of another EP, which will (hopefully) give us the opportunity to swoon some more. For now though this will do very nicely thank you.

The Night VI - Drops

The Night VI - Wonderlust

Isn’t it about time that we had a few more eyes shut, butt cheeks clenched, head thrown back, orgasm-like guitar solos in pop music again? All this 'going for the drop' stuff is getting a bit dull isn’t it? Thankfully The Night VI have got the right idea on their way better than good single Wonderlust (not as far as we are aware a tribute to the Heather Nova album of the same name) which has been shared, unveiled, released etc to the internet today.

“I’m in love I’m in love with the idea of you,” sings Sophie Rose Harper and as she does we once again fall in love with far more than just the idea of this band, but the real thing. Wonderlust finds The Night VI taking a very American 80’s sound and adding imagery to suit - Route 66 and drinking whisky in a saloon bar get mentions, but if we’re honest the thing we’re most excited about is THAT guitar solo. It is categorically the hottest, sweatiest and sexiest of guitar solos we’ve heard for a very long time. Strap yourself in at around 2 minutes 30 seconds into Wonderlust and have some clean tissues at hand.

The Night VI - Wonderlust

Are You Listening Festival 2014 - Preview

Festivals. Breaking More Waves loves them. Big ones, small ones, in-between ones, we adore them all. 

However there’s one thing we don’t like about them, particularly in the UK and that’s rain. There will be those who say that 5 days at Glastonbury, wading around in your wellies up to your ankles in mud  is ‘character building’, an ‘experience’ and ‘brings people together.’ We just think it’s downright horrible, exhausting and a deeply unpleasant way to spend a weekend.

It’s why although you’re bound to find Breaking More Waves trooping round a few (hopefully dry) fields this summer, we’ll be hitting the single wristband, multi-venue, city festivals harder than ever this year. Even if the heavens open, we can be assured a club, pub or concert hall to dry off in for these events and there’s even the joy of a comfy bed, clean toilet and a shower afterwards.

It all starts for 2014 at the home of one of the most famous UK festivals; Reading. But the event isn’t the Reading Festival, this is Are You Listening? Festival, which returns for its second year in Reading city centre after an enormously successful debut in 2013. 

Are You Listening? is very much a local grassroots festival, having a stated policy of ensuring that at least 70% of the artists booked to play are from the Reading and Berkshire area. It’s also great value with advance tickets costing just £10 with a local charity benefiting from the ticket sales, as all proceeds after costs go to Reading Mencap. Last year the event raised a fantastic £8,250 for this good cause, way above the organiser’s target.

This year Are You Listening features over 60 artists and takes place across eight venues in Reading Centre, namely Pavlov’s Dog, RISC, Oakford Social Club, South Street Arts Centre, The Bowery District, The Face Bar, Purple Turtle and one that has to be worth a visit, the bar known as Milk, which serves cocktails served in milk bottles and jam jars as well as a multitude of rums. 

Fancy attending? here's the details: Are You Listening? takes place on Saturday 26th April 2014. Tickets are available in advance for £10 by clicking here (they will be more on the day) and the music gets underway from around 2pm, although some of the venues don’t open until later in the afternoon or evening.

Here are 5 acts that Breaking More Waves recommends seeing at the event, which subject to venue capacities and stages sticking to their timetables (which will be published soon) should all be possible to see without any clashes.

Vienna Ditto (Oakford Social Club)

Whilst the majority of the action doesn’t get underway until late afternoon / early evening, an early stop off at Oakford Social Club might pay dividends. Vienna Ditto mix twangy rock and blues guitars that sound like they’ve been stolen from a lost Tarantino soundtrack, add bursts of electronic edging and top it all off with femme fatale vocals. 



The Jettes (The Purple Turtle)

Pan’s People loving rock n roll meets sixties bubblegum pop with plenty of fuzz and full on riffs. A bit like The Primitives only brasher. What’s not to like about that?



Haze (Milk)

A regular on Breaking More Waves since we first discovered her at last years festival, local girl Haze has a voice that will melt hearts and songs that deliver power through their delicate beauty. 



The Night VI (21 South Street)

Another Breaking More Waves regular, The Night VI have picked up plenty of blog buzz with songs like Thinking About You and Sienna. Described here as making “heartache sound unbelievably lovely,” The Night VI have class embedded in their core.



Ezra Furman (21 South Street)

Previously with The Harpoons and now solo, Ezra’s new album Day of the Dog has received rapturous reviews (Michael Hann of The Guardian called it ‘the best record of 2013’.) Come and experience his brand of rock ‘n’ roll and see what all the fuss is about at his first show of an extensive UK tour.



Expect a review of Are You Listening? shortly after the event at Breaking More Waves.

The Night V1 - Sienna

There was a time in the not so distant past when this blog, despite receiving way less traffic than it does now, got quite a few comments at the bottom of each post. We guess it says something about the way that the internet has changed, where often readers and listeners click and swipe between sites so quickly that pausing to leave a comment just isn’t ‘the thing’ anymore. In fact we get more comments about our blog posts via Twitter than we do the blog itself, which is a shame in some ways as there’s only so much you can say in 140 characters.

For example this comment certainly wouldn’t have fitted on Twitter:

“the person that writ this blog, needs to go back to mcdonalds. incredibly annoyingly writ, un funny, un entertaining, bull shit. talk about the band, the music, not 3 paragraphs of nonsense, then a sentence explaining that the band, are in fact, quite good. people like you do not deserve to write things on the internet for poor, innocent eyes to read. go back to school, and learn how not to be a dick.”

We had a good chuckle at that one. 

It was in relation to our first blog post on The Night (now known as The Night VI) way back in August 2012. So we hope that ‘Anonymous’ with their bad spelling and grammar isn’t reading this post either because as you can see we’re writing once again about issues that aren’t directly about the band or the music. Why? Here's a simple explanation that underpins this blog:

This blog is our own personal blog – a hobby blog if you want. It’s not intended to be a tool for journalism, music criticism or a source for A&R - it's just the inner workings of our brain. (We had a go at criticism a few years ago and decided that if we weren't getting paid, spouting negative opinions in long articles was a pointless activity. We’ll leave that to others and spend our spare time spreading positivity about the music we adore.) If you don’t like it that’s cool, go and read one of the 100’s of other new music blogs who just write about the music and the band every time. That’s not what we always do. Call it a unique selling point if you want. We’re beholden to nobody and the day we start compromising what we write about or what we feature because it’s what we’re ‘meant to do’ in the eyes of others is the day that we lose any pleasure in writing it and if it’s not enjoyable, we might as well give up.

So rant / waffle / blog-navel gazing piece over here are The Night VI  with their new song Sienna, a beautiful but quite sad song where lead singer Sophie politely wishes happiness for an ex who has found a new love; and there lies one of the lessons of the heart - you can never quite tell what the future holds – wishes of getting married in that orange grove just may never occur. Sienna makes heartache sound unbelievably lovely. The Night VI are obviously just very nice people. (Unless of course we find that the next single release is called You're A Sh*t And We Hope You Die Horribly.) Released through cool new boutique label Duly Noted (who were also responsible for releasing Iyes single ‘Til Infinity) on 28th April the track can also be purchased on iTunes right now.

Please feel free to leave comments about how incredibly annoying this blog post was, but also press play, enjoy the music and if you do like it buy the record. 

The Night VI - Sienna



Footnote : You might also want to leave a comment stating 'what dick posted this' after the original post contained the wrong song - bloody amateur bloggers.

The Night VI - Thinkin Bout You (A blog post that's actually about it being OK to miss out on things)

Having already released a number of covers last year The Night VI return with another one and it's free to download. This time they have a crack at Frank Ocean’s Thinkin Bout You. Now of course the obvious thing to do here is give a comparison with the original, but guess what?  We’ve only ever listened to Frank Ocean once in our entire life and didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Maybe we’ll try again one day, maybe we won’t. 

Some people think that as a ‘serious music fan’ that it’s rather odd that we haven’t spent more time with Frank’s music, but we’re old enough and wise enough to realise that there’s nothing wrong with missing out on something. The expectation of being pretty knowledgeable about music (we've won a fair few pop quizzes) is that you’ll have listened to and know everything that is considered 'classic' or 'relevant', but that just isn’t possible. In this modern era of Spotify, Twitter and instant access to pretty much all music, trying to keep up with the Jones’s seems to bring out panic in even the coolest and most grounded of people. Haven’t you heard the new St Vincent yet? The new Boots? The new buzz band that is so new they haven’t even formed yet? No we haven’t. And that’s fine, we can live with that. Sure sometimes we’ll latch onto something early (rather like when we wrote about the lead singer of The Night VI back in 2010 before her band became more than a solo project) but it’s never bothered us if we don’t; we’ve probably been listening to something equally brilliant: Protection by Massive Attack or The Cure’s Disintegration from the past maybe or the rather excellent Kate Miller from the now and possible future.

So here’s The Night VI covering Frank Ocean, apparently an iconic R & B tune. Well, we don’t know about that, but this version is quite nice. Yes, that’s as much journalism as you’re getting from us right now. ‘Quite nice’. Maybe they can use that quote on their next press release.

The Night VI - Thinkin Bout You

The Night VI - Music Sounds Better With You

Got your disco shoes on? Ok, let’s dance, because to re-word a Los Campesinos! lyric, there’s nothing better than you, us and dancing. OK, we’ll admit that in the Breaking More Waves camp food and sex are pretty splendid as well, but this is a music blog and despite our sometimes desperate attempts to shoehorn those two subjects into every analogy, metaphor and pun we can think of, ultimately we’re here to add to the conversation about music, not writing about stuffing our faces and shagging. As Shakespeare once said, if music be the food of love, play on.

So here’s today’s tune to dance to. It’s by previous Breaking More Waves Ones To Watch 2013 The Night VI and it’s the third in a series of six covers that the band are releasing to the world. It’s one of our favourite disco tracks – play this alongside Spiller’s Groovejet and all sorts of mayhem will break loose from our hips down (oh - back on those sex references again). With Daft Punk and Chic & Nile Rogers back in currency (blimey – who ever thought you’d see Nile on the X Factor supplying the riffs for Dermot O’Leary’s dad dance moves?) this version of Music Sounds Better With You is perfectly timed.

This song was chosen by harpist, vocalist and visual artist Anna who states: “From 1998's summer all I can remember is France winning the World Cup against Brazil (trois-zero) my tough big brother crying when Colombia got disqualified and French supergroup Stardust topping the charts with their one off hypnotic and sublime dance track Music Sounds Better With You. She then goes on to explain that in choosing to cover the song the band was faced with a dilemma. How did they take a song with no verses and translate it for a band who don't play house music? The solutions was to incorporate some of Stardust’s sampled inspiration - Chaka Khan's Fate. Thus they end up with a Russian doll arrangement - a cover within a cover.

The Night VI - Music Sounds Better With You

The Night VI - Thinking Of You (Video)

Breaking More Waves policy of only posting one or two tracks a day, one at 8.30am GMT regular like clockwork, the other (if there is a second) at some point in the evening has caused us a particular problem today with seven pieces of music that we really want to push forcefully into your ears. However, our eventual decision came down to three key criteria:

1. Of the seven songs this one is the best.

2. The Night VI are a band that we suggested were ones to watch in 2013 and so by then not posting their first official video would make our recommendation a little hollow. It would make us a little like one of those people that attends a gig and when a particular song comes on they declare that it's their favourite, then talk to the person standing next to them all the way through it.

3. We may have already posted the song in Soundcloud form, but think that sometimes we have to bang on a bit about certain acts for our simple message of THIS IS GOOD. YOU SHOULD LISTEN, WATCH AND SHARE to get properly through to people. 

So let’s just repeat that shall we. THIS IS GOOD. YOU SHOULD LISTEN, WATCH AND SHARE. You should particularly do so if you like ruined cathedrals (who doesn’t ?), frilly collars (nearly as good as big chunky collars) and bands doing nothing in particular but staring meaningfully in an effort to give them some sort of artistic gravitas (our favourite form of staring). Thank you.

The Night VI - Thinking Of You (Video)

The Night VI - Thinking Of You

We’ve been waiting a very long time for this, but trust us it’s worth it.

Since Sophie-Rose’s first appearance on Breaking More Waves way back in 2010 her musical journey now seems to be reaching some sort of important point on the map. Thinking Of You is the debut single from her band The Night VI. If that name seems vaguely familiar it’s because we featured the group when they were just known as The Night and named them as one of our ones to watch for 2013. Here’s why.

Thinking Of You is an intoxicating song that takes the dreamy  glow of new hype kids on the block London Grammar, adds some guitar work similar to The XX and presses it tenderly together with the classic sounds of Fleetwood Mac. What can we say? It’s preciously seductive.

Thinking Of You is according to Sophie-Rose ‘representing a finite moment – perhaps an hour of your life; you’re missing the person that you love and at the same time hating them for making you feel that way.’ That’s an emotionally raw concept and maybe sounds just a little bit needy and obsessive, but if it helps create songs like this then we’re happy that Sophie-Rose had to feel that way.

The Night VI - Thinking Of You